All the books, all the sex

How bored I am … [to the tune of How Great Thou Art]... how booooored I am. I did Nothing Whatsoever last week, bar about ten minutes’ worth of proofing. I really want to tell my boss that I think I should stop working for them because it’s such a waste of their money, but then I’d have no job. (I use the terms “working” and “job” as loosely as possible there.)

People who can’t spell lose annoy me. Loose = adjective, not tight. Lose = verb, opposite of find. It’s really not that hard.

Sw’anyway. I went to the doctor last week for some new pills. And she wrote on her notes for my file, “Stop taking pill three months before you want to get pregnant.” Right there in black and white as if it might actually happen. Eep. (Yes, I did mention the possibility of the baby-making plan to her, she didn’t just look at me and decide it was about time I procreated.) Anyway, she took it all in her stride as if it was a perfectly resonable thing to propose, and didn’t say, “Are you mad? You’ll never sleep again, you know. You’ll never finish a book longer than Hop on Pop and your conversations will revolve around poo. You’ll never have sex again, this is by far the flattest your stomach will ever be for the Rest of Your Life, and, you idiots, you don’t even own a house or know what continent you’ll be living on in two years’ time.”

So maybe it’s a runner. Which, of course, is terrifying. Better read all the books and have all the sex now, while we can.

Back to the unreal life

Christmas was lovely. Home was lovely. It was great to be back. There were, of course, downsides, like cold Irish houses and vicious hangovers and Dublin prices, but these merely serve to remind one that this is the real world. Not this fictitious always-warm, cheap-because-it’s-the-middle-of-nowhere, temporary life we lead for the other eleven and a half months of the year. Dublin hits you with reality like a gust of rain in the face and punches you in the gut with house prices.

I had a few moments of, anxiety, let’s say, when the whole baby-job-house-future notion started to look like far more than we could chew. The trouble with trying to plan a baby is that once it’s on track you can’t stop halfway through the pregnancy and say, “Let’s just shelve this for now. We can pick it up again later when things have calmed down.” And then, feck, you’re baby-owners in Texas, with all the extra stuff that entails, not to mention the actual infant, moving to who knows where for however long it might be, and will you ever manage to live at home as you keep assuring your family that one day you will?

But I know that life goes on, and people have babies, or don’t, and move to other countries or other states, and live there for a few years or ever, and change their plans and make new ones, and I don’t actually have to have it all set in stone right now.

Sadly like a Law & Order episode

I had this freaky dream the other night that made me think I’m starting to get clucky. (I realise this is a self-fulfilling whatsit, because I sort of want to start getting clucky, so I probably made it happen, but still. I like it when my subconsious turns out to be going along with my conscious. And yet. Oh, just read on.) It was fairly freaky though (the more so now I think back and try to remember it), and very vivid.

I had a baby, in this dream. A girl, I think, and I was so happy and got this warm glowy feeling when I held her, and she was all happy and smiley and sweet. She talked to me, too, even though she was only a little baby. But evidently I hadn’t had her long and I didn’t really know much about babies. To wit, we went on a drive and put the baby in the boot of the car for safekeeping. (I’m not sure who “we” was. My mother might have been there. Which really indicates how silly this dream was, because my mother knows about babies. At least, she had me, and she’s always tutting because some baby in a buggy as we pass is too hot or too cold or has the sun in its face and the mother isn’t realising. So I don’t think she’d let me do that to my baby.) At some stage I decided I should feed her, and I took out my boob and tried, but I don’t think she wanted it or something. Anyway, it all devolved sadly like a Law & Order episode and my baby died because I hadn’t fed her because I didn’t realise she was hungry. Or something like that. It was a bit confusing, to be honest.

So I woke up feeling guilty but also suffused with all this fuzzy glowy love for my baby.

Heh. This reminds me that my ex-flatmate had a dream once where I had a baby and I gave it to him to hold and he dropped it on the ground and the head shattered into a million pieces. And he thought “Fuck. I’ve killed her baby. She’s going to be livid.” This was hilarious, but maybe it’s all in the telling.

Small people to inculcate in our ways

So this week I’m coming in early every morning so I can leave early on Friday, so we can get to New York before, say, 11pm that night. Which means I get to wake up earlier, so I can sit here and do nothing for an extra half hour every day. It’s all about the symbolism; because it’s obviously not about doing actual work.

Anyway. I’ve been thinking about why people have kids. It seems like the ultimate triumph of optimism over logic, basically. It’s highly unlikely that your kid will be the one to cure cancer, or even the one who sits quietly, minds what you tell her, and behaves well in public; and yet people keep having them anyway.

