Today on the Tuesday Twofer, it’s all about thinking of the children. Or rather, acting out our own anxieties and traumas through your children, which is just as much fun.

I’d just like to say at this point that no, I don’t know if I want to have kids, but also no, it’s not because I have some kind of moral opposition to doing so. I know a lot of people who get almost angry when they hear people say things like, “Tut tut, the biological clock is ticking!” or “You say you don’t want kids now, but just wait a few years and see how you feel.” And I don’t blame them, because:

  1. It’s really annoying, and
  2. The people who say things like that are usually blissed-out parents who want everyone to share in the joy of driving to hockey practice, buying six kinds of cough medicine, and scraping the shit out of their kids’ underwear before they can wash it.

Having just become an uncle about a year ago, I do understand that there are a number of positives about having kids. They’re clever, they’re interesting, they’re hilarious, they’re industrious, they do things that you forgot you’d done as a kid yourself. My nephew, for example, sits on his food to keep it warm. You think that’s just some dumb baby thing to do, except it’s everything that represents just how cool babies can really be.

It’s the purest form of problem solving. Take the facts: Food is warm, but it gets cold. Bums are warm, and they stay warm. Apply cold food to warm bum, and you’re set until someone digs you out of your chair. It’s just so simple and liberating. Don’t you wish you could take care of things that easily?

Bob: So anyway, I said to him, “How are you supposed to measure efficiency when you’re not even comparing the same metrics? It’s apples and oranges!”
Jim: Exactly! And besides, I– oh, shit, the fries are cold. I hate that.
Bob: They are? God damn. Okay, let me handle it. Hrrrn!
Jim: Bob, what are you– oh my God.
Bob: Yeah, I know, you’re going to have to wait a few minutes. Sorry about that. So anyway, what I really want to know is, what did he think of the pie charts?
Jim: What I really want to know is how you could sit on my fucking fries!
Bob: Oh, ha ha ha! Don’t worry — I’ve got those stain resistant Dockers on. I’m fine.

The problem is that while I enjoy the hilarious stuff about having babies — the food on-sitting, the kleptomania, the loud outbursts of songs that only the baby can understand — I also understand that when all the fun is over, someone still has to scrub potatoes out of the baby’s ass. And right now, I just don’t want that person to be me.

Fans of tut-tutting will say that I’m being irresponsible for saying that, but I would argue just the opposite. If I’m not one-hundred percent certain that I want kids, that I want to cherish every time I scrape boogers off of their homework or accidentally discover their porno stash, then I shouldn’t be having them. If the lady at the Miracle Mart checkout counter shaking her head at me and saying something about my biological clock is enough to get me worrying about my sperm count and buying thermometers for my girlfriend, then I’ve definitely got problems that I don’t want spreading to my kids.

Which, finally, leads me to the questions of the week.

If you could ensure that your children never have one experience that you did, what would it be?

There are plenty of things that I’d like to protect my hypothetical kids from going through. I wouldn’t want them to get beaten up, I wouldn’t want them to be teased, I wouldn’t want them to be called ugly or stupid or useless, I wouldn’t want them to be ugly or stupid or useless, and the fact that I consider that to be a possibility once again shows that I’m not nearly ready to be a parent.

Essentially, I would want my kids to be completely protected from everything bad, which would either make them Aryan Super-Children, capable of brushing aside all threats with a mere glance, or else quivering social retards, unable to relate to anything but TV Guide and erotic furry fan-fiction.

But the question is what would I spare them that I personally went through, so I guess we’ll have to narrow things down a little.

If there was a way, I’d spare them of shyness. I don’t think it’s something you’re born with, necessarily, and so it seems to me that there’s a way of letting even introverted kids find a way of coping with the outside world. As a young person — i.e. between the ages of 1 and about 13 — I found that if I had the choice between ignoring people and dealing with my crushing, agonizing fear of embarrassing myself in front of them, I would always go with the former.

It’s a pretty logical decision, if you think about it, and no matter what teen drama shows might tell you, kids are not that interested in taking on their inner demons and growing into better people. So if I was offered the choice of taking a risk on doing new things and making a new friends or not taking a risk and watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Dr. Who every day for a summer, you can guess which one I opted for. On the bright side, I learned that you can indeed have an inner life that is completely immune to the opinions of others, which leads to integrity and imagination; on the downside, I stayed inside and watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Dr. Who every day for a summer.

If you could ensure that your children do have one experience you did, what would it be?

This is where things get tricky, and you start to stray into the dangerous area of projecting your own childhood on your kids. Not that it’s a bad thing to want all the good things of your life to also be part of your childrens’, but I always found that was the territory of parents who saw their kids as theraputic tools, rather than small people who lived in their houses. I knew all kinds of kids in school who played on sports teams or did piano lessons because at some point they legitimately wanted to — they might not have still still wanted to a month later, but that was after their parents had laid out money for equipment and an instructor and re-arranged their schedules to take them to classes so you’d better God-damned believe they weren’t going to quit so quickly.

But then there were those other kids, the ones who’d tell you about how they’d been playing hockey since they were 4 years old and they weren’t very good and they didn’t like it very much, but they still wanted to be like Wayne Gretzky some day. The ones who, when you were listening to them talk about their weekends, would alternate between their own opinions on what they were doing and the ones they absorbed from their parents. The ones who, by the end of high school, would tell you that really they were hoping to get into a good BBA program somewhere.

I’m not saying that having high hopes for a child’s future is a bad thing, or that kids don’t need a nudge every now and then. I would say, though, that if you start dreaming too much about the happy experiences of your own childhood too long, you run the risk of being that raging hockey dad, smoking cigarettes outside the arena and getting angrier and angrier while you wait for the referee who made that bullshit tripping call on your kid.

That said, the one experience that I do want for my theoretical kids is to work a really, really shitty job somewhere. I don’t think I learned more things about people any more quickly than when I was working in retail, or long agonizing summers in the parking lot at Ontario Place. School or teams or clubs are nice, predictable bubbles after a little while — and even if they’re foul, tortured bubbles that you can’t wait to escape, they’re still contained and limited. Minimum-wage customer service jobs expose you to a rainbow of humanity that is incredibly educational, and can give you a real perspective on just what you’re made of. If you can make it through a fifty-hour week checking out movies at a video store, or having near-homicidal tourists bellow at you about ticket prices, and still care about doing a good job, then you know you’re doing all right.

And reading that over, I sound so much like my father did when I was thirteen, trying to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the sixteenth time while he sternly explained to me why it is I should be getting a job.

Maybe I’m ready to be a Dad after all.