An Apology (of sorts)

Cath once told me she didn’t understand why I wasn’t married with fourteen children. Not married to her, but to some mythic other person. She wanted children herself. At least three, preferably more. Someone who would look after her when she was old and needed the support. (The more kids you had, the better the odds were that one of them might care for you.)

I’m not sure how she got the notion that I’d make a great father. I couldn’t see it myself, but I wasn’t quite arrogant enough to tell her how wrong she was.

Here’s the problem with children. They’re both vulnerable and invulnerable. On the one hand they can say whatever they like and get away with it. They have no filter. On the other hand, they need to be looked after. If they’re sick or if there’s an accident, they can’t fend for themselves.

Their vulnerability and their invulnerability scare me in equal amounts.

Spoiler (not much of a spoiler if you’ve read this blog), I don’t have kids. Never had, never will. Aside from all the things I’ve already said, I’m not a people person. If you want to be blunt, I’m too lost in my own head, my own little self-contained universe.

Or to put it into a single word: Selfish.

I mean that sounds quite harsh, but I’m probably not going to challenge anyone for saying it. Fair cop. I promise to come quietly, hands above my head where you can see them. Put me in a cell, but preferably one without anyone else in it. You get the picture.

I don’t have children, but I do have a niece and a nephew. I am now also a great uncle. Not to be confused with being a ‘great’ uncle, which would be a different member of the family.

I’ve attended my fair share of family gatherings. I’ve done my bit as an uncle. I’m amazed (and yet not amazed) at how well my niece and nephew have grown up into successful adults. (I don’t mean successful in the sense of winning awards, I mean successful at being adults in a way that I never managed.) But not really amazed, because they had great parents. They were nurtured right.

But I’m a recluse, living at the margins (geographically) of the country, as recluses are often want to do. I don’t see them as often as I could. I’m in the loop because modern life makes so much else that’s going on around us accessible, even if you’re not present to view it first-hand.

So this isn’t really an apology. Maybe it’s more by way of an explanation. Or maybe it's just another five hundred words in the shifting realities of yours truly, the unreliable narrator. Maybe my fourteen children are the albums I’ve recorded. Or the stories I’ve published.

And if you need to understand who I am, maybe all the clues are on the page (or screen). Random access memories. More fun to solve than a Sudoku. But really, that’s not saying very much.