Back when I was wee, there was a TV show called Quantum Leap. Quantum Leap was about a Scientist named Sam Beckett who got caught in a botched experiment and ended up “leaping” into people in the past (but within his lifetime) and changing and improving their lives. Putting aside the whole “higher power” thingy going on, it was a great idea.
I remember when a teenager discussing with my friend what you do if you leapt back in time to a younger you. It was a fun thought-exercise. And for some reason I started thinking yesterday… “what if I, the adult me, leapt back into being a teenager?”
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Us parents, at least with young kids, seem to live in a different time zone or parallel timeline to our non-parent friends. We can meet up with other parent friends that we haven’t seen in three… five… years and it’s like we haven’t seen each other in only weeks. There is an acceptance that time moves different once you have kids. Literally years can zip by where you don’t keep up with some friends and it’s not because you don’t like them or don’t want to keep up with them. It’s just not practical, or rather our priorities are different.
With my single friends though, a year is an age. Meeting up with single or non-parent folk after not seeing or talking them in a year or two, they can be seemingly different people! I don’t mean this to say that parents are “better” than non-parents (or vice-versa), please don’t take it that way. I’m not jealous either, we made our choice and I love my kids.
But just sometimes I find that the time deferential generates a gap between myself and others and that it remains even after they have kids. Which saddens me sometimes.
I don’t think non-parents get what it’s like being a parent. Certainly I didn’t. You can watch all the movies you like, you won’t know. There are some books that can prepare you a bit, but still, everything changes when you have kids. Apparent our male brains change too once we become fathers too (certainly I’ve become incredible sensitive to hearing kids cry or more specifically my kids cry, I can hear them across the playground or the other side of a field).
It certainly makes it harder to adapt to things outside of the parental sphere. It’s quite difficult to start something new unless you have all the support in place as you often have to trade against family time or the few other things that currently keep you sane and you don’t know if it’ll be worth it ahead of time. The “cost” (being away from the kids or leaving your partner to handle the thick of it) can feel like too much. The stereotype of the father who buys exercise equipment but never uses them or buys “useless” gadgets has some truth in it. (I bought my Wii in the full knowledge that I wouldn’t use it as much as I could… I haven’t even finished Zelda yet and it’s three years old). It’s easier to maintain hobbies that you started before becoming a parent, or at least that’s what I’ve found. (And I’m glad to have some old friends that I can still meet up/game with it).
I’m curious if other parents feel/think the same and what is the non-parent perspective? Are us parents just a bunch of lazy showers or is it appreciated that were simply moving more slowly? 
I only offer one possible explanation (there may be others) but this one certainly applies to me. By trade, I’m a Software Engineer and, as my project leader said “you’re being paid to be pedantic.” This is quite true: I have to be pedantic, because that thing that fucks up shit at some point in the future (i.e. the devil) is in the details. So I dissect, criticize and over-analysis stuff. You wouldn’t want it any other way though (just think about the software that runs in your set-top-box or medical equipment even). This need to critically analysis stuff spills into everything else I do though.
It’s not bad, it just means we see more “levels” to things. Take a flower, sure we can appreciate it’s beauty and why others find it beautiful, but we also appreciate it’s construction, the clever mechanisms of it’s survival and how it gets insects to carry it’s seeds and so on. Same with the movies we love, and because we love them, we take them apart, argue over what seem like trivia to others, recognise their flaws, etc. It doesn’t diminish our love for such things, but sure as heck pisses everyone else off. (Not that I have a problem appreciating something at a surface level. I love drawing and despite my amateur skills, I enjoy studying the surface and physical level nature of things when I draw).
My wife sometimes cuts me off when I correct our six year old daughter, because not only do I give the basic correction to her simply mistake, I try to address the underlying mistaken assumptions. I try to share with her my love of the details underneath.
It’s why, being a huge fan of Lord of the Rings (I’ve read all the books only three times so I’m not heavyweight) I didn’t like the movies but I accepted and enjoyed them for what they were.
Of course the side-effect is that with experience it makes you cynical. It’s why we hate marketing and “buzz” as it appears to be an attempt to gloss over and even give a different impression of (what we expect to be) the details. And to us, someone who is very enthusiastic about something can sometimes appear to be either a fool who hasn’t looked under the surface or a salesperson.
In conclusion, some of us geeks/nerds are pedants with good reason and hence we can appear to hate the things we love because we appear to be over-critical (but we are simply enjoying it in a different way).
Yesterday I had to pick up Alice, my 3 year old daughter, from her after-school instead of my wife. Normally I drop the kids off and my wife does the pick-up, but she’s still out sick today.
I brought Alice’s little umbrella along. It’s a small pink frilly thing with picture’s of Disney’s trademark Cinderella on it and even though it’s not raining, she loves having it on the short walk out of the school. On this evening though, there was a wonderful evening sky. It was dark but clear, that wonderful black-blue smooth gradiant. The stars hadn’t come out yet but there was a small brilliant white crescent moon.
As we walked across the school yard, I pointed the moon out to her and said “you can nearly reach out and grab it”.
“Pick me up daddy, I want to catch the moon with my umbrella!” So I lift her up and she reaches out to this lovely sky with her pink umbrella until she declares that she’s got it. I put her down and she spins around and says “… and I let it go!”.
Then two more shakes of her umbrella and she tells me in the most serious tone, “I’m capturing the stars now!”.
“But Alice, there are no stars in the sky yet.”
“Daddy. I’m just pretending.”
It’s my wife, Sophie’s, birthday today. I had flowers sent to her work. She sends me an email with the title “I LOVE YOU” as a thank you. But apparently:
This message is considered Spam by Symantec AVF and was deleted.The message has been marked for deletion and the message body, replaced with this text.
Love is spam!
I guess I shouldn’t have criticised Valentines day. This weekend was meant to be our romantic weekend, a celebration of the anniversary of our first kiss. But by Friday we knew it wasn’t meant to be…
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ast night, coming back from my Tuesday night course, I dropped into the 24-hours Tesco on the way home to pick up a few bits and bobs.
There was a few guys wandering around with a single red rose in their hands and at the check-out there was a guy with the all the traditional cheesy v-day gifts: a single rose, rose in vase, two different heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and one small fluffy toy.
Come on, v-day must be a joke? I don’t believe it’s romantic when it’s done out of duty. The guys do the “traditional” thing of getting the “traditional” gifts: roses, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate and small fluffy toys. I get the feeling they do it because it’s expected that they do, not because they necessarily want to (expected by whom though?).
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22nd November 2002
Thats the date I’m getting legally married to Sophie (aka was Dauphin on RB). They’ll be a big party (orgainsed curtesy of me mum) that evening.
It seems to have struck Sophie more so then me. Theres finally a date from which point we’ll be married in the eyes of the law (and taxes).
Still, the religious ceremony isn’t until next year May 2003 in France. I’ll have to dress up for that one!
Right now (19th July 2002) Sophie and myself are mentioned on the frontpage of Redbrick!
It’s all to do with the fact that we’re getting married and we met for the first time on Redbrick and met face to face for the first time on Redbrick’s first unofficial night out.
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This peice of fiction was written for a Alan McNevin’s Dark Obsidian RPG Supplement. It’s about a robot who became human and his choice.
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