Then, maybe it’s all about giving up on yourself. You’ve got this far, and it’s about as far as you’re going to get; so it’s time to start over, instilling all your wisdom into a fresh vessel with all its potential untapped and unlimited by age or experience.

And there’s the narcissism argument. You’re so great that the world needs another one of you. Or you just want to see what your features would look like on someone else. Or, slightly more charitable, you want to show your in-laws how the union of yourself and your beloved will produce the most perfect being ever created. Allied to that is the immortality one, of course – that you must leave a part of yourself behind to carry on the legend. Or the ancestral tea service. Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young boy were about that, I believe. (Unless they were about homosexuality, but that’s not the nun-endorsed explanation we were given in school.)

These are all pretty selfish reasons. Apart from the curing cancer one, and while I’m not saying it ain’t going to happen, you have to admit that the odds are against it. So what about the child? You can’t claim that by having it yourself and providing it with love and a good home, you’re saving it from an otherwise lesser upbringing (unless you’re adopting, of course). Those other kids are going to be born to other people whether you have yours or not. Can you say that by having a child you intend to raise to be good and thoughtful and kind, you’ll up the number of good people in the world, tipping the global balance in favour of the righteous? Oh good – but you know, there are no guarantees. Fred West’s mother probably loved him too.

So sometimes I look at the two of us in the car or wherever, and think, “It’s about time we got some small people to inculcate in our ways.” Maybe it’s about world domination, but I don’t want that many. Maybe it’s because it would be fun, but that’s a bit naive.

I’m not saying I’m clucky; I’m not saying I demand to start making a baby before we’re even married, thank you very much. (At least, with less than four months to go, I’d probably still mostly fit my dress, but it still wouldn’t be the ideal scenario.) Babies are cute, I admit, but I’m more drawn to the idea of a small person who would absorb our ways and our phrases, our music and our ridiculousness. That would be nice. And it would give himself a good excuse to watch all those cartoons, too.

It’s only 9am, and that’s all the philosophical thoughts I can manage for one day. What the heck am I going to do for the next seven hours?

I'm not a control freak, I just like things done right.

I fear I am a control freak. Okay, I am a control freak and everyone always knew it, but they were polite and I thought I was hiding it pretty well under a veneer of laid-backness. I’m easygoing, I can go with the flow, roll with the punches, all that happy stuff. People have complimented me on how I don’t let things upset me, how I can just get on with it and not mind too much about what other people are saying or doing. I even went so far as to describe myself as easy to please. But it’s all a Big Fat Lie.

I began to suspect as much the other week during an episode of Law and Order, where a father was on trial for kidnapping his kids with intent to terrorise them. The terrorising part was where he’d forced them (through strictness to the point of witholding love, not physical abuse) to live their lives exactly the way he wanted, down to the friends they had, the clothes they wore, the study they did, the lies they told to defend him on the witness stand. The thing was, the girls loved their dad and were heartbroken when they were returned to the custody of their mother. Yes, they had no personalities of their own and the notion of doing something that wouldn’t make Daddy happy was unimaginable to them, but they didn’t feel terrorized. They obviously had a big adjustment ahead of them.

Anyway, I watched this and realised that I want kids so I can make ‘em do things the right way. Their father might be a lost cause when it comes to remembering to wipe off countertops (say), but they’ll be malleable little things I can train up right from the start. Is this not perfectly reasonable? Oh my God, I’m going to be a terrible parent. I don’t want them to have no personality. Just so long as it’s a personality I approve of. And preferably pick out for them.

(What I think will really happen, and will be my salvation from 15-20 or pleading out for ten, is that my children will wear me down to the point where my controlling nature is stomped all over and I’ll end up jaded but really truly laid back. I’m sure that trying to maintain control-freak status and have kids at the same time would be far too much like hard work.)

Anyway, the other night my suspicions were confirmed. Himself is in the final throes of thesis writing, and has reverted to his natural timetable of working late and sleeping in. Which, I protested, was fine with me. If that’s when you work best, if your brain starts buzzing after 10pm, then you should make the most of it; go with your circadian rhythms or whatever they are. I can make dinners that improve with reheating. My mistake was doing very little on Sunday, so instead of sleeping the sleep of the righteous log that night, I was tossing and turning a bit. And with every toss I wondered why he wasn’t in bed yet, how he could possibly still be up, what the hell he was going back downstairs again for, why the feck he wasn’t more normal. And by normal, I mean “like me”, because my brain switches off at night and I have never worked later than about 11pm in my life. I finally came to the conclusion, around 5am, that I was unhappy because (apart from the fact that I should have been asleep and wasn’t) he was different and I didn’t like it because I Couldn’t Control It.

Why yes, I am a control freak. Just as well he’s almost completely perfect. We’ll have Perfect Children and it’ll all work out wonderfully.