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Part of it is guy posturing. Many of my pals talk a good game about how their wives finally put the clamp down and demanded they do the deed, but deep down they're all glad the women forced the issue. They knew the day was coming; most of us want it to come, even if few of us ever feel the time is exactly right.
I absolutely hate this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no one's ever completely prepared to be a parent and all that. But the conventional wisdom--"You really do want to be a parent! You just don't know it yet!" is wrong and dangerous and has destroyed marriages, sometimes after a woman, believing that her husband does, deep down, want nothing more than to be a daddy, "accidentally" gets pregnant. It's called the "oops."
Please don't perpetuate this myth. Yes, if I had children, maybe I would find that they were the best thing that ever happened to me. Or maybe not. Maybe I shoulda been a doctor or maybe an airline pilot, or taught basic literacy in some village school in Botswana. Who knows? We all have regrets about the life path we chose not to take, and sometimes I regret not having children.
But what I don't regret: that I decided not to do so because my husband, kind, funny, brilliant, who loves me more than anything, didn't want them, and I didn't want to force such a major life change on him, because marriage means that your partner's happiness means as much, or more to you, than your own. Oh, and it also means respect for your partner's wishes, and not patronizing second-guessing. Perhaps my husband would have been a great father. (As an uncle, he is fantastic.) Perhaps he would have been a merely dutiful one who, deep down, saw his children as an intrusion on his life's work. I would never do that either to him...or to the children. You'd be surprised at how often that happens. In the immortal words of Philip Larkin, they fuck you up, your mum and dad. They don't mean to, but they do.
I'm curious to see tomorrow's installment, and I'm hoping that either Smith did respect and love his wife enough not to force her to a choice she was reluctant to make, or that, if he insisted on having his own way, that she really, truly is glad that he did. In the case of the second scenario, though, we may never know the truth, because the human mind is so good at rationalizing the acceptance of what the heart rejects. And ten years down the road, the truth may come out--to the detriment of Smith's wife, their children, and their marriage.
Which may be an awfully heavy price to pay for not being the oldest guy handing out orange slices at a soccer game. But that's the way it is with the Kodak moments.
