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Strollerderby
The Referendum – Sizing Up the Road Not Taken
Ever size your life up against a friend who’s made different choices than you have?
Whenever we choose one road in life, we naturally leave the other undiscovered. In an absolutely pitch-perfect essay, cartoonist Tim Kreider defines this phenomenon as The Referendum, or the time of life when you start looking at your friends — especially friends from your youth — and comparing their choices to your own.
In Kreider’s case, he compares his single, child-free lifestyle to the way his friends live — married with children, their “next thousand Saturdays are already booked.”
Kreider never wanted kids, he writes:
I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life.
(Kind of like Dana Carvey’s 100-year-old man, for example:)
But though he’s never seen himself as a parent, he acknowledges that The Referendum forces him to acknowledge what he might be missing:
But there are also moments when some part of me wonders whether I am not only missing the biological boat but something I cannot even begin to imagine — an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my senses, like a flatlander scoffing at the theoretical concept of sky.
It’s a brilliant and hysterical read, no matter which side of the parenting fence you sit on. Do you find yourself — especially those of you who are nearing middle-age — looking into the lives of friends who made the choices you didn’t? What do you feel when you do … envy? Or relief?
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0 Comments
chattydaddy commented on Sep 22 09 at 9:50 amSure, you can’t help but make these comparisons. Once you hit a certain age, right around where we young parents are, you realize that you can no longer double back and take those other paths. Right up until early 30s you think you can double back.
I feel pretty lucky, and rarely would swap with anyone else, but now and then I get frustrated with a financial shortfall or evidence of the inflexibility of my life and I think twice.
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