Here’s a horrible reason to have kids…

Now that the holiday season is over the desperate thoughts have long passed, but family members can drive you crazy in unexplainable ways.  I am in my thirties, my parents are in their late sixties.  We don’t have the same idea of fun.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re great people, but if you are in your thirties and single, and your parents have no grandchildren to dote on, the parent/child dynamic seems to stay at high school level.  I still don’t feel comfortable having boys over.

My folks are divorced, so for the Christmas holiday I did what I do every year, spend Christmas Eve with my mother, and then drive three hours to have Christmas again with my dad in the next day or two.  I realize married people do this traveling thing all the time to satisfy in-laws, but this is just me, by myself, going through the routine, spending time with everyone and making sure no one feels like I love the other one more.  It’s a lot of driving, usually when the weather is the worst, but I’ve been doing it for over ten years and it seems to be the best way to spend time together. 

It wasn’t until this year that I was walking with my dad, bored and playing the, “I don’t know, what do you want to do” game when I thought to myself,  “I wonder if I had a kid, if I could get away with staying home and having them come to visit me.”  It was not an idea I was considering, as much as a realization that this awkward relationship with my parents may have a lot to do with me being happily single at a time that they really want to be grandparents. 

Then I started to romanticize that if I had a kid, this need to entertain and the difficulty in trying to engage with them would be relieved.  I could just plop the thing down in front of my folks and let the kid take over.  They could gush over the little one, and we would never run out of things to talk about because we’d have all sorts of “kids say the darndest things” stories to laugh about. 

While that does sound easier than constantly trying to make conversation with my communication-challenged father, I have run the numbers and it’s not very cost-effective.  There’s also no guarantee that my plan will work and I’d hate to go to all that expense and nine months of pregnancy only to cave in and end up driving the same route between their houses at Christmas time, but with a carseat.