I am sharing with you my old post that I wrote 8 years ago. It is the most read post on my blog:
https://thenext15000days.blogspot.com/2015/03/i-can-see-that-you-dont-have-children.html
I love re-reading my old posts.
Most of the posts I would now re-write, change, delete. But this one.. is just perfect as it is.
The old man who looks like the Santa: he is still alive and healthy enough to work. He sent me a text just yesterday with greetings.
How lovely to revisit this post. I remember it well. I'm so glad that the old man is still alive and relatively healthy, and that you are still in contact with each other.
ReplyDeleteAnd also I love the photo too. This area of Italy is one of my favourites - I have a special fondness for Santa Margherita Ligure and Portofino. A friend and I once walked a trail in the hills above Portofino, and encountered a herd of wild boar!
Dear Klara,
ReplyDeleteI think I have read your post before. When I read it now, it touched me very much. How good that you asked him what he meant by his question while so many feelings were welling up inside you.
I am glad that you are still in contact and that the man is doing well so far. I think the regret of not having (living) children will never end.
I am just starting a new job in a nursing home and that is one of the questions I always take with me. I don't ask them. I don't ask anyone about children. I try to pick it out in conversations. And when it's appropriate, I try to ask carefully. (For example, Mother's Day was a big deal at the old people's home. I thought it was over the top. After all, all (!) the ladies got a rose. I asked one of them later what she thought of it - I knew in the meantime that she doesn´t have children. She said that her husband had suffered more than she had).
But my first thought was different when I read the title of your post. My husband's uncle and aunt do not have children. They always said they didn't want to have any. Maybe it was a clever protective claim. About them, my mother once said many years ago that she would notice that they do not have children. I didn't ask how exactly she meant that. In the circle of former colleagues I experienced something similar. Sometimes I ask myself whether it is noticeable to me.
Dear MiH, it is always lovely to get a new comment on my blog <3
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