A rival for my wife's affections
My son Jack, 4, says he wants to marry my wife Katherine.
Normally I would not worry too much about this. It is just a passing stage, right?
But things are getting complicated.
Jack went to the cinema with some little playmates today and one of them, Christine, who is a year older than him, proposed to him on the way home.
"You would make a very good husband," she told Jack.
"I can't marry you," said Jack. "I'm already going to marry my mummy. You'll have to marry my daddy instead."
What!
I have a hunch that bigamy is still illegal here in Australia, not to mention a 42-year-old marrying a five-year-old.
What's the hurry, anyway? What is it with the younger generation?
I managed not to get married until I was 36.
Jack started wanting to marry Katherine at least six months ago. "I'm already married to daddy," Katherine told him. This caused him to get very irate with me.
"Why did you have to marry mummy, daddy," Jack said, indignantly, waving a toy sword at me.
"Because if I hadn't married mummy, you wouldn't have come along," I said.
This makes about as much sense to a plastic sword-wielding four-year-old boy as his declaration of love and associated proposal to my wife makes to me.
He already knows the pre-school version of the birds and the bees. There are no cabbage patches or stories about storks in our house - he knows he came from Katherine's tummy. He has not asked how he got in there but he did ask Katherine the other day: "When I was still in your tummy, mummy, did I ever pop my head out and have a look?"
Take a look at what?
His rivals in his quest for marriage to my wife?
I do not remember ever asking my mother if she would marry me.
I certainly never asked her if I popped my head out for a sneak preview.
And I would have had a good reason for that, too.
My beloved Collingwood Football Club won their last premiership for 32 years in 1958, about a month before I was born, and I had to wait a very long time for the next one, my first.
Jack, as yet, does not have a favourite football team.
And nor, thankfully, does he has my wife.
I think that might be against our law here, too, anyway.
It would have to be.
Otherwise my son might become my stepfather and feel the urge to spank me.
I wonder what Sigmund Freud would make of that?
©December 28, 2000 John Martin. All Rights Reserved
NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it
Australian writer John Martin looks at the funny side of parenting in My Son Jack
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