Ripples

As longtime readers of this space know, Eva and I fully intended to have children. We were going to have one "naturally" and adopt one; when that failed, we tried to adopt both, and were turned down. Now we have a dog in lieu of a child, and another dog on the way come fall.
When Family and Children's Services turned us down, it was as if somebody had thrown a huge boulder into a pond from a height. At first, there's a crater effect: it feels like your soul's been scooped out and shredded. Soon after, as you get used to the idea that you've been judged and found wanting, calmness seems to settle where the boulder hit. You can dig the boulder up off the bottom, examine it, and feel a faint echo of the pain you felt when it shattered the surface tension of your life, but by and large it rests deep in the murk, not forgotten, maybe, but minimized.
But there are ripples.
They spread out and touch corners of your existence you'd never expect. They continue to change your life and your attitudes long after the initial impact.

As I said above, we're going to get another dog in the fall, a companion for our Tux. All we know about this dog right now is his name: George. He (or she--didn't The Seekers have a big hit with "Georgy Girl"?--will, ideally, be your quintessential big dumb George..."c'mere, George. Okay, George. Lick yourself, George."
Eva was talking about George at work, or more specifically, the added expense of George. The new dog will cost something like $200 from the pound (Tux would have been put down if we hadn't come along, and that felt so good I'd like to do it again). He or she willl have to eat the same food Tux does, because Tux has a food allergy and it's bitchly hard to train one dog to eat from a certain dish and not another, let alone two. Then there's the annual shots mandated by the city: two sets of those will set us back more than $600.
One of her colleagues spoke up at this point. "Two kids--one week at camp--twelve hundred dollars. Shut up."
Well, I guess we've been told, eh?
I remember reading somewhere that it costs $250,000 to raise a child from birth to age 18. I panicked mightily when I first came across that figure: $38.05 a day? That's insane! Eva, who is a consummate tightwad when it suits her--and whose parents actually charged her rent from the date she got her first job!--scoffed at the notion of a kid costing a quarter of a million bucks. "That's what Value Village is for", was one of the milder things she said.
Nevertheless, childrearing was bound to be a pricey proposition. Gradually, I got with the program, or at least succeeded in getting it out of my mind.
Now, with the prospect of actually having kids dashed, I hear that it costs $85.71 a day to send a child to summer camp and recoil in horror.
Then I think to myself, maybe they were right. Here you are fretting about money to send your entirely fictitious kids off to Camp Hypothetimaginary. Obviously you're not built for children.
Then I think I'm a selfish bastard.
Before the concept of KIDS entered my life, I had never thought of myself as a selfish bastard. Not once.

While we're on the subject of camp, one of the cashiers at work is counting down the days (I think she'll be counting hours, soon) until her kids go off to camp. She's talking about spending time with her husband in wistful tones as if it's something she's often dreamed of but never had the opportunity to do. Never mind $85.71 a day: the idea of time with Eva is priceless. She gets antsy if I don't come to bed when she does four nights running. Not in any possessive way: she just sleeps better with me there, the same way I sleep better when I know she's just over the doggy butt.
I admire you married folks with kids. From my perspective, it's like both of you are carrying on a torrid affair that takes up most of your waking hours, day after day, for years on end. How do you manage to stay married in the face of that? It's a mystery to me. I figured I'd adapt once the children came--even though I'm not a big fan of change, I'm nothing if not adaptable. But I don't think I ever really understood what I'd be adapting to. They say you make time for your spouse. Oh, sure. One family I know had to deal with a colicky infant for months. Not only would there have been no time to make, I doubt either Mommy or Daddy felt even remotely interested in looking for it. That these people are still together, still in love, is a testment to their strength and commitment. I'd like to think Eva and I have that kind of strength and commitment, but I don't know for sure.
Then I think I'm a lousy husband for even thinking this.
Before the concept of KIDS entered my life, I never once questioned any aspect of the strength and commitment of my marriage...much less felt any species of gratitude at a test I wouldn't have to take.

Once we got over the injustice of not being granted children, we rearranged our heads and became a CBC couple: Childless By Choice. (True, the Children's Aid rejection represented a real narrowing of our choices, but if we were absolutely wedded to the idea of kids, it could have been done.) Instead, we chose again. Now we're at the point where Children's Aid could call us and say there's been a terrible mistake, and we'd hang up on them; where if by some miracle a little baby shot out of my wife tomorrow morning, I believe we'd actually consider putting it up for adoption.

That we consider ourselves childless by choice has actually all but destroyed a friendship of many, many years standing.

There's a general belief that once you get married, you leave your single friends behind, at least until they marry themselves. In our case, that seems to be the case: most of our friends (not all, but most) are married or partnered. The corollary is that childless couples chum with other childless couples, and people with kids naturally hang with other fully stocked families. For us, that hasn't held true entirely: we have several friends with children, and others who plan to have them. But at least one friend--who has a child--has evidently decided that we're not worthy of her friendship anymore. Saddest of all, she'll never tell us in words that we've fallen short of her kidful standard. I had a very close friend who just drifted himself right out of my life once, for no discernable reason, certainly not one I was privy to. I wasn't sure what hurt worse: the abandonment, or the sense that I wasn't even worth being told why I was being abandoned.

You can tell yourself all you want that this behaviour says more about her than it does about us. You can try choosing to see this as the closing of one chapter in life's book, with another chapter waiting, Why cry over the end of a chapter? you ask, through tears.

Ripples. I wish to Christ they'd stop their ripping rippling.