Meditation on Other People's Children

Okay, so only very devoted readers are reading at this point, so hello! I'm in Toronto, where I have been since a week after the EVENT that made B.A. and I historical-homeless.  I was not driven here by the misfortune--I bought my airline tickets on January 1, in fact--it is just my annual visit to my family and friends.

And I am pretty darned tired because I am also working 9-5 (or, yesterday, 7-3) at my great-grandfather's desk and my friends all live in different parts of Toronto, which means a lot of travel for me. And I hate "empty" time on busses and subway trains, so that also means a lot of Polish study. And one of my best friends has four small children, three of them boys under 9, so visits to her usually include chasing the boys around and around the ground floor of their house roaring like a dragon.

That is quite fun, actually, if ultimately tiring.

On Sunday I was at these boys' baby sister's baptism, and there were something like 20 adults, many of whom I knew, and 45 children, most of whom I didn't, they having been born since I married and moved to Scotland. Afterwards the church's basement hall was knee-deep in the anklebiters. When I went home, and I was one of those who stayed to tidy up, there were still 15 children under 12 running or toddling around after each other.

From a Catholic and civilisational point of view, I was highly edified. Most of the parents were in their mid-thirties, and I thought St. John Paul II must be very proud of the generation named after him, for here they were with three, four and five children. I just wished they didn't all look so tired.  The baby's mother looked especially tired because her toddler had kept her up from midnight until five. I do not know how you can live like that without accidentally putting the laundry in a high chair and the baby in the washing machine.

During last night's visit,  I did the math and calculated that in three years and three months, her eldest son will be legally old enough to babysit. I myself will pay him the going rate so that his mother and I can go shopping. She, however, will probably be mourning over how fast her children are growing up, even though her sons are spending their extreme youth falling out of windows, bouncing each other's heads off the arm of the new sofa, getting stitches, and dropping the baby's sterling silver christening mug on the hardwood floor.

Just so you understand the heroism of my friend and her husband, none of their boys are allowed electronic devices or television at home. They are like little boys from the 1970s. When I first turned up, they showed me their hockey cards, and we had an intelligent conversation about Gordie Howe, Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky and other hockey greats who retired before they were even born. Thus the no-screen policy has led to very active, imaginative, clever little boys with an interest in history but also maximum exhaustion for their parents.

I really like those boys, I must admit, but at the same time I am delighted that the baby is a girl.

Meanwhile, I have also been visiting friends without children or with grown-up children, including pals and mentors in the Catholic journalism world. They don't look as tired as my thirty-something friends, but they do look older than I remember, which makes me gloomily wonder how much older I look, and when I will die. It is not fun when someone you vaguely remember to be only 12 years older than yourself admits that they are retiring in the next few years.

Interestingly, I feel the weight of my years least when I am around the under-nine set, which is just more evidence to my theory that the very young give almost as much to their elders psychologically as their elders give to them materially. I wish I had known as a child or teenager how much adults really enjoy the company of a bright young thing, as long as the BYT isn't silly, sulky or tiresome. My Canadian grandmother did say a few times that her "grandchildren keep [me] young", which at the time I took for kindness or affection. Now I understand that that was, psychologically speaking, true.

Benedict Ambrose report: B.A. is still very well but won't come out to Canada despite my pleas because he wants to keep his eyes on his job and on the Historical House.