Fun v. Fun

So, what's a girl like me doing reading Lileks? He's Mr. Flat Tax, and I want the government to take more of my money. Get me a candidate who promises to raise my taxes, damn it. He'll win for sure.

I read Lileks, because his life so closely parallels mine. He goes to Target. I go to Target. He muses about mid-century furniture at Crate and Barrel. I spent some quality time with the new CB2 catalog today. He scans old matchbook covers into his computer and writes commentary about them, and I... well, no...

He writes about his life before the kids:

We should all see each other more often, of course, but most of us are now busy attending the offspring, and the opportunities for just dropping in and sitting around drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, scoffing at MTV, and rising from the sofa six hours later to go home and have a frozen pizza are remarkably few. (Every man misses his single days in principle, but rarely in specifics.)

And Steve and I talk about life pre-kids. Actually we went to that bad place last night -- we wondered if we had more fun before we had kids. When this topic comes up, you are supposed to say, "having kids is a different kind of fun." Well, last night I wanted the kind of fun that involves staying up all night, smoking a pack of cigarettes without guilt, and doing body shots in a Mexican restaurant on West 3rd Street.

Yeah, yeah. You can't maintain your party-hardy, couch slacking ways for long. I mean nobody wants to see a forty year old woman licking salt off a guy's neck and coughing up big phlegm balls from the smokes.

Even the slacker thing becomes old, too. Steve always brings up his old roommate, Tiny, as the poster boy for the aging slacker. Tiny is still in the four bedroom apartment on 146th Street with the rotating cast of crazy roommates found in the Village Voice. He's still blowing his money on video games and pot. He is a professional slacker. Of course, he hasn't had a girlfriend since the first Bush administration and is getting fat from all that Chinese take-out.

Last week, we briefly talked about why people, especially Europeans, aren't making babies like they used to. I've got a new theory. Childless people are having too much fun. They are congregating in urban areas and when they outgrow body shots and apple core bongs, they move on to nice restaurants, museums, and last minute trips to Anguila. The breeders get stuck going on the DisneyLand cruise and posing for pictures with Goofy. And why are the Europeans having even less kids than the US? Ibiza.

Kids really are fantastic, but you don't really know it until you have one of your own. When you take the love for your kids out of the equation, all you have is a comparison between fun and no fun. And without the social pressure to procreate, many people choose no kids.

Having children shouldn't mean such a vast change in lifestyle from complete freedom to chained to the boring house in the suburbs. It shouldn't mean poverty and a mandatory second income. It shouldn't mean the end of parties and interesting vacations. It shouldn't mean being too busy with work and activities to sit around with the kids and slack with them.

I've got to train little Ian to get me a beer from the basement fridge and pop it open for me.

Comments

[meg]

It has struck me many times that CAREFUL parenting really gets in the way of fun. We are surrounded by friends with toddlers, and the least uptight of them have the most fun and most normal* lives. The others, well, of course you're not going to get out much if you refuse to employ non-family babysitters or allow a sip of wine to pass your lips in the presence of the sprog or insist on washing toddler hands every time they touch the floor or shoes. (And no, I'm not exaggerating.)

I'm not faulting them for these choices, and they don't whine too much about the pre-kids days, but sometimes the difference between the careful and relaxed is pretty striking.

And before I forget the required caveat about the childless talking about parenthood: Disregard everything I said. I know nothing. I'm not worth flaming. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

*normal as judged by the childless anyway, which may not be normal at all.

[dave s]

Your theory has some plausibility for people not making the leap from none to one, doesn't do very well for why folks stop at one or at two.

My view being that it gets more fun at least to three, and beyond that, I don't know. Yes, it is a different kind of fun, but, well, I was never worth a damn in the bar scene anyhow.

[Laura]

No doubt, meg. Obsessive concerns about safety makes all this much less fun. It's natural for a new parent to be a little nutty, but 'ya gotta relax after a while. Our parents had a lot less worries about germs, but also car seats and neighborhood predators. Kids can't walk to school anymore. No more carpooling with other parents.

I don't know, dave. Don't you think that juggling childcare got much more difficult when there was more than one. Certainly, everything got much more pricey. We also only felt like we had to move from the city after number 2 came.

[harry b]

Great post. I've just posted my shocking reply at CT (you have to go below the fold to find the shock!)

[meg]

No more carpooling with other parents? Really? Wow. That one hasn't hit Sprinklerville, thank heavens.

I'm sometimes amazed at my mother's parenting decisions. Sure, maybe in 1961 she didn't know better than smoking and drinking through pregnancy. But other decisions seemed based purely on "What are the odds of that happening again?" -- and in some cases (seat belts, neighborhood creep, mean dogs) she made what I'd consider the wrong call.

[Amy P]

Everybody's making such good points. I agree about the difficulty of imagining one's life with children. I was the oldest of three kids, and I still had almost no idea of what the physical care of infants and toddlers would entail, and I don't think anyone could have gotten it across to me just in words. At least in our society, there is an almost insurmountable barrier between parents of young children and everybody else. Although heaven knows plenty of us go too far, I would suggest that a good deal of parental paranoia is justified, being simply the hyperfocus necessary for keeping small children alive and well in a world full of steep steps, scalding faucets, nippy dogs, hot stoves, sharp scissors, enticing swimming pools, speeding cars, etc.

As many women have said over the years, I don't really remember what I used to do for fun. I know I read, and I still read (mainly online)but these days, if I have an hour or two at Barnes and Noble, I automatically head over to the child development section, or over to the workbook section. I feel rather lonely and at a loss if I'm out and about without a child in a stroller. I'm definitely overstretched when I take care of both my preschooler and my one-year-old, but it's becoming almost effortless to hang out just with the preschooler.

[joe o]

I like having kids. I was never very good at the single life.

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