Happy Happy Joy Joy

Originally Posted Tuesday, May 14, 2013

(Mother's Dream)

Who knew parents could be so touchy?  I don't know that many of them, but the ones I do know who read this blog want to make sure I know how happy they are to have children.  I wasn't opining.  I was just sayin'.  It is the natural thing to do, having children.  Nature wants it.  It gave you seeds and eggs and the mandate to go forth and populate the earth.  Have at it. 

I didn't even talk about unhappy marriages and broken homes and how healthy custody battles are for the little tykes.  There is where I can really piss some people off.  "Ou habitez-vous?" we can ask the children.  "Oh, one week here, the other there. . . but summers are different." 

All the parents wanted me to know how good having children was for them, how it enriched their lives, the joy they felt. 

But we all know the first question:  "So. . . tell me about your mother." 

And of course, mine:  "Was your daddy bad to you?" 

In America, though, we fetishize having children.  We are a nation of aspiring immigrants.  I don't think that Western Europe has the same ideas about this.  I don't know much about it, but "childhood" there doesn't seem to come with that mindless smile that encompasses The American Dream of innocence and purity. 

Of course, none of my redneck neighbors in the less-than-working-class neighborhood I grew up in got that look, either.  Children were like puppies.  As they grew up, you just replaced them with another and left the older ones to fend for themselves. 

Whack!  "I told you goddamnit to get up.  You're going to school." 

And they did. . . for awhile.  Until they were sixteen, anyway.  Then they dropped out and got a job, and after a couple years they'd get ambitious and take the GED exam.  And there they were, eighteen and a proud possessor of a high school equivalency diploma granted at the same time as all the other kids who stayed in school.  And everyone was proud. 

Some even enrolled in the local community college for a few courses.  A few got some specialized certificate in something like Water Sprinkler Technology, got a job, and bought their own trailer, got married to the mother or father of their child or started over with someone else. 

It is not just them, though.  I live in a nicer neighborhood now full of doctors and lawyers and famous poets and developers, and only two of my ten closest neighbors have been married to and have children with only one spouse.  And I've lived here long enough to tell you this: once the children grow up and go off to college, they rarely come home.  Home?  There are usually several options on that one. 

But you don't know what you don't know, as they say, and I have never been a parent.  I am jaded and fucked up in my own particular way and will have my own special hell or heaven built by the way I've lived my life.  I'll be sad enough at Thanksgivings and Christmases and all the rest.  And when I'm in that "retirement home" next to the interstate, the one that used to be a cheap hotel now converted into a Lysol torture chamber with airplane food, bare walls and thin mattresses, I'll recite this:

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had, 

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn, 

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can, 

And don't have any kids yourself.  

(Philip Larkin)