“Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.”
― Roald Dahl
Inspired by a comment chat with the lovely and thoughtful Grace from Culture Life, on one of the weekend links.
I’m turning 29 this year, Jeff is turning 30. In four months we’ll celebrate our 6th wedding anniversary. Depending on who you ask we should have between 0 and 3 children by now. Some people are amazed we married as young as we did, some feel the need to caution us about our dwindling fertility.
Living in Britain means that the latter is a lot less common than when we lived in Utah when multiple people, including total strangers, would ask me about our reproductive plans every week, but it still happens simply because we’re married. It’s a natural progression in the social expectation. In Britain it’s not unusual to partner up but wait until you’re ready to have kids to marry, to have kids before marrying, or some other variation. It’s a lot more more live-and-let-live than the US is in a lot of ways, but family is a topic of conversation for a lot of people I know, particularly working women.
I’ve married a man who definitely wants kids, and who decided at the ripe old age of 23 that he definitely wants to have them with me. (Luckily for all concerned, he still does.) Which means that before we married we had a lot of frank talks on the subject and have maintained a pretty open dialog about the whole thing throughout our married life. One of the things we talk about the most lately is the financial realities of families for people like us. We also talk about about getting a dog.
It sounds like I’m getting off topic here, but I promise I have a point.
A while back I was speaking to a whip smart agent who works at a major global sales firm. The woman is very nice and always well put together, and I enjoy working with her. She mentioned that she had a dog, a breed that I like, and I asked how she and her husband managed to look after a pet since Jeff and I were interested in having one down the line somewhere. It turned out that she has a dog sitter look after her pup. Every single work day. Her dog needed a nanny.
And lest you think I’m telling this story to make fun of her, I assure you, I’m not. It’s just a reality for a lot of pet owners. Pets take care and if you want a pet you either need to provide it yourself, or ensure someone else is on hand to do it when you can’t.
The parallel to children might seem unflattering towards the latter, but I think it’s a fair one. London is an obscenely expensive city and when I look at my colleagues and coworkers, there are only two options I see for how they manage it. They either 1) make enough money for one parent to stay–or more likely work from–home with the kid(s), meaning they make an awful lot, or 2) they have help. And to make the second option work, that usually requires plenty of money again to be able to afford said help!
Getting this job effectively doubled our income, which has already been an incredibly positive shift for us. I’m still freelancing on the side, but now if we’re smart, we can pay off our remaining student loans within two years. I can’t begin to tell you what a relief it is to say that, because debt (even obtained in a good cause) is terrifying. However, we’re still a few years away from even thinking seriously about having kids. And in that time, we estimate we’d have to double our income again to afford a child because even though we’re bringing in twice as much, it’s not even close to allow one of us to stay home past a maternity/paternity leave–much less afford a nanny five days a week.
I know some people, in countries all around the world, who can afford to have and maintain a family on a single income. I know far, far more who can’t, and the trend is very much towards the latter from my generation. Wages have not kept up with cost of living and–in spite of what a lot of Boomers like to argue to the contrary–the evidence is that people my age are pretty frugal. Jeff and I sure as hell are! Like a lot of millennials, in spite of working hard (two jobs in my case) we’re swimming in debt which delays a lot of other financial considerations like buying property and cars (two things the American economy has depended on for half a century), investing…and having kids.
Spawning is a complicated topic for me. I’ve written several times about the fact that I’ve never felt a primal urge to have children like I know many women do. In fact, I dislike infants and babies intensely, silly or not childbirth actively frightens me, and human pregnancy looks to my eyes as if we should have tried one or two other evolutionary models before deciding on the one we’ve landed on. Add to the mix my slow and painful breakup with a religion that couches the female experience almost entirely in the language of motherhood, often (in my personal opinion) to the detriment of nearly all other possible life choices/realities for women, and you get some pretty conflicted views.
But financial issues conflict it even more. We won’t have our debt paid off until we’re in our early 30s, and I don’t want to have children in my late 30s. My mother did and even though it was the right choice for her (plus my little sister is pretty darn cute), it’s not an experience I want to repeat. Which means that our window to consider children shrinks every year. I’m personally fine with that, but I work hard to make sure Jeff and I are on the same page about it. We are. We literally cannot afford them.
And I don’t think we’re unusual. In fact, I think we’re the increasing norm.
Weigh in with your thoughts and experiences, kittens. I’m curious to hear them.
on Amazon.com this year.
with Patrick Stewart is fan-bloody-tastic! Jacob Marley’s haunting is nice and spooky, Patrick Stewart is appropriately grouchy and reformed (there is a hilarious moment when he wakes up, realizes he’s not dead, and tries to laugh – something he hasn’t done in decades and has forgotten how to do).
