I’m at a friend’s house, the friend who we sit with four people on his bed watching rugby on a Saturday. Now, I am not a rugby fan, in fact I am sitting writing this blog from the bed to avoid having to watch over exercised and grisly men fondling each others’ bottoms. I wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.
I don’t know if my eardrums will survive this match though, seeing as one of my fellow bed sitters is screaming so loudly, my ears are hurting. I mean really, if it was say… Jacob Zuma being a judge on Miss South Africa Teen or Hershelle Gibbs participating in a marriage counselling course, sure, I would get fairly vocal. But to me, rugby is such a homo-erotic display of testosterone fuelled bum fisting. But I love company of my friends and their repressed need for masculine displays of dominance; I am willing to sit with sore ears.
Speaking of masculine dominance, it has become quite frightening to me how many of my friends are joining the fashionable habit of pro-creating. Some (actually many) are younger than me and I cannot grasp how punching out a kid is going to make their lives any better.
I am 25. That is not old. Definitely not old enough to be capable of raising sprogs. I haven’t reached levels of maturity to be ok with paying tax but who has to be honest. It feels like yesterday that I was seated in my school hall, singing the Lord’s prayer and letting religious ideals flow over my head whilst I thought about Ouija boards and how exactly one would go about selling their soul to the devil. Ok I wasn’t that apathetic, I was animated but strange in school.
I was in the group of girls who didn’t really fit into any of the regular cliques. I wasn’t a beauty queen, I wasn’t a super hockey player or athlete, I definitely wasn’t an academic, a comedian or a slut. Neither was I a party animal/drug user or a church going happy clapper. I was just a weirdo who listened to Beck and wished she was a ghost. I did change after going to Varsity though, but that’s a whole other story.
The first person who I was in school with who chose to go the route of motherhood was a girl in my school in the UK. She had her first at barely 16, but to be frank she was a Slough resident (pronounced “Slaaaah” by locals) which is in Berkshire and is mentioned in the Ali G movie where they build the Airport over Slough instead of Staines and is also the location where “The Office” is set. No more explanation needed.
After this, my friends’ level of procreation was extremely low.
And suddenly, a year ago, everyone started getting pregnant. These couples seemed to have forgotten how to use a bloody condom.
And I am not talking about settled, married couples. I am not talking about people with a relatively ok paying job, that have somewhere stable to live and more importantly, a stable partner. I am talking about waiters and waitresses with drug problems, office assistants and students who have partners that are being arrested for shop lifting. I know this might offend some people but tough shit, really.
It is utterly beyond me, how people find themselves in a relationship for a few years and get careless with contraception. More alarmingly, that when they find they have a bun in the oven, they think it is the answer to all their problems.
What is more frightening is that I have been there, I have felt that yearning to be a mum. And thank GOD it went away. I would have been tied to the person I hate the most in the world. For the rest of my life. And I was careless when I was younger… But after seeing friends’ lives and dreams disintegrate into nothing when the two strip result appears, I am perfectly happy to wait to have a kid when I am say… well, never actually.
I know this post is not the most humorous of posts, but what has brought this to my attention mostly is an ex housemate of mine, who recently published photos of himself holding his new baby boy. From my experience of living with him, he was about as far from being responsible parent material as Sarah Palin is from becoming a member of PETA.
It seems people today fall in love and whoops! Lets have a baby! Nicole Ritchie has done it! Ashlee Simson has done it! Jamie Lynn Spears has done it! So lets do it!!!
A baby is not a Nine West handbag unless you are Edward Gein. A baby is not a funky cell phone. A baby is not fashionable and a baby is definitely not the answer to people’s problems. A baby is a responsibility for 18 years at least. People seem to think that a baby is great and cute and they will be able to walk around din hippy clothes on Hollywood boulevard and get snapped by paparazzi.
Unfortunately, they don’t see toddler tantrums, sleepless nights and baby vomit as a deterrent, and they don’t see school fees, custody battles and maintenance bills as a deterrent. They seem to think that their kids will stay cute babies forever. I have bad news for them – unless they start their kids smoking cigarettes at a young age to stunt their growth, they have a hell of a wake up coming their way when that kid pops out.
I see these stars in magazines with their fashionable sprogs on their arms, who then get admitted to mental hospitals and custody of their children taken away. I have had three boyfriends who had no father figure in their lives and believe me, the toll on them (and everyone they take their abandonment issues out on) is unbelievable. But the celebs are different- they do have the ability to support a child, usually not emotionally and possibly contributing to the rising number of serial killers in the US, but the kid will never go without what it needs, just love and attention.
Another difference between famous people and ‘normal’ people pro-creating is that the celebs have personal assistants, nannies and massive bank accounts to help them along. Britney got strapped to a gurney and held in a padded cell for a bit? No problem – family, personal assistants and nannies had her covered. Britney was still able to go out and get plastered all the time with dodgy boyfriends whilst little Jayden and Sean were perfectly safe with child minders. Nicole Ritchie can still go to movie premieres looking skinny whilst little Harlow is at home sleeping under the watchful eye of an expensive babysitter. Jessica Alba is back to her svelte figure in about two days after giving birth and making movies again whilst little Honor Marie is guarded by an au pair. Real life? Nuh HUH!!!
Unless you are extremely well paid, your social life is going to take a dive for non existence. And the stars look fantastic and are yummy mummies? They have personal trainers who they gym with twice a day for four hours at a time because they have the money and the time to do so. Normal people have to do it like normal people – exercise when time and energy allows.
And let’s not kid ourselves – when you have a baby who needs feeding every two hours, screams when it feels happy, sad, angry, confused, jealous, depressed, ecstatic, pensive and any other emotion, pees and poos without restraint, sometimes even into your face and is just a general 24 hour a day job… You are not going to have much energy for anything other than sleeping, which is pretty much a treat when you are sitting with a three week old.
But those people who are under twenty five, unmarried, hardly able to support themselves and really want life to change; if you think that having offspring is going to make your life different you would be right. But perhaps not for the better.
Bag by Fendi, stomach by sad emo rocker who wears eyeliner
