I’m no militant on population replacement, but in general I think it would be swell if willing Americans had a kid or two. Somebody needs to pay for Social Security, and someone will need to change my diapers in a few years.
That’s why I found my conversation a little depressing yesterday–even though it was during happy hour (two for one drinks!) at Shoolbred’s–with an unmarried friend of mine.
“Why do people let kids change their lives so much?” he asked. “It makes it all look really unappealing.”
Of course, it would be tempting for us dads to stop there and say, “Listen, kids do change your life, whether you like it or not.” And that’s true to an extent, of course, but so is his complaint, one which I think ties back to babies-in-bars and lots of other conversations we have here at DadWagon: Parents are sometimes their own worst enemies. We freak out after we have kids. We hear that structure is a good thing for babies, so we take it to the extreme, and never leave the house after 6 p.m., ever again. We make visitors take off their shoes, wash their hands, stay away if they have sniffles. We paint entire parts of our home in ridiculous colors. We start calling the sexy people we married “Mom” or “Dad.” We listen to awful children’s choirs sing “she’ll be comin’ round the mountain” while our Primus albums collect dust, because babies of course should only listen to music made by other babies, under the safe supervision of Disney or Baby Einstein.
If it looks ridiculous to people who don’t have children, that’s because it is ridiculous. And yes, I would like it if my nonbreeding friends felt better about our having babies. But this isn’t just about their comfort. It’s about our own happiness and sanity. Dial it down, padres and madres. Experiment with fitting your children into the life you want to lead. It might just work out.
Rant over.
I’m proud to say that my son’s lullaby is a Ramones CD. Beats the hell out of Raffi.
I’m with you about 95% of the way. I hear you on the parental freak-out. In some couples I know, the arrival of the first child is the first visible break in an already-troubled couple. The focus shifts to the child and away from the partner and the partnership. The child becomes a prop, an excuse to drop unwanted friendships and activities and the care of whom can become a bitter bone of contention.
But some of the small things are unavoidable. The plastic crap, the insipid music and movies, the household palette shifting to strong and bold primary colors. These are the little things and the decline of our “adult” tastes help provide perspective on how insignificant those things were.
I’ve found that I can keep doing what I need to stay sane (adult conversation, exercise, reading) but not everything I used to do (becoming a regular at a bar, video games, weekend naps).
You have the power to keep parental and personal life balanced (in most cases). Most parental freak-outs I’ve seen were freak-outs ready to happen. The child was just the catalyst.
I think a lot of those “unavoidable” things are actually avoidable. We make a point of not having all that plastic crap in our house (most of my daughters toys are wood) and the music she hears is really good (both the fact that I pay my music all day and there is good music aimed at kids out there, like TMBG’s kids albums and Peter Himmelman) and we’ve avoided our daughter’s room, clothes, toys and everything else from looking like a Pepto bottle exploded all over it. We have no desire to let her watch TV or Wiggles videos (or Baby Einstein or Veggie Tales or any of that other crap).
Certainly many logistics of our lives changed, like never getting to sleep in and making sure we’re (usually) home in time for a consistent bed time.
We have the well designed wood toys that hardly look like toys, play old punk and the best of Staxx records for the kid (on vinyl, of course), we let sniffling people into our home and the kid eat dirt. We have made our house kid-friendly, not kid-everything-everywhere (though in the course of play, everything of course gets everywhere). That said, the kid LOVES the plastic crap that relatives get for him. He turns up his nose at the tasteful Ikea or Euro-style wood toys and dives for the FisherPrice.
And though I take the baby to the bar (SCANDAL) as you well know, I think we should be also be critical of the impulse of modern parents to not alter their time schedule and lifestyle to accommodate a kid with a kid’s particular needs re: (over)stimulation. To take your advice to fit the kid into the life they want to lead to an extreme.
For some young children staying out till 11 and going to music festivals with their parents every weekend, being carted around with the on-the-go parents for brunches and lectures and fancy dinners, etc. might work. But I don’t know if that’s the best for most kids.
Don’t get me wrong–it was my PLAN to keep on with everything the same, just bjorn my kid with me everywhere, before I had him. But? He is a kid who goes absolutely bat shit if he’s not in bed by 6 pm. So? I live in fear of his bedtime.
Some things will change, no question. But when you change everything about yourself after the little bundle of joy arrives, that’s where problems arise.
The main thing I did to combat that was to make sure we went places with him right from the start. We went to restaurants, parks, visited friends’ houses and carted him along with us wherever we went. And we also made sure we each had time to do some of the adult things we enjoyed before kids. For my wife, that was going back to school. For me it entailed occasionally drinking to excess with friends.
But some of our former friends became unrecognizable as people after kids, and that’s what I couldn’t stand.