until recently. Shocking I know, and deeply upsetting since I love the P.G. Wodehouse short stories of the hapless Wooster and the loyal butler who routinely drags him out of the soup. Luckily, I found the the whole series 
as it tells of how Jeeves came to be in Bertie’s service, but there are dozens of Jeeves and Wooster stories, as well as that hilarious adaptation for television. I mean, come on. Two words:
is a better beauty, although the only really good thing about that version is the music. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
with Kate Beckinsale is my favorite version. She loves the 
with Gwyenth Paltrwo, which I don’t at all. And the latest 
with Ramola Garai, though it got mixed reviews from the crazed Austenites (with whom I do not see eye to eye), I quite liked too. In fact, this novel seems to be the most debated because main character is a bit spoiled, a busybody, and stupidly manipulative in only the way young girls who think they are more clever than they actually are can be. But I like the character of Emma quite a lot. All of Austen’s characters grow, but this is an instance of one of them growing up. “Silly things do not cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”
with the divine Emma Thompson, but 
did a version (which aired on my beloved PBS stateside) which I think a lot better. The ages of the actresses were more appropriate and much of the novel which had been left out of the first adaptation was put back in, making the story a bit more as rich as it should have been. And as much as I love Alan Rickman’s broodiness (in everything he’s ever done), I thought Col. Brandon seemed much more noble and likable, which he ought to be, instead of lurking in corners and sighing dramatically. I don’t go much for the Byronic types. They’re aggravating. “She was stronger alone; and her own good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken, her appearance of cheerfulness as invariable, as, with regrets so poignant and so fresh, it was possible for them to be.”
is really fun. It’s Austen’s lone almost purely satirical novel, mercilessly lampooning those Gothic monks and ghosts previously mentioned. 
and 
of Persuasion are really very good so it’s a coin toss there. And if I had to choose between 
and 
of Mansfield park, I lean toward the latter, even though neither are very good. Mostly because Fanny Price is the dullest of dull heroines and does next to nothing throughout the course of the book and the second film tried to make her likable.
Partly because it is uproariously funny, partly because even J. liked it. Spoiler alert. Darcy, on the occasion of his first, pompous proposal is rewarded for his pains with a roundhouse kick to the face. Alas, Mrs. Bennett is little changed: her husband is trying to keep his daughters from the clutches of the undead…but she’s still trying to get them married.
is required viewing. Paul Scofield gives a a subtle but brilliant performance of a man who managed to be both conflicted and steady and who ultimately decides to stand by his faith, but more importantly his conscience. The movie could easily have been a trite morality play, but it isn’t. It’s as complex as the idea of conscience and morality itself.
Franco Zefferelli’s 1967 version staring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Why? Because however you choose to read the original play (pro wife-beating, proto-feminism, lighthearted, or sinister), Zefferelli’s adaptation turns the tale into a marriage of equals perfectly suited to one another. Taylor’s Katherine is the less-loved daughter of a man who dotes on her sister (Bianca, a spoiled and manipulative wench). She’s second best and spends most of her day hearing about it, and can only throw tantrums to get attention or satisfiy a sense of injustice. Burton’s Petruchio is a loudmouth bore who’s never learned to behave himself and, in trying to turn Kate into a lady, becomes a gentleman. Fantastic.
from 1989. Did I mention Paul Scofield, Dame Judi Dench, and Emma Thompson are included (along with a not-yet-legal Christian Bale)? This adaptation is sweeping, epic, gritty, poetic, occasionally funny, powerful, and gripping. Again, Mum got me hooked young. As I recall, I hid my eyes during the gory battle scenes or she fast forwarded through them (remember VHS, darlings?). I had memorized the St. Crispin Day Speech before I was 10 and in high school, my friend Moll and I had to make a movie for French class, so we acted out the scene where Alice teaches Princess Katherine English. Honestly, probably one of the best Shakespearean films of all time. “God for Harry, England, and St. George!”
directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Not that it’s referred to as Makiewicz’s movie, it’s invariably called “The one with Marlon Brando.” And with good reason. One of the best scenes of the film is Marc Antony [Brando] orating to the people in Rome’s forum and slowly, subtly rousing the mob to rebellion. The moment when he turns away from the screaming riot and walks into the senate chamber smirking darkly still makes me feel chills.
– Branagh again, this time as the irrepressible Benedict and Emma Thompson as the fiery and fiercely loyal Beatrice. A classic tale about the vicissitudes of love, the interference of friends (and enemies), and kicking up a great row about nothing much at all. Sparkling. “The world must be peopled!”
– a tale of justice, honesty, and deceit, this film is utterly stolen by Al Pacino as Shylock. Now, Scarface has never been one of my favorite actors, but the levels of emotion he poured into one of the most villainous (or victimized) Shakespearean characters is incredible. The whole thing is nice and morally ambiguous. “The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”
– I first saw this version in the 8th grade, under the tutelage of my teacher The Friar, with whom I keep in contact to this day. It’s never too soon to expose children to gender-bending, right? “Most wondrous.”
, done by the BBC and first introduced to me my Angel two weeks ago. Shakespeare brought into the modern day and frighteningly funny. Hero doesn’t marry Claudio (and good on her, because he was an unbelievable ass and I could never believe she forgave him!) and Katherine, a vicious and snarling MP is tamed by Petruchio, a lonely aristocratic exhibitionist who really just wants someone to think the world of him. “And all we do is set around in front of the telly all day eating chocolates. I know I do, when I’m not running the country.”
, 
, and 
virtually speak for themselves. Illustrated by the delightful Martin Brown and others, there are puns, jokes, incredible stories, side-splitting captions, and all manner of fun. I’d recommend them to anyone who wants to stuff their kids’ heads with something without the child catching on to the parent’s nefarious scheme to make them enjoy getting smarter. You can buy them on the cheap, often starting as low as $.01 on Amazon, I already own a sizable (and growing) collection that still makes me laugh.
Small Dog Syndrome 