OTHER PEOPLE’S KIDS

Esther Walker - 30 Aug 16

I am not the sort of mother who feels sorry for people who don’t have children. Not even in my most smug moments (literally, only fleeting moments) do I think “People without kids are missing out!” or “People without kids must be so sad”.

I think, quite honestly, if I hadn’t had kids I would have been alright. I would have done something else, been someone else. I would have bred Shar-Peis or collected guns or become a foreign correspondent or something else equally child-unfriendly. But it would have been alright. I wouldn’t have been sad. I would have Christmassed in Barbados and spent Sunday mornings browsing in foreign antiques markets. I would cook more elaborately. I would read a lot of books.

But there is one area in which my heart does go out to the childless and it is this: they have to pretend, especially women, to like children they are not related to. They either have to pretend to like them, or self-defensively announce loudly that they are not “crazy” about kids or they are “bad” with kids or turn it around and claim that kids don’t like THEM. (It’s not me, it’s you.)

The plain fact is that it is hard to immediately take to strange children. Your own are fine. Your nieces and nephews are delightful. But other kids? Well, they’re just… whatever, really. Not repulsive or anything. (Although sometimes yes, totally repulsive) But mostly you just feel… nothing.

Unless you get to know them of course. Any child, once you get to know it, becomes the world’s most precious thing. But unless you see each other reasonably often, it’s hard to go wild about them.

This is a perfectly okay attitude to have if you already have children. The other day a friend whom I was supposed to be seeing for coffee asked at the last minute if she could bring both her kids. Both of mine would be occupied elsewhere. “No,” I said, guiltlessly. “Let’s do it another time.”And her children are perfectly nice. Any other time, when I also had my kids, they would be welcome at my house to smash the place up – we would all put funny hats on and sing songs and have a wicked time – but spend time with her kids, on one of my kid-free mornings? No. Unthinkable. Never.

But you can’t say that if you haven’t got kids because people go hmmmmm and think Oh, she doesn’t like children. Like one of the Witches in Roald Dahl. And it’s not that, s/he just doesn’t really like children she doesn’t know. She doesn’t hate them!! Just doesn’t really want to socialise with them. They operate at such an odd tempo, do little kids, and unless you are tuned to it, it can seem bizarre.

It’s all the interrupting that the childless can’t cope with. They probably think you shouldn’t let your children interrupt you, that Kiddo ought to just sit in a corner eating PVA glue while you gossip on for 3 hours about someone’s hideous new kitchen extension. They think you, the mother, ought to turn and say NOT NOW I AM TALKING.

Or, worse, they do that thing where they reach over to stop the hand of an eight month old who is banging a spoon on a table, because they believe that you are not stopping the child from making this awful noise because you are blinded by love or helplessly out of control.

(The fact is that there is so little joy and light in an 8 month-old’s life – can’t speak, can’t move, probably teething – that why shouldn’t the poor little bugger have a bit of fun banging a spoon about?)

Before I had children, all those utterly bizarre things kids do used to do my head in and I thought I didn’t like kids, but now I know that 1) you don’t really like kids you don’t know and 2) I didn’t understand them.

Now I don’t even notice when I am interrupted. In fact these days I am quite grateful for it – I talk so much and so fast that I can really wear myself out if left to rattle on unchecked.

And anyway I am usually just sitting in my kitchen with Becky B – in the middle of saying something scandalous – and I will be dragged hither to clear up a spill and she will be dragged thither to look at a Peppa Pig rocket and when this strange little ballet brings us back to within shouting distance of each other, we pick up where we left off. That’s just how it is. We don’t care. We usually manage to cover quite a lot of ground that way.

But when you don’t have kids you don’t GET to not want to be with them. People act like it’s “good” for the childless to spend time with their own ratbag kids to “get practice”. Me? I never expect anyone to want to spend time with my kids if they haven’t got their own. Why would they? Moreover, why would I? If I am going to see a friend who hasn’t got children I want to sit about in clean, fashionable (?!?!?!) clothes drinking alcohol and talking, uninterrupted, about that hideous kitchen extension.

Read more by Esther Walker on her brilliant blog Recipe Rifle and buy her book The Bad Cook, here.

Esther Walker

Esther Walker is a freelance journalist for The Times, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and a beauty columnist for Sainsburys Magazine. Her two autobiographical books The Bad Cook and the Bad Mother are published by The Friday Project. She lives in London with her husband, writer and broadcaster Giles Coren, and their children Kitty, 5 and Sam, 3.

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