Elora, ON ― First-time parents Felicity and Ivan Jennings welcomed an enormous waste of time, money, and effort into the world yesterday, which they refer to as their “son,” or Jody.
Friends of the temporarily happy couple report that Felicity is doing well and getting some rest, the last she will get for eighteen years, with paltry return.
“We’re just so delighted! This kid is going to have only the best,” said Ivan. Witnesses, forgiving the hyperbole, admit the couple is fairly well-off and emotionally prepared to raise the child. However, none of that will prevent Jody growing up to be a total fuck-up at worst, and a thoroughly unremarkable user of rapidly diminishing resources at best.
Although Felicity is already imagining Jody’s future as a doctor or lawyer, she has not considered the many more ways he could have a future as a trainwreck or tragedy.
“He might die in an accident caused by a drunk driver, or go to jail for being the drunk driver. He might join in with the wrong crowd and spend his whole life vaping, or be sexploited online and sink into despair or suicide. Or, he could just not be very smart. I mean, statistically, he’s not a prodigy, or even much good at anything,” mused friend Landon Gray.
“Like, it’s their lives, and I’m happy if they are. They just won’t be happy long, that’s all I’m saying. Certainly not as long as if they’d just bought a house in the south of France, right?”
Other ideas friends have privately come up with for the fruitless investment is three luxury cars, a few years off to travel the world, giving to a charity for existing children, adopting a 12-year-old who has already proven to have potential, or just actual investments in stocks. Good portfolios, they note, produce at least a 10% rate of return over 20 years, so the cost of raising Jody would yield, conservatively, $25 000, and maybe over $30 000.
“In the 80s, you’d expect your kid to pay their way through college out of their summer job, and send back a few bucks after buying a house in their early twenties,” said Felicity’s twin sister, Joy O’Connolly.
“Now? In twenty-five years (editor’s note: it will actually be twenty-eight, and his mother will despise the woman he marries), Jody will still be in his childhood room, desperately searching through Tim Hortons listings that for some reason want a master’s. And all on their dime. That’s somehow a negative overall return, since they’re losing even more than they thought they were putting up.”
Nevertheless, nobody close to the couple has the heart to disabuse them of their naive optimism, even those who were once naive optimists themselves and now have to sink ever more money a tutor so their dumb kid can maybe pass high school, at least.
“What’s done is done,” pointed out Gray. “And maybe this failed investment will produce his own failed investment someday. For some reason, parents find that really redeeming. That’s the only thing Felicity or Ivan have ever done to make their parents proud, after all.”
