Adulthood

The wife and I had been discussing the possibility of having a kid for some time, but it's always been some far off fantasy – like what we'll do when we buy that penthouse flat in Manhattan. We kept passing various milestones – my parents were 31 and 32 when I was born, they had their first kid at 30 and 31, etc etc. It was awkward at first. Somehow I'd imagined I'd have had a kid by 35. When I hit 35 I knew I wasn't at all ready. Now that I'm 40 I keep vacillating between it being ok or silly of me to have waited til now. Having a kid can't be that hard. I mean, every single one of my ancestors has bred. And most of those at a younger age than me.

A bit of background... I went straight from undergraduate uni to do a PhD without any real job in the meantime. Looking back, that did delay "adulthood" a bit – hardcore academia is so different from the real world, and being a student in the UK, one can get by without ever dealing with real-life stuff. Sure I was an expert on immigration, living cheaply, finding rental property, etc. But I'd no real idea about how the grown up world worked. It was fun.

After I graduated and got a real job, flat, relationship, etc etc, I still didn't feel grown up. I felt no different after any of those milestones. I once asked my mother when she finally felt like an adult. She said it was only after she'd had a child. So I'm kind of wondering how things will change for me after the wee one is in my life. I am already starting to see changes on how I view things. I've spent the past 9 months in a kind of instinctive look-after-the-wife mode, and now I'm entering the look-after-the-family mode. I can see my perspective shifting, and it's weird being able to notice it. It's actually brought the wife and I closer together. Not that we'd been having issues. It's just you hear stories about people having children to save their marriage. It never occurred to me there might actually be a relationship-enhancing effect of children (or at least pregnancy). We've been very happily involved for almost a dozen years now, and I'm rather surprised to see how some of our remaining rough edges have been smoothed in the process.

With regards to my parents, I now realise that my life is so different from them that there's no point using them as a metric. I'll take their advice, but I'll tempter it with my perspective and see what happens. After all, I find that by now I have a decent sense of how the world works. I know now that few people have any real clue about what they're doing and all of civilisation is held together with ossified strings and glue. Homeownership has done far more than anything else so far in life in making me feel adulter – partly because of all the repairs. Once you see a house taken apart and put back together, there's a lot of is that it? feeling I just never got as a renter.

Anyway, I am both ready and not ready for this. I'm pretty sure I can take what the world is going to throw at me. On the other hand, I know changes are afoot and I wonder if I'd have been better off the way things are now. I guess I'll just have to wait to find out.