Children are like trees...

I went on a long run this morning in my neighborhood. My iPod has been freaky lately, so I left it at home, and it was just me and my thoughts slogging through the oppressive heat. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the baby hunger that won't go away, and I had a Shrek-style "ogres are like onions" moment (I think the fact that all of my cultural references come from animated movies shows that I've been in the parenting trenches too long). Children are like trees.

Let me explain. The houses in my neighborhood are all about ten or eleven years old. I live in one of those subdivisions where two thousand of the same three or four houses are thrown up practically overnight. Some of the original residents, in an attempt to distinguish their houses to the point that they didn't accidentally walk into their neighbor's house, went a little crazy with the landscaping, deviating from the standard builder's one-or-two-live-oaks-out-front model.

I'm sure that the people, when they were planting the trees, thought, "These trees are so small and so cute, our yard can handle five or six or ten of them." And yes, when the trees were small and cute, I bet the yards with five or six or ten little-bitty trees looked better than the yards with a lone live oak. But more than a decade later, the trees are no longer small and cute. Our live oak is as tall as our house. And the houses with five or six or ten trees in the front yard look like the jungle that was cut down to build the subdivision has come back and reclaimed its territory. I thought I was going to lose an eye when I wasn't quite quick enough to get out of the way of some errant branches from one of the adolescent trees as I was running this morning.

The houses with one or two trees still, for the most part, look pretty good. Yeah, the trees are big and the yards are small, but it works. And a couple of the houses with lots of trees have owners who are intrepid enough to brave the humidity and keep the jungle at bay. But most of the yards with lots of trees look wild-- and the owners seem overwhelmed by the chaos that their yards have become.

So how does this relate to children, and more specifically, to our choice to close up the baby-making shop even though I'm hungry for another one? I think it's pretty obvious. Right now our four little trees are pretty easy to handle. They're cute and I can still (usually) whip them into shape by counting to three in a mean voice. But one day, they're going to turn into teenagers, and I won't be able to physically dominate them anymore. I'll probably be so tired and worn out from things like yesterday's visit to the children's museum (you haven't lived until you've run down the main gallery of the museum, junior high school groups all around, baby attached to the boob, chasing after a toddler with a load in his underpants), that I won't be playing my A-game anymore. I've already created enough of a jungle. I guess our yard doesn't need any new saplings.

Maybe I'll plant some annuals instead. Now, in the symbolic sense, I just have to figure out what those annuals are.

--originally published 6/9/07