It’s a hard life being a LITTLE MISTAKE
Your parents are happy with two children then — surprise! — you arrive. COLIN DUNNE says...
ABOY. A girl. one of each. How nice. These days, that is considered to be the ideal family size. Unless, of course, there is then a Little Mistake.
I speak of this with some feeling. I’m a Little Mistake myself. Although I didn’t find out until I was 15.
A married cousin had just given birth to two babies — one was dressed all in blue, the other in pink — and my mother said that was the ideal family.
‘They won’t want any more now,’ she said. And a troubling thought bubbled in my adolescent mind. ‘Why not?’
‘because they’ve got one of each,’ she said. ‘So what’s the point?’
What troubled me about this was that I had an older brother and an older sister. I pointed this out.
My mother gave a slightly nervous laugh. ‘oh yes, you were a Little Mistake. but we loved you when you came.’
believe me, there’s a lot of us around. Check any family with more than two children — particularly if they’ve got the gender balance right at that point — and you’re looking at possible late additions.
It’s not easy, being a mistake. Makes a person think.
Those elder siblings who arrived ahead of you were wanted, planned, quite possibly an answer to a desperate prayer. Jubilation would have greeted them, the popping of champagne corks and quite possibly brass bands and bunting.
After that, it’s acclaim and praise all the way. We Little Mistakes don’t get that. I can only imagine my mother announcing the news with what was once the most feared sentence in the English language: ‘Something which should have happened hasn’t happened.’
When he found out, my dad probably
My siblings had shiny bikes. I had
a battered relic
cancelled the order for his new Ping golf putter.
Then followed (as it will have for every other Little Mistake) the handme- down years. Worn clothes, scratched toys, torn books.
When both my older siblings reached safe cycling age, they got shiny new bikes. All I had was a battered relic known as an ASP — ‘All Spare Parts’.
Most painfully, you are the last to do everything.
When my brother learned to ride his bike, my parents rushed outside to witness this miracle. When my sister did the same, they gathered at the window and clapped furiously.
When I told my dad I’d done it, he only said wearily: ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ He’d seen it all before. He was biked out.
you had only to look at the family photograph album to see my brother, aged two, in his sun hat, watering flowers in the garden, and my sister standing up in her playpen.
My photographic debut was the official school photo, along with 364 other boys. If you ever come across it, I was 17th from the left, second row.
There must be millions of us around. over recent generations, the norm has been for parents to have two children. This apparently afforded domestic bliss. More, and you’d end up like the old woman who lived in a shoe.
I have no idea where this came from. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a government directive (like China’s inhuman onechild policy) — more likely it was some early PR from the manufacturers of contraceptives. (The gents’ hairdresser who, rubbing his hands and grinning, inquired whether you wanted anything for the weekend, probably did rather well out of it.)
I think two is still regarded as a sensible target for most families. yet I always found the idea of the huge family somehow more romantic.
Those big families weren’t always mistakes. Ronnie, a friend of mine, rather to his surprise, found he had fathered five daughters.
His wife was quietly determined to have a boy and after each pretty little girl arrived, she placed an order for the next one. He didn’t notice until they’d got to five.
once, in a cricket match, he dropped an easy catch. ‘That’s what you get if you have five girls,’ he said. ‘but I’m mustard at playing with dolls.’
Recently, I asked two women I know and both said they were mistakes. one was the result of a drunken Saturday night, the other was failed contraception.
Which leads me on to another aspect. If you’re a mistake, aren’t you entitled to know how it happened — I mean, what sort of mistake? No one ever told me.
but I don’t think I’d want to be the result of a product malfunction. Surely human life must mean more. An eruption of uncontrollable excitement is much more acceptable.
I could live with the story concerning a friend of mine who said his father had told him he was the result of exactly that sort of raging passion.
Coming home from a party one snowy night, his parents were overcome by mutual desire. They piled out of the car, apparently, on Wimbledon Common and rolled about on
Was it a night of passion that went wrong?
the grass. He never knew why, for years, they had nicknamed him Womble.
I would settle for that sort of mistake.
A couple I know told me their daughter owes her presence on this earth to a holiday in Tenerife, a rainy afternoon, nothing on telly. They have never told her, of course, and I can understand why. It’s hardly the sacred gift of life, is it?
Come to think of it, I believe it is a basic human right that we should all know the manner of our conception.
Standing up in Woolworth’s doorway is one thing, on a swaying yacht in the bahamas is quite another.
Either way, though, I think we should be told how we were first launched on this perilous lifelong journey.
We make enough fuss about birth but, if I’ve got this process right, there wouldn’t be any birth without the prep work earlier — conception.
Crucially, what we happy army of Little Mistakes must work out is how we respond to this knowledge.
Let’s face it, here we are at a party to which we were never really invited. We’re life’s gatecrashers, aren’t we? It’s a thought that could make a fellow sullen and resentful.
Alternatively, should we take on the role of don’t-give-adamn funsters? We didn’t ask to be here so we have no responsibility.
None of it is our fault. you want blame? Talk to our parents. our only job is to ensure that there is no song unsung, no wine untasted.