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| Questions About Parenting |
Indeed, this may be mentioned as early as the first date. Imagine the scene. You ate in a louche Italian restaurant. Things are going well. The waiters are friendly and helpful, and you have yet to spill a single drop of pasta sauce on your trouser. You slosh a little more red wine into her glass. You are talking about yourself. You haven't the faintest idea what is going to happen next.
Life doesn't get any better than this. And then, when you briefly stop talking to shovel in a bit of food, she pounces.
'Do you want children?'
First priority here is not to spit your mouthful of food halfway across the restaurant. But this also allows your brain to chug into action for the two seconds it needs to formulate the instant and appropriate lie.
'Oh yeah, definitely, yeah. I love children.'
No you don't. She looks you straight in the eye. She knows you are only saying this as a form of verbal foreplay, that you don't mean a syllable of it. She knows you are Short Term Man. But then so is everyone else. What is a girl to do? Simple. She will remember everything you have just said for later use, should the relationship get that far.
'Oh yeah, definitely, yeah. I love children."
You may never be forgiven for this lie, however many times you apologize for it. Did you only want me for my sperm? You will ask, years afterwards. Well no, of course not, she will say (failing to look you straight in the eye), but you misled me, and we had only just met. Which is what any man would do, you will respond. For if we all said 'No, I detest children with a passion and wish to stove their tiny heads in with a mallet', then our chances of what might be called 'getting a result' would be sharply diminished. Only you probably won't say this last bit, but just tell another lie instead.
One problem is that most of us have only the haziest, vaguest notions of what it is going to be like. I asked the fathers what their preconceptions and expectations of fatherhood had been, how they imagined it would be.
FATHER G (GUY): Most of my preconceptions of fatherhood were influenced by memories of my own father. I suppose I thought you had to be rather grown-up to be a father. Because I remember my father as being rather grown-up. It seemed impossible. Thinking, oh my God, how am I going to be suddenly grown-up overnight, a serious person, who didn't have time for fripperies and banalities, just did serious stuff like mow the lawn and wash the car at the weekend. Smoke cigars, drink whiskey. I didn't see how I was going to get to that. Fortunately I never had to.
FATHER H (HARVEY): I largely expected that I would take to smoking a pipe and spending more time in the shed making things from balsa wood. Neither has proved true. To find out more, you can check out Questions About Parenting.