[lit-ideas] Re: I shall say this only 5,000 times (allo allo)

  • From: "Paul Stone" <pastone@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:58:06 -0400


David Ritchie wrote:
> What a sad tale, made more so by the "of course."


Reading this reminds me of something I've been grappling with for about 8
months now.

As well as the fact that Freelists keeps arbitrarily kicking me off the
list, another reason that I've been relatively "quiet" in the past little
while is that next month, I'm going to become a father [for the first time]
and, despite what women will report, men also have a harder time during
pregnancy -- something which is HARDLY ever mentioned, and if it is, it's
just a laugh between women.

Apart from the whole anxiety of having another mouth to feed and how I will
handle being responsble [after 40 years of throwing caution to the wind]
etc. I think the main thing I feel trepidatious about is what to TELL the
kid.

As i was watching some current event thing on television last night, I said
to my housemate, "don't people remember what it was like to be a child?" in
response to the way an adult was treating her child. I mean, really, this is
important to me. I don't want to tell my child about Santa Claus or Fairies,
or Bunnies or any of that stuff that they might think "sadly" or "of course"
about me in the future.

When i was a child, I was for some reason a doubting kid. Even though both
my parents were fairly religious "christian" people, I wanted none of it.
All the other childhood myths were just as fantastically silly to me and one
by one they were debunked -- my sister and I counted the carrots at easter
before we went to bed and in the morning. We noticed that the tooth fairy
and Santa Claus had the same backwards handwriting, etc. Perhaps the fact
that we would both become Engineers was early obvious.

So I guess my question to the group is: is it deprivation to let a kid grow
up without this childish nonsense? If it is... what exactly am I depriving
him of?

Paul (soon to be Mr.) Stone

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