The Parenting Taliban

The wife (CS) and I used to be good friends with another couple, lets call them Ricardo and Nieves.

Now Ricardo and Nieves were great fun to be with, we even holidayed with them a couple of times and I never recall there being any tension. Ric was the consumate gentleman and Nieves, although a bit of a diva, had a razor wit that kept any boredom well and truly at bay. But then sadly….

….kids came along.

Now let me be quite clear about this, CS and I love and adore wee Nic and would do anything for him. If I have one priority in my life, it’s that he grows up to be happy, healthy, safe and loved. Nonetheless, we have tried to maintain another aspect to our existence …. It’s called a life.

We always try to put aside a little time for ourselves as a couple, we try to maintain friends who are not part of the parent cabal, we read broadly and can hold fourth on topics of conversation unrelated to children and we don’t fret about every little thing that Nic says, feels, does, eats or shits.

Kids are resilient, adaptable, devious, fun-loving little buggers that happen to be made of rubber. They need to be fed, loved, exercised and educated, not wrapped in cotton wool. As a result of this philosophy, Nic is turning out to be an affectionate little thug and I have very few worries about his future.

Ricardo and Nieves have two kids and a third has just arrived. Ricardo and Nieves read paranoid articles about parenting and talk about little else. Ricardo and Nieves’ friends are now almost all parents. Ricardo and Nieves have become food neurotics and will only feed their kids some sort of virgin soy extract due to the horrible things that cows’ milk does to the human body. They have held vicious protests at their kids’ school in the past due to the fact that the lunches there consisted of normal food. Ricardo and Nieves almost never leave their kids out of their sight and carry them around in a contraption attached to a bicycle. In short, a long time ago Ricardo and Nieves began to tocar nuestros cojones.


But the best was yet to come.

Last week their third child, Vanesa was born. I shall translate the text message we received from Ricardo verbatim.

Vanesa was born on the 1st of July at home in the bath and breast fed for the first time right there while the umbilical chord was still pulsing with the blood that was both hers and Nieves’. In this way, they were united as one until the chord ceased to softly beat, all taking place before this humbled father. This was the process which inscribed Vanesa into her new life. A true welcome.
Ricardo.

What’s with the fucking gore? A simple - ‘Vanesa born 1st of July. Mother and daughter doing well.’ - would have sufficed perfectly.

It’s amazing the way having kids can turn normal people into David Cronenberg.

UPDATE:

We found out on the sly that Nieves had to go to hospital later on the night of the birth anyway, due to complications. I feel really bad about this but BWAAAHHAAHHAHAHHHAHAHHA!