I am visiting my son and D-i-L — with two children under 3. I love them very dearly, but having started today (as the continuation of the week) just after 5 AM I am aware of a good reason for having your kids early in life. You cope better with a total lack of uninterrupted sleep and the wonderful logic of toddlers (to say nothing of ‘what you doing Gandy?’ repeated not more than 5000 times a day).
In many ways my oldest grandson is strong proof of the heritability of the sort of traits parents miraculously manage to forget. He doesn’t stop, needs constant watching because he’s insatiably curious, and, um, not very good at sticking to the rules. I am delighted in having them. I’m doing my best to ease the load a little and… looking forward to drinking a warm cup of coffee again, and not negotiating every meal like a peace-treaty between hypersensitive generational enemies. He’s a hearty eater, BUT he needs to have just particular spoon, and the rituals of breakfast cereal make Japanese tea ceremonies seem like ‘two sugars, and milk, thanks.’ His sister, while still too young for these shenanigans, is rather prone to gas cramps, which can transform her instantly from placidity to air-raid volume distress, and yes, by the looks of it, rage at the quality of her staff.
Going through it again has reminded me that actually, it was remarkably like this the first time around. OK different times, different rules, but parts of have a feeling deja vu — and deja poo, and deja spew. Now… I am delighted to have them and my kids are both better parents than I was, but I can deal with the fact that if it wasn’t for defensive memory cutting out the last part of a long day, many people would decide on one child being enough. And speaking as a grandfather, no, one kid is not enough. We get to give them back, see.
Which kind of brings me to writing. I get to a stage with every book – often several times, when I realize it is definitely deja poo, again. And yet, here I am doing it again – everything from those horrible bridging pieces, to building an alien world in the reader’s head, putting motives there… without alerting, let alone boring the reader, fitting a two hundred pound story into a 30 pound box… and then the proof reading, editing, fighting covers, and worst marketing your guts out… thinking your child beautiful and brilliant… and having it go nowhere much.
And then you do it again.
Mad Genius Club 
3 responses to “Defensive memory”
So, Lazarus Long was right again? 😏
^^^ THIS ^^^
Although the first one fooled us entirely, making us think this parenthood bit was a breeze, until she hit middle school at least.
You would think that the second one – who had nuns cowering in the corner when she was three, and backed off a Marine with two deployments to the sandbox in elementary school – would have disabused us of the notion.
But we still had the third one – who fell somewhere in the middle, until mid-teenagerdom.
(Note, all three of them are adults of whom I am extremely proud. But that they made it to this point is, honestly, evidence of divine intervention.)
It’s also said that remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience. That might be glossed as “hope over memory.”