My children are hippies and it’s the best thing that could ever have happened to me.

I never really imagined myself having kids – the desire for it didn’t materialise (or I buried it so deep it could never surface). Over the years my reasons for this solidified into one statement that cemented itself in my mind: I don’t want my experience of the world to be mediated through someone else.

I’m not sure exactly where I picked up the idea that having children puts parents at one remove from reality, or that seeing the world through a child’s eyes is a bad thing. Who knows where we pick up the strange notions we attach ourselves to? Possibly I imagined that having a child would be so all-consuming I would struggle to form ideas and perceptions independent of the needs of my baby. Perhaps I thought that, in some sense, “I” would die.

In any case, I fell in love with a man who had children, and over the years, his children gradually became mine. As a step-parent, you can fight it as much as you want, but after you’ve picked enough nits from a scalp, stared at the back of enough slammed doors and mopped up enough tears, it eventually just comes to pass; you’ll never have that biological connection, but you inescapably end up as a parent.

So I got the kids I never wished for, and just as damn sure as if I’d birthed them myself, they ended up being completely different to me. If I’d ever allowed myself to imagine what my kids would be like, I’d have assumed bookish, academic, intellectual, standoffish, nature-loving, compliant. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

What I got was kids who never read anything printed on paper, have an intense dislike of school, a deep suspicion of intellectualism, and who are extremely well embedded into large friendship groups, city-loving, and rebellious to their very core. I come home from my office job, having spent the day being a good little worker bee, feet sore in my sensible black city shoes, to find them dyeing their hair, making their own cosmetics, mixing film soundtracks, talking dreamily about the sky, berating us for drinking cow’s milk, and most emphatically not doing their homework, not settling for jobs they hate, not going to university and not treading the narrow path that I so unquestioningly tripped along. When they aren’t with me and their father, they live together in a house full of music, stray cats, rizla packets and merry chaos. My children are hippies and it’s the best thing that could ever have happened to me.

And as for my experience of the world: the moment we met, my life was mediated through them and so much the better for it. Through their eyes I see a future that is both bleaker than anything I dreamed of and much richer in terms of its potential for questioning and changing the status quo. They have far fewer options for a financially prosperous future and far fewer constricting beliefs about how one has to be.

As I struggle with getting older and accepting the limitations of life, knowing my children and seeing how different they are to me and how differently they do things gives me a deep source of comfort that I could never have envisaged. Having children has also helped me to the realisation that “I” am dying and being reborn in every moment, and that all our lives are constantly being mediated through others’. (Does that sound like something a hippy would say? Are my “children” parenting me?)