The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Pope came out the other day to issue one of his proclamations to the World. He said the people who had pets instead of children were selfish. God meant us to procreate, not pamper Fido. Ordinarily I don’t pay much attention to the Holy See, not being Catholic and not being a very religious sort even, but this caught my attention, I suspect, because we never had kids and for quite awhile, and I’m a little embarrassed to tell you, we had a dog, old Dr. Gonzo who has now gone to Pet Heaven along with our cat Kitty. And while I’m in full confessional, we had some goldfish too, albeit briefly, plus some tetras and a couple of angelfish. But no kids. Not one.

How were we to know the level of selfishness this was? And now, of course, we’re a bit beyond child bearing age and probably couldn’t even adopt kids from some agency even if we wanted. Not even Afghani orphans, I’m betting. At any price. We didn’t know we were egocentric back when we made our choice. We thought, geez, there’s billions of human beings crowding up the planet, maybe a few of us ought to resist the urge to make babies. We thought we were being moral, magnanimous even, for slowing down our carbon footprint by a helluva lot, taking one or two or six future mouths to feed and clothe and buy I-phones for out of the equation. We thought we were doing the Right Thing.

Besides, we didn’t really want kids, tell you the truth. Me, I didn’t think I’d be a very good Dad. I wish a lot of folks took that into consideration. There’s way too many grandparents taking care of their kids’ kids once their children realized drugs were way more fun than child rearing. And who knows, maybe having kids made them turn to drugs. But I’ll leave that to the psychologists and the Pope himself. All I know for sure is if you want to have kids, you ought to really want to have kids, not fall into it by accident or because you were lonely or your friends were having kids or your parents wanted grandkids. You should want them because you want them. Period. And with apologies to the Holy See, I think it’s okay to have pets too, you know, if you plan to take care of them. Even if you don’t have children.

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