‘I love children, but only my own’

Fill up the rosé app group with birth photos. An echo as a Facebook profile. 123 newly added photos to the Fairytale Wonderland album. A thousand snaps of little Nina or Shem begging for likes. It’s not necessary for me, all those children on display on social media. I can’t do anything with it. A baby is a baby, a child is a child. Whether it has a lot of hair or little hair, chubby cheeks or cute dreads.

Occasionally I let myself be tempted to give a thumbs up or heart because otherwise I come across so heartless. The same goes for stories about cute babies, toddlers, and toddlers. I miss the punchline (which often isn’t there), I drop out of boxing stories about when a child could walk, was potty trained, tied his shoelaces or knew all the tables.

Happy offspring

Apparently my environment thinks that because of my background I am just as happy with their offspring as they are themselves. Getting pregnant did not come naturally for me. That’s quite an understatement, when you consider that it took me ten years to have my son. When I flushed the pill down the toilet just before I turned 30, I was counting on testing positive the following month. I had always been terrified of forgetting a pill and getting pregnant promptly. So the time I did it intentionally, I expected my body to pick up the message right away. Not so. Pills, syringes, test tubes – I got into the whole medical merry-go-round.

To make a long story short and to end on a triumphant note: at the last minute, a month before my fortieth birthday, I became a mother after all. I had a wonderful child about which all the clichés are true. Two days after he was born, I looked into the cradle and thought: if something ever happens to you, I don’t need life anymore. A feeling that no one had evoked in me before and that I now felt down to my toes.

Crazy about children? wrong.

With such a success story, the outside world expects you to be crazy about children. When you put in so much effort for a baby, you’re apparently a mother hen, kid friend and baby whisperer all rolled into one. wrong. The opposite is true. If there’s one thing I’ve developed in my childless years, it’s hating other people’s sprouts. In other words, the uneducated child. Or even better: to their parents who deliver uneducated products.

I hate it when I get kicked in the back for ten hours by a boy in the airplane seat behind me. When children are playing tag in a restaurant. When nieces and nephews dive into the bowl of chips/ cashew nuts/ cucumbers with two unwashed hands on a birthday and clear the table. Let me put it kindly: then I am not very good at suppressing my annoyance.

Basic Politeness Rules

Of course I would do it all differently if I had children of my own. And of course I don’t always succeed in that, because my son is not a model child and sometimes tired, grouchy and grumpy. He also has qualities that might bother someone else, but which I happen to tolerate well (such as playing sports fanatically and wanting to win every game). But the basic rules of politeness are burned into him.

My credo is ‘my child must not cause a nuisance to others’. Callum is only seven and I can take him to a restaurant, birthday, wedding or funeral in peace. And he does not turn his hand around for transatlantic air travel. Thanks to good preparation, distraction, snacks and entertainment in his hand luggage, he sits out on the long flight without significant contact with fellow passengers. At the end of a playdate, he helps clean up and gives the boyfriend’s parent a hand and thanks for playing. I stand on that.

irritation

I personally find it difficult when children play here all afternoon and do not get a goodbye out of their beaks when they say goodbye. Kids who flawlessly know how to tip twelve toy boxes, but don’t want to put back a Lego block yet. Usually I wave after mother and child for an excessive amount of time, in the hope that someone will remember some decency rules. Then to clean up with Callum and remind him again that I would never accept this behavior.

When I’m throwing a party and a friend of Callum’s calls out with his mouth full after one bite of frikadel that he wants another, I miss the gene to laugh it off and think: how nice that the kid enjoys the snack so much. Instead, it irritates me immensely and I think falsely: you alone get nothing at all. Not a nice character trait, not something I’m proud of, but it is true.

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‘Nothing is too much for her’

I look with admiration at women who immediately love other people’s children. That sweet mother who radiantly greets my child every morning in class, calls him by his first name, and compliments him on his new polo shirt/Beyblade/lunchbox when I don’t even know her child’s name. The mother who smoothly controls six bouncing kids on the class trip, while I can’t even keep three together – including my own son who suddenly listens a lot less well than at home. My neighbor where whole crowds of neighborhood kids gather every day and who has a seemingly bottomless freezer full of ice creams. I envy her energy, patience and warm heart. She’s 78, but when it comes to kids, nothing is too much for her.

And then there is my friend Hettina, whom I call the primal mother. She loves every child she gets squeezed into her hands (or just grabs from someone else’s playpen or pram). She still makes the saddest little one laugh. Every baby falls asleep on her lap instantly. She also flips through baby albums with delight and yells oh and ah with every photo. When my son was just born, she came to stay with me for three nights to help me through the first nights. Voluntary.

Nothing with babies

So I don’t care about babies at all. But really. Must be an excess of male hormones. I am a big fan of football and Formula 1 and like most men I only find children funny from about a year and a half. If they can walk and talk a little. Rather I just can’t do anything with them and find it a chore to take them on my lap or give them the bottle.

Before I was a mother, I could get away with a stupid joke: ‘No, I’ll drop it or break an arm, haha.’ But since I gave birth myself, mothers faithfully trust me with their larvae. I can’t get away with an excuse anymore, I get them automatically tucked in. Incidentally, those babies understand that I can’t do much with it, because they immediately make me roar.

Gift

Surely there are children that I can tolerate and like. Children who have learned fairly old-fashioned rules of behavior from their parents or who are very funny, considerate and endearing themselves. But those aren’t necessarily Callum’s best friends. Unfortunately, he has the gift of choosing sizes that quickly get to my irritation level.

Callum is of course allowed to make his own friendships, even with boys and girls that his mother doesn’t like. But that doesn’t mean I can’t steer him a little. For example, there are two boys next door who lard every sentence with a swear word. I’ve pissed them off the trampoline twice already because they liked to sing “you’re a dirty gay man” non-stop.

Love their mother

The first time I neatly explained that article 1: you shall not discriminate, also and especially in my garden. But when I heard “gay fag and sissy” from their mouths again not long after, I rushed out to say with a little more volume and aggression that the next time I hear a statement like that, they’ll never set foot in the door again. put in the garden. I didn’t win the ‘coolest mom’ contest with that. The brothers have been looking at me terrified ever since, suspecting I’ll hide them in my basement next time. Ah, the same will apply to them: fond of their mother, not of anyone else’s.

This article was previously published in Kek Mama.

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