Getting Jobs and Having Babies

Rachel reminded me the other day that I was more or less an old man. I’m 31 in two weeks – what a pointless age! 30 isn’t too bad because at least you can have a big celebration. 31 is like Thursday mornings – there’s no reason to be happy about them. You still have to be in work the next day.

Since I’m moving so quickly towards death, we’ve naturally chatted about the important things in life – films, music and photography. We’ve also spoken of having babies and getting ‘real’ careers.

A number of people close to us have either had babies recently, or are soon to have them. And all of them say the same thing ‘Your life will change. The baby will become the most important thing in the world’. They say that in a positive way. When I hear it my mind says ‘Do you want your life to change?’

The answer is overwhelmingly ‘no’. Fortunately Rachel feels the same right now. We simply don’t want our entire life, most waking minutes, dictated to by an infant. Naturally, I understand why parents feel the way they do. It’s an evolutionary process. Our child must survive so our genes may continue. Everything about a child is designed, if you will, to make us care for it, to give it the best that we can. Even a child’s cry has evolved to be a sound that we can’t filter out – it’s a survival mechanism that makes us attend to the baby when it’s in need.

At the moment, I love not having that responsibility. We are as free as we have ever been and we love it.

Inevitably, when I explain this to my friends, their response is ‘Wait till you have kids, you’ll see what I mean’. They truly believe that we are missing out on something wonderful, and that may well be the truth. But apart from new parents, the general advice from people who’ve been parenting for a few years is to hold off having kids as long as possible – ‘enjoy yourself’, they often say.

I do see us having sprogs at some point. We’re just too selfish to consider it right now. We’re putting ourselves first in the hope that in later life we’ll be better placed to raise a family.

By that time we’ll hopefully be settled into careers. At the moment everything is experimental. We’re testing what will work and what won’t but we have a good idea where we’ll be at the end of these next 2 years.

Any decision we make will be a big one, as it is for anyone else. Again, in a purely selfish way, we’re looking after ourselves first. Whatever we choose to do, we’ll make it into an adventure. It’s in our nature.

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