Parental Enlightenment

My children are my greatest educators, in lots of ways.

I remember my older step-daughter’s comment from around 6 weeks after the birth of her first child: “If I had known at the start that I would spend the rest of my life working out ways to outwit my child, I might have thought twice about it…”. This sums it up exactly. No matter how intelligent you are, how well you run your own life and how good you think you are at reading other people, as soon as you have your own child you are pretty much no longer equipped to look after yourself, let alone a tiny, defenceless, vulnerable human being, for whose welfare you are entirely and terrifyingly responsible. Let’s face it, for the first few weeks after the birth, you cannot even remember how to start the car any more.

Other things you only learn post childbirth:

1. There is no such thing as an “easy birth”. Anyone who tells you they have had one is either lying to protect you, still high on pain-killing attitude-adjusting narcotics or is recalling it from so long ago that merciful time has washed all painful memories away. Any process requiring pain-killing attitude-adjusting narcotics which you could sell for a serious amount of money in your local pub is never going to be easy. Get real.
2. Any mid-wife or health visitor who describes breast-feeding as involving a “tiny nip” has either never done it or is lying to protect you. Breast-feeding makes your toes curl. EVERY TIME.
3. Telling people how to raise their children is a multi-million pound industry. And you will still get it wrong. Even if you read every super-nanny book available, at some point your child will still tell you that they hate you and that you’re the worst parent in the world and that everyone else they know has a better life.
4. You will be amazed at how well you can do without sleep.
5. You will never finish a conversation, cup of coffee (without having to put it in the microwave to reheat it half way through) or newspaper again unless your child is asleep.
6. Your ability to consume alcohol without turning into a dribbling, havering, incoherent wreck will drop like a stone.
7. Entire evenings with your friends in the pub can now be filled with conversations about school catchment areas. Nothing will be resolved due to everyone’s inability to process alcohol efficiently (see point 6 above) coupled with the fact that every council’s catchment area policy is random and illogical. And the fact that if any council suspects that its residents know all the rules around catchment areas, it must immediately change some or all of them without notice or consultation.
8. People who park their cars with 2 wheels up on the pavement really piss you off. You have never noticed it before. But then again, you have never considered the ability to proceed unencumbered along a pavement with a buggy as a benefit before.
9. You watch people who park in the parent-and-child spaces at supermarkets like a manic hawk, just to make absolutely sure that they actually have children when they emerge from their car.
10. The people who are the least well qualified to give you advice will be the ones who give you advice. The people who are the best qualified to give you advice (eg my mother) will be the ones who say “I don’t really know, I haven’t got any experience, I have no idea what I’d do” or the old classic “it was much easier for us in my day”. Yeah right, of course it was. You had no money, no soft play facilities, no children’s TV, no car, no innoculations to spend sleepless nights deciding about, and absolutely no advice from health care professionals. How is that easier?
11. You will feel guilty about every single thing that you do, from choosing the wrong toothpaste with an inappropriate fluoride content, to allowing your child to eat a packet of chocolate buttons. You have probably never suffered from that much guilt before. You will get your fill now though, because as if current guilt is not enough you will also develop retrospective guilt about things which didn’t make you feel guilty before but which now, with the benefit of empathy, cause you to cringe inwardly every time you think about them.

In short, there should definitely be some sort of qualification exam before people can have children, and all children should definitely come with a handbook. If a toaster comes with a handbook, why doesn’t a complex organism like a child have one?