"If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much." jacqui kennedy
I read this the first time and thrust my fist into the air power-to-the-people style. Jacqui, you had big sunglasses just like me and you rock! To a life-long shirker this surely meant I could bunk off duty and responsibility for the rest of my life and shrug it doesn't really matter. Then I read it again. And again.
And now it's like a slow-cooking omen. I'm more petrified by the second. If I fail to raise my children well, will nothing I ever do matter? The writing, the friendships, the cocktails - will it all become vacuous life-filling fluff? Just because I didn't actively encourage out-of-the-box thinking through role-play and baking sessions? Heavens!
I'm not being serious, of course. The Big O does have a point, even if she can't really be trusted as a mother who wore impossibly white suits. If we bring up our children to be backward-thinking, warped wastes-of-space then what was it all for? The world's overpopulated as it is, so it can't be to make up the numbers.
But who doesn't bungle raising their children? Is there anyone that can say 'my child turned our perfectly' as if she or he were souffle?
With my first I opened the oven too soon - she was 10 days early - and my second was overbaked by a week. I bungled step one - TWICE - and the rest is a catalogue of errors. I'm a failed mater, therefore I'm anti-matter. I think I'll have a cocktail to commiserate. I don't suppose anyone will mind.
