The Best Reason to Have Children Is One No-one Ever Tells You

I slammed the door behind me and trudged out to the street, pushing the buggy. Every time I blinked, my eyes stuck like an old door. My daughter, Runa, had been up five or six times in the night, scared by nightmares she couldn’t describe.

It was Sunday. Wait, was it Sunday? “Big tree,” Runa said, as we entered the park.

“It’s delirious,” I said. “No, wait, that’s not right. It’s deciduous. That means it loses its leaves at, err… some point.”

“It needs to find them,” she said.

I parked the buggy and sat down on a wooden bench. Next to us were a beautiful young man and woman, their hips touching. The woman held a pink feather boa. The top three buttons of the man’s suede shirt were open. They were luminescent and immune to temperature. I realised, with grief, that they were still yesterdaying. The woman gushed about an upcoming holiday to Georgia, where she’d stay in a “fruitarian free-love conscious chakra community.”

“Amazing,” the man said. “Totally.”

I’d always wanted to go to Georgia. I’d even made a Google Doc once. But then… well, I knew what had happened. Who had happened. I glanced down at Runa. She was throwing her crisps up in the air and trying to catch them in her mouth, completely without success. I sighed. My limbs were as heavy as oak trees. Why did I decide to have children again? There had to have been a good reason, but I couldn’t remember it. There was a lot I couldn’t remember these days—interrupted sleep hollows out the mind.

To leave a legacy, perhaps?

No, the problem with legacies is you’re too dead to enjoy them. Unconditional love? She’d screamed at me for seven minutes at breakfast because I gave her the wrong colour cup. Her love seemed quite conditional.

“I want a drink, papa,” she said.

I handed her a bottle shaped like a badger.

“I said I want milk.”

“No you didn’t. And I don’t have milk.”

“But I want MILK.”

“There’s no milk.”

“We can buy milk.”

“We’re in the park. And I have juice.”

“I HATE juice.”

“You liked it this morning.”

“You’re a mean papa.”

Because all our friends were having kids? No—we’d been early in our friend group. Having a child had cost us socially. Late-night lust? Primal instinct? If only. Runa was IVF. She had been a multi-year odyssey. We’d nearly lost our minds.

None of the usual reasons fit, I decided. The disgustingly young couple began discussing the health benefits of licking a Peruvian tree frog. I was probably too old now to lick any sort of frog. I stood up and pushed Runa away. We walked in silence. I was with her physically, yet far away mentally—my mind playing time like a xylophone, binging and bonging up and down the decades: twenty years into the future (Runa’s university graduation day), thirty into the past (when I wet myself in geography class).

“Cheeky bird,” Runa said.

“Sure,” I said, too tired to lift my head. There would be a bird somewhere. There are always birds. Cuckoos, for example. Could I trick someone else into raising my child? Then I’d finally get some sleep.

“PUDDLE!” Runa screamed, leaping out of the buggy, nearly tripping over, righting herself, and dashing away.

“Stop!” I shouted, because I’d forgotten her wellies. Splosh. Too late. She was ankle-deep and grinning up at me like a tiny lunatic. She jumped up and down, stuck out her tongue, flapped her arms. She was having the best time.

“My feet are swimming,” she said. “See?”

“Your socks are wet.”

“They don’t mind.”

I laughed. Not at her—with her. Which made her laugh. Which made me laugh harder. Could this be the reason, this laughter? It felt closer to it. No-one laughs like children. No-one lives as fully, either. When they’re sad, they’re devastated. When they’re happy, they’re punch-drunk delirious. They don’t feel, they become. Or rather, succumb. I remembered how I used to be like that, too. Back when finding a twenty pence coin on the walk home from school was like discovering treasure. When eight streets from my house was as exotic as Georgia. When I didn’t need to lick a Peruvian tree frog to get high, I could just do a roly-poly.

I was still laughing. Around her, I did all my best laughing. The effort of raising her often made me feel old, but it just as often made me act young. No, it was more profound than that, somehow, I decided. Her youth didn’t simply remind me of my youth—it helped me feel it. Her first encounter with a flamingo becoming my second-first encounter. Her wonder at a rapidly ascending elevator reactivating my childhood belief that I had magical powers. Because children don’t just give us a future, they give us back our childhood. More than that, even. Because our childhood informs theirs, which reawakens ours, which further enriches theirs. I suddenly understood that my parents must have felt this too. Watching me splash in a puddle, they must also have re-experienced what it felt like to be a child, healing parts of their own childhood in the process.

Each generation gets to be young twice: once in their own childhood, and again through their children’s eyes. Even through the thick fog of tiredness, I understood what an immense privilege that is. The chance not just to love someone fully, but to remember what it felt like to be loved completely, when the world was new, and full of wonder. And yet, the chance to re-experiencing your own childhood isn’t a reason people cite for having children. Standing there in the park, watching my daughter’s socks soak, feeling long-dormant things stir back to life in my chest—I felt sure that it was the greatest reason of all.

“Move over, kid,” I said, positioning myself at the edge of the puddle, feeling the best kind of silly, bending my knees, ready to jump.