“A Hollywood tearjerker or a harrowing news report, you can’t claim that being a parent makes you any more emotional – and it’s insulting for people who don’t have kids”
We’re had a couple of conversations recently with various friends who are considering having kids, and the thing which comes up again and again is that there’s never a switch-flicked moment where you can say everything is different. Is it when you choose to try and have a kid, if you make that choice? When the pregnancy test comes back positive? The first scan? Birth? First words, first steps, first food, first night away, first favourite book, first joke; the experiences don’t stop, and that child never stops developing. But is there some kind of End of History assumption that because you’re the adult in charge, you do?
No one would discount my assertion that my experience with this film was different when watching it shortly before my father’s death, rather than if I’d watched it when it first came out, before he was even ill. But to admit that having a baby — the most mundane, bourgeois, boring and everyday event from some angles; the most missed, mourned-for, hoped-for, agonising event from another — might actually have some effect on the filter through which we view the world? Ha! No way, dude! I’m cool! Havin’ a kid ain’t never gonna change me! Art is a simple objective event with no personal experience brought to its consumption!
If your child is a healthy one/two-year-old, and you aren’t the primary caregiver (I have no idea about whether either of these is the case with the author of that piece), might I be so bold as to suggest maybe JUST MAYBE you haven’t got the final word on How Parenting Affects Everybody? That maybe your friend who’s experienced an event for longer and and in more depth than you might occasionally have something valid to say? That maybe after eighteen months you haven’t yet discovered all that caring and raising another human has to offer? That you, too, might have some developing to do, just like every other single person still kicking around the planet?
Ultimately, articles like this annoy me because a) they smack me so much of ‘I’m not like those awful parents, I’m a COOL parent’, b) son, you — just like me — don’t know shit about all the ways parenting can change you, and c) setting one set of people’s emotions against another set of people is just bad egging. We feel how we feel. It’s not tactless to say life changes us. There are no enemies here. You don’t have to win anyone round by being Just Like A Normal Person and throwing parents under the bus. No one’s saying parents experience things more, only differently. Just like it’s OK to say that a divorcée, a retiree, an orphan, a widow, might experience a piece of art differently after an event which is echoed in that art.
Either way, lazy generalisations are just the worst. As a parent, I’m uniquely qualified to judge.
