Aaron Triaster has a delightful article on being a stay at home father. I could see my ever so misunderstood self portrayed perfectly here :
The common misconception of childless, alcohol-imbibing party guests and cyber-ether baby-haters alike is that parents blabber constantly out of some arrogance or indulgent desire to show off their great kids and their perfect parenthood. Nothing could be further from the truth. We parents have so little now; the children have taken so much. We just have nothing left to say. We sometimes hear ourselves and know how we must sound to others, and we feel great shame. Our children have broken us and turned us into single-subject simpletons. They've accomplished this feat in what is supposed to be the prime of our intellectual life.
J is the center of my universe and I have a hard time recalling who I was before I became her mother, what I did to occupy my time and what my most pressing concerns were. How one little person can displace my entire life before they arrived, is a puzzle I have yet to solve. Indeed the coming of J into my life has turned me into a "single-subject simpleton" as Traister puts it. It takes concerted effort to keep a social conversation J-free so to speak. Each time I am able to pull it off, it seems like an achievement.
Sustaining a social conversation with folks who don't yet have kids is pretty daunting - it becomes very important they we share atleast a few other common interests. A child however, is a great leveler - I can have a conversation with just about any parent and it does not matter that we have absolutely nothing except parenthood in common.
Needless to say this can be the undoing of a new relationship. The question is to be or not to be my post-J self (which is apparently the only self I have any awareness or recollection of) so I am upfront about who I really am. Like the author, I am acutely conscious of the fact that child-free adults are underwhelmed by us parents who constant blather about kids and would want to avoid us like they would a soiled diaper.
