Re: Kathleen Parker’s insulting WaPo column “Of pleasure and parenting”

Photo (c) Newsbusters.org

Last year I was visiting my childhood friend, now a mother, when dinner time arrived. She squirted ketchup onto her daughter’s plate and then her son’s. And then mine. I looked at it.

She immediately recognized her mistake and laughed. She knew I could squirt my own ketchup, she said, but she was just so used to doing it… She apologized (still laughing) for overstepping her role as “mother” by inadvertently mothering me.

This is where many women, such as Kathleen Parker in her recent column “Of pleasure and parenthood,” fail miserably when they say things, as Parker did, like, “it’s hard to know for certain that one doesn’t want children. Many don’t, until they do.”

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This is something I’ve wondered about for some time – probably ever since my friends started having children. It seemed that as soon as they had their own kids, many of them crossed the “parent” line into a parallel universe where their memories of being children – that is, of what it was like to see, hear, perceive, and experience things as children – were wiped clean.