Posted on 11/17/2004 4:26:11 PM PST by Huntress
Let me share with you the daydream that gets me through to Friday.
I retire. I move to a house on a wooded acre from which I cannot see my nearest neighbor. My new house has a media room with a state-of-the-art sound system and plush recliners.
When I am not there, I am lounging on the screened-in porch out back, watching the river travel past.
Swell as all that is, here is what makes the daydream lovely: There are no children in the house. They have all grown up and moved away.
Oh, I love them to death; don't get me wrong. But I've been doing the dad thing since I was 22. So I look forward to loving them from afar.
In the kid-free house of my daydreams, you can stock the refrigerator and close the door knowing the food won't disappear before the light goes out. You can walk past a room without fear of being knocked back five feet by the song stylings of Jack Filthy and the Foulmouths. And when the telephone rings, it might conceivably be for you.
I apologize to late-life parents everywhere for saying this, but if, at 75, I find myself walking half a block behind some 14-year-old who is terminally mortified at my continued existence, or debating some 9-year-old who can't understand why I won't let him see Naked Nazi Coeds From Planet X, I will walk in front of a bus. While slitting my wrists.
So you can imagine how alien Aleta St. James is to me.
She's the woman who gave birth to twins last week in New York, just a few days shy of her 57th birthday. Apparently, she did this on purpose.
St. James is said to be the oldest American to give birth to twins. A press release informs us that she is an ''internationally acclaimed life coach and motivational speaker'' and that this is her ''greatest achievement.'' St. James, who is single, managed this feat through the use of donor eggs and in vitro fertilization.
''This is the most incredible thing I've ever done in my life,'' she told reporters.
St. James acknowledged that other people might have other words for it. ''A lot of people may think I am selfish or crazy or whatever,'' she said.
``Well, I'm a little bit crazy. I've never lived in the box. I just say if you have a dream, if you put your mind to it and don't listen to other people's negativity, you can really do incredible things.''
Amazingly, her next words were not, ``I would like to thank the Academy.''
Your humble correspondent is forced to remind himself that other people's reproductive decisions are none of his business and that one person's daydream is another's nightmare.
There are, I am sure, many people for whom a house is not a home unless the kitchen floor is sticky.
So I'm not going to say St. James is ''selfish'' or ''crazy.'' I might think it loudly, but I'm not going to say it.
I will confess, though, to wondering what old Mom Nature makes of all this. Eons past, she installed perfectly sensible rules and limitations on this child-bearing business.
But here as elsewhere, science is breaking the rules and stretching the limitations so that it's entirely conceivable -- you should pardon the pun -- to imagine a future where it might be common for a child in middle school to have a brother who qualifies for the senior discount at Denny's.
I keep reading these predictions that someday soon, you'll even be able to design your child from scratch, choosing its gender, eye color, hair color and aptitudes.
It's a brave new world. Also in some ways, a strikingly narcissistic one.
Contrary to what the Rolling Stones said, it is increasingly the case that you can get exactly what you want. Imagination is the only limitation.
If that's your idea of progress, enjoy it with my compliments. Me, I'd just as soon sit this particular revolution out.
I do think, just as a joke, I'll ask my wife if we can take a shot at senior parenthood.
So if you never see me again, you'll know why.
Dude has lived in the city WAY too long, if he thinks you can not see neighbors on just one acre of land. Maybe if you're UNDER it.
thank you, i thought i was the only one, any more????????
Actually, Mother Nature installed rules under which women were still bearing the last of their 10-14 children (assuming they hadn't yet died of childbirth complications) just a very few years before the end of their natural lifespans. A child-free home was something very few of them ever experienced.
Now, women's life expectancy in the developed world is on the early 80s. And for women who have reached age 57 in a condition to be energetically giving press conferences the day before giving birth to twins, the life expectancy is considerably longer. Don't worry about Ms. St. James -- she's got plenty of energy to raise those twins, and she'll still enjoy a decade or two of post-parenthood retirement.
Sorry the writer's children represent a nightmare from which he wants to run run run.
Up here in Vermont we like to see our neighbors across the valley or up the road. It's those yuppie flatlanders who move in and start putting up hedges and screens of trees. You can tell they are newcomers when you see them plant a row of pine trees across an old pasture, spoiling the whole curve of the landscape, because they're afraid their neighbors might glance their way.
Vermont houses are built with porches in front, so you can sit outside and greet the neighbors when they go by.
I'm less worried about her age than her being single. These kids will spend a lot of time at the daycare center while their mom is busy lecturing.
Actually, I rather doubt that. She has a significant extended family in New York. And a kid could do a lot worse than be left with uncle Curtis Sliwa when mom's busy -- he won't take any crap. Besides, I doubt that her lecturing really takes up much time, and much of it would be in preparation, which for the type of lecturing she does would be overwhelmingly a work-from-home proposition. And she'll probably cut back now that she's got the twins to occupy her time and attention.
So true. I really think that raising children when one is still young, inexperienced in life, and financially insecure is much more exhausting than doing it in late middle age, assuming the late middle-ager is in good health. These people who found child-rearing so overwhelming in their twenties and early thirties just seem to assume it would be more so at a later age, because they've gotten more exhausted and stressed with each passing year.
People who don't have children in their early adulthood have more time to develop wisdom, perspective, financial security, and general calmness. With all that under one's belt, raising children is a lot easier. I've known enough older parents to be sure that's true.
They were donated eggs and not a husbands sperm, so this unmarried senior citizen felt the need to be an incubator and put her 57 year old body through hell all for her own selfishness, yet there are 1000's of needy orphans who she could have adopted.
Ms. St James is thoroughly selfish. She might feel fine at 57, but it isn't unusual for people to get a little slower and less energetic by 65 or so. Her children would still be very young.
If she really wanted to be a mother, she would be better off adopting some older children who were in need. There are plenty of them.
I'm in my thirties and haven't had kids yet, so I hope that's true for me, too.
I'm 67 now and have no regrets at all. I loved every minute of it and treasure every moment with my kids.
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