Sex, Mom, and God by Frank Schaeffer

Author:Frank Schaeffer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-05-04T10:00:00+00:00

Four years after The Girl Who Let Me and I were kissing on that mountainside, I got Genie pregnant and she turned out to be my wife. If the Girl Who Let Me ever reads this, then I’d like to say to her—rather to you, Ma Chérie—that all this stuff about waiting for the “right time and right age” and “right person” is nonsense. How long do we think we have? Many of my friends say they envy me my grandchildren. That’s odd. Measured by their idea of success and how to achieve it, Genie and I and our children have taken the “wrong path” by having children “too young.” And the strange thing is that my aging and envious friends’ childless children are doing just what their parents pushed, begged, even forced them to do: “succeed,” with a vengeance, while putting having children on hold.

Serendipitous, messy, and joy-filled bodily-fluid-lubricated natural life, babies, and grandbabies (in other words, Love) matter most to me. I hope, Ma Chérie, that you found your own version of what Genie and I (and you and me almost) stumbled into by dumb luck and horny abandon—a life full of children, grandchildren, and friendship.

When I run into the sorts of striving people who are shocked if you have a child before age thirty-five or so, if at all, as they chase a second master’s degree and who act as if Nature and Love are a mere footnote to Career, Mom’s example of putting Life first kicks in. Mom’s idea that Family is a blessing has proved true. I am glad I had babies at the “wrong” age. Whatever path led to two-year-old Lucy and me working on my old broken Pinocchio, as we glued him back together, let alone her joy as she hugged me and exclaimed, “Thank you so much, Ba, for fixing him!” is an experience I’d choose a thousand times over anything my career has ever offered me. And six-month-old Jack grabbing my nose and shrieking with delight while radiating effervescent joy is not a blessing but the blessing of my life.

When at age seventeen, you get your girlfriend pregnant, and later your own children start families fairly young, you wind up with grandchildren the same ages as some of your friends’ children. So when Genie and I walk around with Amanda (age eighteen) and Ben (age fifteen), people assume they’re our kids. “You’re too young to be grandparents of a eighteen-year-old!” they exclaim with a smile, as if offering Genie and me a compliment. What’s really happening is that we’ve upset their idea of what it means to be good, upstanding, twenty-first-century, kids-canwait, upper-middle-class whites.

Most upper-middle-class white North Americans think that it’s normal for black, brown, and Latino people to have grandchildren “too early.” But upper-middle-class whites aren’t supposed to have kids early, let alone have teenage grandchildren before they’re in their sixties. Sure, we live in a nice house overlooking the Merrimack River, and between us, Genie and I have ancestors who sailed on the Mayflower and one (Genie’s mother’s great-great .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.