Why I Don't Want a Child #1

Guess who the little one is.

1. "So when are you going to have a baby?" If Pierre and I charged for each and every time we were asked that question, we could have already bought plane tickets for our next holiday to the Philippines. And bought first-class.

Having built up a nice collection of answers, we choose one depending on the mood.

"Apol's too young." It's a lie, but my relatively unlined face fools the wrinkle-prone Europeans.

"Pierre's sterile." I invented that one, but only got to say it once before my husband censored the attack on his virility.

"When we're rich enough to afford a yaya." This is closest to the truth, because we're so lazy that if we could, Pierre and I would hire three nannies, one each for him, myself, and the kid.

After some soul-searching, I have decided that my unwillingness to have a child comes from trauma, experienced at the time I was editing a magazine for moms and homemakers, when I came upon this harrowing piece of information: Dentists recommend that we brush our children's teeth for them until they develop the motor skills to master the task themselves. That means wielding the Disney toothbrush until they're six or seven years old.

I did the math: three minutes, three times a day may not seem much, but add it up and you come up with a straight 16 days, with neither sleep nor coffee breaks, more than two weeks of your life that you could have been spending working on the next revolutionary invention after thong panties, that instead you devote to staring at mini tonsils.

"Don't worry, maybe our kid will take after me," grinned my dear darling, who lives up to the stereotype of the not-very-hygienic Frenchman and thinks he's doing me a favor if he brushes his teeth once in 24 hours. Still. That's more than five days spent cleaning out somebody else's tinga.