Novel approaches to raising a family

   
"The dance of the weedy sea dragon takes place every year in the shallow seas off the coast of Australia. During the ghostly dance, two beautifully odd-looking fish mirror each other's every movement. At the end of the ritual, the male fish is the one to get pregnant, giving birth two months later, a process the BBC crew filmed for the first time."       http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8330000/8330705.stm


This is a beautiful film-clip, but if it is the male who gets pregnant, why not just switch the labels and call him the female? Answer: Because the above summary is misleading. It appears that the female sea dragon actually produces the eggs, but these are then implanted in the male's tail, and he carries them around while they grow and develop. After two months, presumably to the male's great relief, the eggs hatch out and the baby sea-dragons are immediately capable of feeding themselves. What Mrs. Sea Dragon has been doing all this time the article does not say, but given the lack of equal opportunity careers, Sudoku and Facebook Scrabble in the Australian weed beds, her life in between mating cycles could seem a little empty.

Nevertheless, I know quite a few women who would gladly hand over the job of gestation to their male partners, and quite a few couples who wish their kids would show the same level of initiative in providing for themselves as baby sea dragons. Just the other day, a harried parent from my school confided to me that if people knew what raising teenagers was going to be like, they wouldn't be so keen to make babies.

On the other hand, you have to remember that fish lay hundreds of eggs at a time and are lucky if one or two survive the hardship and natural predators they face in the wild to carry on their parents' genes. In contrast, we humans are emotionally devastated if a single offspring fails to outlive us. And we carry a burden of responsibility, not just for their survival but the kind of person they grow up into, that is typically the biggest single motivator in our lives.

The aspect of this that many people are unprepared for is that once our kids are off our hands, life can seem to lose its meaning. Mrs. Areopagus and I are nearing that point in our lives. 2/4 of our kids already have their own lives, no. 3 spends most of the year away at uni or travelling, and no. 4 will be off to college in two years' time (deo volente). We have already experienced the first bouts of self-questioning, remembering with consternation how quickly our orderly domestic routine unravelled when we emerged from the straitjacket of feeding times, bottle sterilising, nappy changes, school runs, and so on. At present our respective pressurised careers continue to drip-feed us deadlines and objectives, but neither of us cares for the idea of working full-time much beyond 60 - a transition point that is bearing down on me in particular like an express train.

It is in circumstances like these that the idea of the church family acquires fresh meaning. We believe in a God who provides us as inidividuals and as communities with a purpose, who equips us to fulfil those purposes, and who provides us with rewarding outlets for our gifts and skills. His timing is awesomely perfect. I remember how my training as a Lay Reader was completed just a few weeks before I was frog-marched into early retirement from my career in the City, giving me the opportunity (and, with the help of an equally timely bequest from a sorely missed relation, the resources) to train for a second career as a teacher. Now Mrs. Areopagus is following the same path - training as a Reader with the vision that when we do finally retire we may have a few years left to serve the church family the way we have served our own.

Unlike some parents I have spoken to, I give thanks for every minute of life with my family - even those special moments of toys being thrown out of prams and the expletive-strewn teenage equivalent. But I know now that raising them is just one phase in my life. Nostalgia for these days will probably bite as hard in future years as it has done for my parents - but I am confident that under God's guidance we are preparing for a new approach to raising a family as radical in its way as that of the sea dragon.