The Miracle of Parenthood

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Most of our lives are spent in situations of numbing sterility. There is usually no

option but to conform and obey boring rules. We don't in our work generally create

anything of particular wonder or interest. We don't know how to paint or play Chopin's

Scherzo No. 2 in B flat minor. We can't personally manufacture an iphone; we don't

don't know how to extract oil from the ground. And yet, without being conscious of the specifics,

we are at points capable of doing something properly miraculous: we can make another person.

We can conjure up the limbs and organs of a fellow creature. We can create a liver,

we can design someone else's brain, we can – by ingesting a mixed diet perhaps including

bananas, cheese sandwiches and ginger biscuits – make fingers, we can connect neurones

that will transmit thoughts about the history of the Ancient Persians or the workings of

the dishwasher. We can choreograph the birth of an organic machine that will probably still

be going close to a hundred years from now. We can be the master coordinator and chief

designer of a product more advanced than any technology and more complex and interesting

than the greatest work of art. Having a child definitively refutes any worry about our lack

of creativity and dismantles (at least for while) the envy we might otherwise feel about

the inventiveness of others. They may have written a stirring song, started and sold

a bio-engineering company or plotted an engaging novel. But we will have created the oddest

yet most inspiring work of art and science around: one that is alive; one that will develop

its own centers of happiness and secrecy; that will one day do its homework, get a job,

hate us, forgive us, end up being, despite itself, a bit like us and eventually, make

humans of its own that can spawn themselves into perpetuity. However much they may resent

one another, grow apart or be worn down by the humdrum nature of family life, parents

and children are never entirely able to get past the supernatural sequence of events that

connects creators and created. Because two people met fifteen years ago in a friend's

kitchen, liked the look of one another, swapped phone numbers and went out for dinner, there

is now – across the table – a being with a particular sort of nose, a distinctive emotional

temperament and a way of smiling that (as everyone remarks) unnervingly echoes that

of a dead maternal grandfather. Parenting ineluctably

demands that one address the greatest, founding philosophical question: what is a good life?

As we go about answering it live in our words and actions over long years, we will at least

know that we have been spared the one great fear that otherwise haunts us and usually

manifests itself around work: that of not being able to make a difference. There will

not be the remotest danger of lacking impact, only of unwittingly exerting the wrong kind.

We will as parents be the biographers, coaches, teachers, chefs, photographers, masters and slaves of

our new charges. Our work will lend us the opportunity to show our worst, but also our

best selves in action: it is the particular words we will find, the touch of our hands,

the encouraging look only we will be able to give, the swerve towards lenience or the

brave defence of principles that will make a decisive difference to the sorrows and joys

of another human being. Who we are every day, the specific individuals we will have matured

into, will have an unparalleled power to exert a beneficial influence on somebody else's

life. We will – in our role as parents – be terrified, exhausted, resentful, enchanted

and forever spared any lingering doubt as to our significance or role on the earth.

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