lunes, 3 de enero de 2011

Elton John: Too Posh To Push - Sky News (blog)

Colin Brazier January 03, 2011 3:18 PM

Elton John's experience of parenting is likely to be unusual but not unprecedented.

Mums and dads of everyday means will squint at the £35,000 apparently spent kitting-out a nursery for Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John.


Others will gag at the gizmos enjoyed by the 63-year-old's son and heir. A cradle with an integral iPod docking station. What a wheeze.


More still will find their top-lip curling when the pictures inevitably emerge of Mr and Mr Furnish-John taking baby Zach out in the customised buggy.


Hello or OK will pay a king's ransom for the right to show the happy parents at home, just being, y'know ordinary parents. There will be images of Elton changing the nappy. Except that any poo will be airbrushed away like so many crow's feet.


And yet readers will be entitled to wonder how often the pop-star really gets his hands dirty.


It will be parenting John, but not as we know it. It will be fatherhood-lite; with little of the mind-numbing ennui and cash-annexing misery that many dads - myself included - inevitably associate with long stretches of child-rearing.


And, because Elton will never spend unhappy hours chipping coco-pops from underneath the kitchen table, he will be a stranger to the immutable bonds which are forged by self-sacrifice. If we still love our children after all they demand - and most of us do - then we must conclude that the bond between a parent and child is magical indeed.


So Elton will be a semi-detached dad. But that is not to say his child will be unhappy.

Many privileged parents spend too much money on, and too little time with their offspring. The British upper-classes have long sneered at any parent who has the means but not the emotional wherewithal to send a child to boarding school. Wanting to bring up your own children - 24/7 - is a mark of below-stairs sentimentality.


Obviously the complicated provenance of Elton John's heir adds an additional dimension to the story.


Not only does young Zach have two fathers, but there are two mothers; a genetic mother who provided the egg and a gestational mother who provided the surrogate womb.


This is not optimal, to put it mildly.


But there is still something cheering about the desire of celebrities to want children. It is easy to excoriate Elton John for wanting a child as a fashion accessory, to be cast aside (or at least palmed off to a legion of nannies) whenever his attention span expires.


And yet parents - those parents who, like me, did not know it was possible to get an iPod docking station for a cot - should be thankful that Elton John, or Madonna, have the same yearning for a child that the rest of us have.


A child's birth continues to be the greatest gesture of optimism that people can render. I would rather young Zach had a less complex lineage. I would rather his upbringing had some meaningful gender diversity (AKA "a mum"). But I am glad he is alive (born on Christmas Day no less) and with a life ahead of materially-enhanced possibility.


There are worse things in childhood than being brought up in a gaily gilded cage. Not being born chief amongst them.

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