Or, at least, it won't get any worse.
The same logic works as we get older. In primary school, we know that teachers live at the school. If we think about it at all, we just suppose that they sleep under the desk at night. They certainly aren't real people like mum and dad. Teachers, we think, just sort of blink out of existence when we're finished with them at 3pm and then reappear, magically ready to torture us again, at 8.30 the next morning. This is why seeing a teacher at a shopping centre on the weekend is a major source of disbelief on our part and, depending how much of a little sod we are, a major source of distress on the teacher's. In fact some teachers have resorted to strictly on-line shopping on their doctor's advice because of their ongoing blood pressure problems.
Child development experts tell us that, as a normal part of maturation, we will grow out of all of this. By a certain point in our lives, we're supposed to be able to reason that things continue to exist even when we're not looking at them - the tree will fall anyway.
What I'm concerned about is that many of us - not just half-witted conservative governments - appear to have gotten stuck somewhere along the road to maturity.
I've commented before on the strange habit adults have of expressing gobsmacking levels of disbelief that a child they haven't seen for a while has grown in the intervening period. This is not surprising as most healthy children will do this with very little encouragement or instruction.
Drivers believe that, if they stop looking at the road for a bit to send a trite text message to a friend - that the other cars will have frozen for that moment in time and will still be exactly where they were. They won't, for example, look up to find they're about to go up someone's bum at a fair rate of knots without so much as a "Good evening" or "Would you like a drink?"
Old people also seem to expect, despite their many years of experience with the world, that things won't change. After being heads-down, bum-up (the bum thing's becoming a bit of a theme, isn't it?) for years working and raising kids, they finally raise the weary face to the world again to find that, despite them not watching with raptorus attention to find out what it was doing wrong, who with and who needs their bum (there it is again) smacked as as consequence - the world has gone and done its own thing. And they get pretty cranky about those young people with their X-bleeper-play-station-screen things.
As a parent I suffer from the same case of delayed development. I find myself, many times a day, opening sentences with "Didn't I tell you to ..."
I have four children. After 13 years of experience, what is it that makes me believe that the children will continue to do what they were doing, whilst under the baleful gaze of their father, once that father has gone off to be baleful at someone else? I should know that, when I'm not there, they will stop pretending to be responsible little adults, dutifully cleaning their teeth or playing nicely with their baby brother, and will revert to being children - doing unspeakable things to one another with the toothpaste and experimenting to find out just how far a juvenile human can go when flung from a skateboard.
I think, perhaps, that I conceive of my children as golems; magical clay men that, once given the magic word of parental instruction, will continue to do the set task until I tell them to stop or until they fall off the edge of the world. It's odd that I continue to be so stupid.
Or perhaps not. I saw the movie "Dark City" again the other day and it reignited my fantasy of just being able to get to a point in the night and proclaim "Shut it down!" and everyone and everything would stop. And the world could just be mine for a while.
Ah well!
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