Family

Sarah Quigley: Sane, childless and free

Despite the twists and turns, you’ve got to be grateful for a life you’re living on your own terms.

I’m perched on a bar stool in a sparse bachelor kitchen, listening to an acquaintance’s story about his working week. “The woman was unstable. Verging on mad.” Looking close to mad himself, his Einstein hair on end, he knocks back a slug of expensive Scottish whisky. “Could have ruined my project, plus my reputation. So I got her fired.”

I’m thanking my lucky stars that a) I don’t work in a research lab, and b) I don’t work with him, when the doorbell rings. It’s the slightly mad scientist’s slightly distraught son, who stays with his dad part-time but is supposed to be at his mother’s this weekend. “I had a terrible basketball match. The coach shouted at me.” He’s close to tears.

“Now’s not a good time.” The scientist bundles him swiftly back towards the door. “I have to go out soon.”

The son leaves, looking even more ruffled, and I gather up my things. “Oh, you don’t have to go!” The scientist pours himself another whisky. “I’m not really going out – it’s just not my night on kid duty. I need my space. You understand.”

I don’t usually venture opinions on parenting – but I’ve never seen a nine-year-old with actual furrows in his little brow. “Couldn’t you have let him stay for half an hour? He looked as if he needed you.”

A thundercloud crosses the scientist’s face. Were I a mountain, he’d rain on me; were I a lab rat, he’d fire me. Being neither, I await my own particular judgement – and sure enough, it falls like a Damocles sword.

“You don’t know anything! You’re not a parent!”

The second sentence is fact. The first is rubbish. Just because I don’t have a kid doesn’t mean I can’t recognise one who needs comforting. But there’s no arguing with parents who know they’re falling short and need to assert their superiority.

Swiftly, silently, I get my bag before I too am relegated to the unstable-verging-on-mad category, as well as being progeny-lite. “You’re not going,” he thunders. Query, or statement?

Either way, my answer is the same. “Yes. You need your space!”

And I leave him to his whisky and his government-subsidised, rarely read scientific journals and his self-important solitude.

Feeling jangled, in need of company other than that of an over-intelligent, under-attached man who seems chillingly capable of compartmentalising his life – Career, Relaxation, Romantic Prospects, Child-Minding – I take the tram across town to my own particular type of child. Actors are the first to admit that they never grow up, that there’s a Peter Pan inside every one of them.

Glove Boy is endearingly pleased to see me. He’s just had a Skype fight with his absentee flatmate, who owes Glove Boy a hundred Euro! His blue eyes blazing, he looks every bit as distraught as a kid whose coach has unfairly shouted at him.

Part of me wants to reassure Glove Boy that, in the big scheme of things, a hundred Euro is neither here nor there. That sometimes even people you trust behave like arseholes. And that in a year he’ll have forgotten the whole thing. But these are the sorts of comments parents make, and one of the best things about not being a parent is not having to spout sensible shit that isn’t welcome.

“Let’s go to bed,” I suggest, and he agrees enthusiastically, and it’s wonderful. When you’re in bed with someone you’re compatible with, age and roles don’t matter, no one has to give advice and guilt doesn’t come into it. As I drift off to sleep with my head on Glove Boy’s smooth shoulder, I thank my lucky stars for the second time today that, in spite of the hardships of the writing life, I’m myself and not a malcontent parent who realises, too late, that he never wanted kids in the first place and he’s gone down the wrong road.

Next month: Sarah may have been happily ignoring her biological clock, but Glove Boy sets off the alarm with talk of having kids.

Words: Sarah Quigley

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