Little Ole Me

29 Aug 2009

When I first gave CNMO to a critic to read (not a professional critic but a friend), she said she loved the bit with the children in it. They sounded so real, she said. It’s exactly the opposite, I’ve found. Children, for most of us, are ninety percent headache and only five percent joy. The other five percent is left in the realm of ambiguity. We would prefer to have our lives with them when they are babies, or when they are old enough to shoulder some of our burdens. It’s the in-between stage that is problematic. There are so many decisions to be made, from which character to play in the fancy dress competition to whether to invite members of the opposite sex to the sixteenth birthday party, decisions that have already been taken for oneself all those years ago, agonising that has already been iterated once before.
But the biggest decision that all parents obsess over is what their blue-eyed child should become when she grows up. Doctor? Engineer? Lawyer? And that’s when the so-called experience of our own decision-making when we were sixteen comes in handy. Look, I’m a doctor and see how well I’ve done! The right thing, therefore, is to become one yourself. Why? Coz I say so!
Nobody said parenting was easy. In fact, Huxley believed that it was such a hard thing that it shouldn’t be left amateurs at all. Appoint a set of professional parents and let them raise all children, who would then turn out to be ideal adults. But in the absence of such a utopia, the least we can do is to leave our kids alone, and let them turn into strangers, people who we admire on their own terms, not merely as our children.