The answer to the title of this post is, of course, have kids!
Spotted this great piece on Monday at work and then Clair reminded me of it in her post.
The thrust of the article (if you can’t be arsed to read the link) is that having kids really shows up the cracks in your relationships with your friends, especially if they are childless.
The point being, the child-free friends don’t get why their friends have a complete life and personality change once they’ve sprogged.
Meanwhile, those couples now weighed down with nappy-changing, bath-times, sleep routines, etc get riled when their childless friends can’t or won’t do what they used to do.
I know I’ve been guilty of putting my kids above my friendships in certain cases, but I’m well aware that in a few years, my daughters won’t want anything to do with ‘boring old dad’, so I may as well enjoy the time I have with them now.
Equally, while I’m not arrogant enough to think that ‘you don’t get it, if you don’t have kids’, there are certain things that are impossible to empathise with if you don’t have a rugrat.
The thing is, everyone takes to parenting differently, and everyone’s children are very different and throw up their own individual set of challenges.
And most of us don’t really change that much – it’s just that there’s another person (at least) to think about when we make decisions about, well, pretty much everything.
Funnily enough, I think it’s possible easier to keep your up with childless friends, if you are in the suburbs and don’t live in London. There’s something about the sprawling metropolis that makes any journey longer than a mile seem like such a schlep.
Anyway, to those childless friends of mine out there, I haven’t totally forgotten about you and I still care. I guess I’m just tired and far less interesting than I used to be!
* Apologies to Toby Young
So my Dad’s recently started chemotherapy to try and remove his pesky brain tumour (does that make it sound like something out of Scooby Doo? Good!)
He’s very matter-of-fact about it all. He got through the radiotherapy part of it fairly easily, with a few tired spells, but not a lot of other bother.
This time, though, I don’t think it’ll be quite as easy. I spoke to him last night and he’d had to take a couple of days off. It’s sucks so much that something that is meant to be making you better actually makes you feel like crap a lot of the time.
I can’t begin to pretend I know how he’s feeling. It’s bad enough knowing that you’ve got this lump inside your head growing and making you act slightly weirdly.
That a doctor then gives you a bunch of powerful drugs that are only hopefully going to reduce this lump, but also make you feel like shit simply compounds it.
The fact that my dad seems to be quite stoic about it all doesn’t surprise me, but it makes me feel just so helpless. I can do nothing other than talk to him regularly and offer words of cold comfort.
What makes it suck even more is that I was meant to see him and my step-mum this weekend, but unfortunately, as my little girl has a cold, he is very sensibly staying away.
Let’s just hope the next few months go as well as can be expected.
Dads are strange things, aren’t they? I’ve been in the fortunate, or unfortunate depending on how you look at it, situation of having two for most of my life.
My mum and dad (biological) separated when I was roughly 4 and both remarried. I was brought up by my mum and stepdad (who I called Dad), while seeing my dad and stepmum on alternate weekends for most of my childhood.
I came to look on my stepdad as my real dad (because he was there most of the time) and he was very good to me, taking me on as his own. Meanwhile, the relationship with my real dad became strained and more and more distant. I came to look upon him in a more avuncular way, rather than paternal and I think, especially as I grew up, our similarities managed to drive us further apart, rather than closer together.
My stepdad died, sadly, almost two years ago, after a long period of ill-health, so the only father figure in my life now, is my dad. I have also, in recent years, left my first wife and settled down with my current partner, with who I have Schmoo.
That has been the biggest factor in rekindling my relationship with my Dad. We never stopped talking, but we could go months without proper contact and he frustrated me no end.
Now C’s opinion of him and my stepmum is far higher than my ex-wife’s ever was. I live closer to them than ever before and, having talked things through with my counsellor, I realised that I needed to make an effort to, at least, see if I could improve things.
Well, things had been better for a while, and then I told him about my recent bout of depression and the floodgates have opened. We’ve been in touch more in the last few weeks than we have (almost) in the last 6 months.
Yes, he still annoys me and, yes, I know we still have a long way to go, but things are definitely on the mend.
Anyway, the point of all this is because it taps in so closely to my relationships with Schmoo and B. I know that at times, my daughters will become intensely frustrated and pissed off with me. Equally, I hope I make it clear to them that they can come to me, whatever the problem or request.
Familial relationships are never easy, I know, probably because blood means that characteristics are shared and these cause friction, rather than harmony most of the time. But I know I want things to be easier for my kids with me than they have been for me with my mum and dad.
Here’s hoping…
