“Then the door opened and in stepped a nineteen-year-old yoga instructor with impossibly long limbs and the bone structure of Sophia Loren in The Black Orchid.”
Often in the course of family life, a parent must face inconvenient or downright disturbing truths about children that fly in the face of what we believe about our influence as parents and human nature itself.
Before becoming a parent, for instance, I genuinely believed I could convince my offspring that Barney the Dinosaur is in fact evil and does not actually love them.
I was also convinced that my children would be the first toddlers in history to possess, thanks to their kindly father, impeccable table manners and a keen appreciation of historical documentaries, late-90s acoustic mope rock and Alaskan scenery.
On all these counts, I was forced to face facts. News flash: Kids love Barney, do not generally appreciate the genius of Ken Burns or Elliot Smith and will never, ever, even if you shell out many thousands of dollars on a pleasure cruise of Glacier Bay, give a damn about the majesty of the wild when there’s a buffet table piled with cookies behind them.
Still, hope dies hard. Throughout my first years of fatherhood, I clung to some ridiculously starry-eyed and politically correct notions about children.
I believed they are born virtuous and freethinking, that meanness, superficiality, and arbitrary gender norms are learned via reality TV and unlicensed childcare providers. Left to their own devices, I imagined children would establish a just, happy society filled with toys and cake.
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