I think I’ll be ready for kids in about two years. Once I get my life sorted out and achieve a few of my big goals—which will definitely happen in my thirties—then I’m totally ready for a kid or two!
Thing is, kids are expensive. You have to buy them strollers and diapers and top-rated car seats and high-quality baby food made of, like, blended-up, grass-fed, T-bone steaks. I barely have a handle on my current finances, let alone the foresight to budget for all that stuff. That’s why I need to learn how investments work and put an extra hundred thousand bucks in bitcoin and emerging-market index funds before I can afford kids. I refuse to have a kid who doesn’t eat the best mashed-up T-bones!
Kids are incredible. So full of joy and wonder. But also so physically demanding! Kids wake you up every single night for four years until you’re tired and defeated and your eyes are bloodshot like a frostbitten, nineteenth-century Alaskan gold miner’s. I have friends with kids, and that’s how it went for all of them. I really need to launch my movie career by writing, directing, and starring in a popular comedy before I have a kid. I’ll do that by the time I’m thirty-nine. Then I’ll be successful and happy, and—BOOM! My kid will have a movie-star father!
Honestly, kids sound great. They’re just full of cute little surprises, like when they shout that a cloud looks like a butt, or they pronounce Neapolitan ice cream “neopatoleyman.” So adorable. It would be amazing to experience that daily. But kids really need a wise and worldly parent who’s already had his share of life-altering adventures. That’s why I should visit every country on earth and spend a summer riding the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Mongolia before I even consider parenting a kid. After I’ve been a blacksmith’s apprentice in Ulaanbaatar and learned to hunt wolves in the Gobi Desert, then I’ll get serious about having kids and teaching them self-reliance through smithing and wolf-hunting.
But am I even sure I want kids? Of course! Once I turn forty-one. And after I write my epic sci-fi novel about colonizing the solar system via quantum teleportation. My kid needs an impressive literary-science dad, not an unaccomplished moron dad. That’s why I am absolutely on board to have a kid immediately seven years from now, when my novel has been turned into a best-selling trilogy and an Emmy-winning Netflix series.
When I explain all of this to my friend Pete, he says, “Man, I think your expectations are too high. If you want kids, just go for it.”
And I’m, like, “You son of a horse’s ass, Pete! I one-thousand per cent want a kid! But after I turn forty-four, ski down the face of Everest, film a documentary about it, and dedicate it to ‘the only mountain bigger than Everest: my future kid.’ ”
And then Pete says, “That’s not reasonable.”
And then I say, “No need for me to commit to a timeline right now! I can keep kicking this can down the road until I’m, like, forty-five. Yeah, forty-five. That’s when I’ll man up and decide to initiate my Child-Raising Decision Matrix for Maximum Happiness.”
And then Pete changes the subject.
I’m fortunate. I’m young. Well, sort of, vaguely young-ish. I have a while, theoretically speaking, to rehash all my fears and ambitions in my head until a magical sense of calm about kids emerges. Then I can have kids when I’m fifty. Surely, by fifty, I’ll have achieved all the things I ever wanted to do in life pre-kids—coincidentally, the exact same things I “knew” at age twenty-five that I’d have definitely achieved by thirty-five.
But, truly, I can’t wait for some kids. When I’m old and wise and I’ve read every book and untangled every paradox of human existence and my soul mate and I have traversed the farthest depths of space and seen wonders beyond wonders, then, and only then, will I be ready to raise some precious, beautiful kids.
Minor point: When I have kids, whom should I have them with? I guess I’ll figure that out right after I master the arts of charisma and tantric sex and stage a global photo shoot for the perfect online-dating pic—though I need to do a lot of work on my mind-set and physique before I’m ready for something like that.
