Parenting & Family Quote by Peter De Vries

De Vries slips a scalpel under the pieties of “readiness” and lets the air out. The opening question is a prank on adulthood itself: we like to imagine maturity as a credential earned in advance, a calm plateau we reach before we’re allowed to shepherd anyone else. He suggests the opposite. Nobody is “ready” because readiness is a story we tell to make the chaos feel scheduled.

The second line delivers the real inversion: marriage isn’t validated by adults doing the socially approved thing (producing children). It’s validated by what children do to adults. That’s a bracingly unsentimental take, because it isn’t praising parenthood as fulfillment; it’s describing it as an engine of forced development. Children don’t arrive as cute accessories to an already coherent life. They arrive as moral auditors, time thieves, and relentless mirrors. You become an adult less by internal enlightenment than by external demand: someone is hungry, someone is afraid, someone is watching how you handle disappointment.

The subtext has bite because it’s also a critique of marriage-as-status. If the “value” of marriage is transformation rather than proof of responsibility, then the institution looks less like a finish line and more like a pressure cooker. Coming from a mid-century American novelist with a taste for domestic irony, it reads as both consolation and warning: stop pretending you can perfect yourself before commitment. Life recruits you before you feel qualified, then trains you on the job.