by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

I’m under some pressure to fill people in on the kids thang.

When somebody has a kid, they often say, “If only I had known how cool this is, I’d have had a kid long ago.”

There’s another, more accusatory, version of this tune. “Everybody told me not to have a child,” a recent mom told me. “They tell you to have an abortion. Get a job, go to school. Now I had a kid and realized that this is what I should have been doing all along.”

Assorted deadbeats such as myself are apparently colluding in a conspiracy of silence about parenthood.

So now for my terrible confessions. I knew zilch about kids before I had my first of four, eight years back. I tried to read up, but always hit the two-paragraph wall. I earned an impressive 11 per cent in Child Psychology at Dawson. I blame the teacher’s inaudible voice, which I couldn’t hear over my Walkman.

Most women eventually turn 28, the most common age for a female to bear children in Quebec. Around this time their men are faced with a creeping resentment that maybe they’re hogging their woman’s fertile years in a less-than-virile way, a conflict that culminates in the mid-30s Armageddon where she panics and tosses the guy on the street for being a 30s thief.

My big fear of fatherhood was of becoming genetically redundant, that, having replaced myself, I’d be just a passenger on the train of life, that nature would be humouring me from now on.

It also means sacrificing your accumulated lifetime oeuvre of coolness. Unless it’s hip to be square again, your cool-guy groundwork is a waste. Prior obsessions, such as the lead guitar genealogy of your favourite rock band, descend the list of importance when you’re rooting about frantically for diaper coupons.

Quebecers just don’t want to swap their groovy ways to perpetuate the species. Our birth rate is shrimp compared to America’s. Experts get paid to guess why our abortion rate is triple that of New Brunswick.

I suspect it’s because parenthood is seen as dory. And that’s largely because it is.

Firstly there’s the family-values agenda. Yes, you might instinctively cover your kids’ ears when exposed to 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop.” You’ll buy a van and ditch dearly held prejudices, such as your enviro-friendly, anti-consumerist, anti-car-culture snobbism. Either that or stand in the bitter cold at bus stops hauling 90 pounds of groceries amid unruly knee-biters.

Parenting also transforms you into a periodic oppressor. Pleading is ineffective. If you don’t holler at your kids, they’ll sit around pouring Coke from two-litre bottles into shot glasses well past midnight.

Some other revelations from my parenthood: you don’t have to particularly like children in general to be freakishly attached to your own.

Other observations I’ve made:

Trying to raise a kid alone seems like a daunting logistical challenge. Kids gang up in well-organized uprisings, overwhelming even for a duo.

A lot of people have a kid and act like they invented the concept. You’re best to babble about your kid only when so invited.

I spend more in the frozen food section annually than a university student spends on tuition. Kids are expensive, but many exaggerate how bad it is.

People often pretend they’re looking on casually but in fact they’re carefully scrutinizing your parenting methods.

You will worry and constantly visualize disaster.

No matter how much you do, you’ll feel guilty for not doing more.

The stress can be unbearable. Last time there was a health issue, I practically forwarded my dental records to the coroner. I was sure I was going to have a heart attack and drive off a bridge.

Young kids swallow gum even after they promise they won’t.

But I’m only jealous of people with more kids than me.

Kids say things like, “I dreamed me and you were riding on a unicorn and touched the clouds and landed on a mini-trampoline and bounced into a rainbow and there were butterflies.”

I just eat that stuff up.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca