Titanic or Starship Enterprise?

"Of children as of procreation - the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable." Evelyn Waugh

"This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind." Desiderius Erasmus

"Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation." Walter Benjamin

No, they won't look after us in our old age, and yes, they spoil our figure, wreck our nerves and cost a fuckload of money. Bin lids. Why have them?

If you don't want them don't have them, it is the responsible thing to do. I wouldn't change my baby boy for the world. Children give life meaning. If we are simply to live and then die without having left any bit of us behind, then what was the point of our life. My late boyfriend, Ash, died before we had any children. Those first nights after his death I prayed I was pregnant. When it became clear that I wasn't I cried inconsolably for days because there really was nothing left of him. I wasn't given the opportunity to even carry his child, his legacy into the world. I often think of the childless widows everywhere who have been robbed twice.

In this, our Western world of artifice, where we are encouraged to desire only that which can gratify us instantly, in the savage competetiveness of the workplace, and within modernity's constrained living conditions and even more strained human relations, there exists the opportunity to be selfless, to attain that little-mentioned and rarest thing, grace, to acquire something strongly discouraged, humility, and exercise that equally out-moded virtue, temperance.

My son has impacted on my life in ways I never could have imagined when all I had to think about was myself. Patience and quietude characterized my pregnancy and the first few weeks of his life. Graceful (and grateful) was how I felt when I was holding him and gazing in awe, day after day. I am not religious in the slightest but I now understand Christianity, the cult of worshipping the innocent infant. No wonder that innocence and purity were once highly regarded and held as the greatest prize on earth. It is the most beautiful, most evanescent quality, a frustratingly intangible thing that is more abstract than the notion of love.

I felt and embraced humility in those difficult days of pregnancy, emraced my vulnerability (never have I felt so helpless or felt the world to be so perniciously cruel) and I thought of my mother, sister and grandmothers and the millions of women who have born, were bearing and would bear children, and give them, yes, GIVE them to the world. Children are not 'had' nor held, they are given. It is done, just like a risky business deal or a throw of the dice, in good faith. And anyone who has had kids, believe me, will tell you that they are a bigger rush than any speedball at a celebrity party or skydive over the Amazonian rainforest.

Here we come to temperance; Paul and I have re-thought the debauched excesses of the past and have, gladly and with a surprising sense of relief, tempered ourselves, our lives and our thinking. When you carry such a precious load through life you make damn sure everything about you is ship-shape and Bristol fashion! If you never want to glow with pride or love beyond any love you've ever felt, or have honours bestowed upon you that you could never have dreamed of, then keep stockpiling the Durex!!!