The Burden of Children

 

The first time the boys came racing through the dining room, nobody paid much attention. My mother halfheartedly told them to slow down.

The second time, she hollered at them but they ignored her.

The third time, Miz Hilda calmly stretched out her walking stick just as they barrel assed around her chair and sent them both flying. Although unhurt, both immediately burst into tears and began to wail like a pair of banshees.

“Hilda!” my mother protested but at the other end of the table, I could see my grandmother fiercely trying to smother a laugh.

“Children,” Miz Hilda said grimly, “particularly boys, are assuredly overrated. Get up, you young hooligans, and stop that hideous noise!”

“Hilda!” my mother repeated weakly but it was no good and she knew it. The former British nanny glared her into submission and she folded and staged a tearful retreat. Abandoned, the boys got to their feet and stood sullenly.

“You did that on purpose,” one of them muttered.

“I most certainly did and I can’t imagine any children more deserving,” Miz Hilda snapped impatiently, “This is a dining room not some barn on the prairie for mannerless, ill brought up street urchins! Take your rude, vulgar games outside this instant or mark my words, I’ll beat you both within an inch of your lives!”

They fled.

“I do apologize if I’ve overstepped, Alice,” Miz Hilda told my grandmother with a sigh, “But not being able to hear oneself think is simply not something to which I intend to become accustomed, however briefly. More tea, dear?”

Nana, now making no attempt to hide a smile, shook her head.

“If I’d had my cane, I might’ve tripped the little bastards myself,” she said mildly, “No harm done.”

Looking back, I have no doubt she meant every word. The boys were her grandsons and while she may have loved them, I knew she didn’t much like them. I think she saw too much of my grandfather in them – crude, coarse and common, as she’d once said when she thought no one was listening. When I was a little older, I began to realize that for my mother and possibly my grandmother as well, children were a by product of marriage, a requirement to be filled, almost a necessary evil. You married and you had children because that was the traditional thing to do. Wanting them was for other families.