Legacy of a Lifetime: If we’re not here, who do we want to take the kids?

This week Emily ponders the suitability of prospective guardians for her three children and comes up blank…

My husband and I recently adopted the survival strategy historically favoured by the Royal Family; travel separately, never sit in the same railway carriage, take two cars on long journeys… Have we been arguing? Have we a surplus of funds to splash out on travel expenses? Have we mis-understood the environmental debate and pledged to enlarge our carbon footprint?

None of the above. We have simply been embroiled, for several weeks now, in a discussion about what would happen to the children in the event of our simultaneous death. Admittedly the odds are slim, but then so were the odds of naturally conceiving twins after a lifetime of infertility, so I don’t have much truck with statistics nowadays.

An only child is pretty easy to place; all your friends and family jump at the chance to act in loco parentis, meaning you can have your pick of possibilities. After all, everyone’s got space for just one more. “Be his guardian? Oh we’d be honoured!” was the reaction from the Toddler’s God-parents as they cradled our three-month old son in their arms. Top tip number one: identify and ask prospective guardians when your baby is still small, cute and largely inoffensive. If you wait till he becomes a threenager before attempting to palm him off on relatives, you may find stair-gates slammed in your face…

Less than a year after this conversation, two more babies arrived on the scene and the issue of guardianship became rather more thorny. Obviously the children can’t be separated; whilst it is true that they have probably already had their fill of the screaming banshee that presents as their mother, I flatter myself that they would be somewhat traumatised by my passing, and need each other’s support. Besides, they do a cute version of ‘monkeys jumping on the bed’ that just wouldn’t work, solo.

My mother-in-law is a possibility, but I simply can’t bear the way she wipes the babies’ mouths between each mouthful to avoid mess; the children would be sure to grow up with OCD as a result. My own mother abandoned the will to clean over a decade ago; her house sports a level of hygiene previously seen only in documentaries on the working classes of the 1890s. OCD would be bad, but CJD would be worse. My husband is an only child, and my younger sister an inveterate hippy whose knowledge of children is confined to watching CBBC in a dope-induced student haze. My older sister is a Perfect Mother; she makes things from yoghurt pots with her own three children, and has reading time before bed. But she also has a religious fervour which borders on cultdom, more bibles than a nun’s lending library, and more crosses than I could bear. My children aren’t going to escape cleaning obsessions and mad cow disease only to end up as Sunday School teachers.

Family exhausted, what friends would take on three children? Those without off-spring of their own are hardly up to the challenge; those fellow parents have neither the space, the finances, nor the time for more.

And so in the absence of a contingency plan we have adopted the time-honoured tactic of total avoidance; reducing the likelihood of a joint accident by never going anywhere together, and avoiding discussing it further for fear that the stress may cause us to spontaneously combust.

Emily Carlisle is a freelance writer living in the Cotswolds with her husband and three small children. You can read her take on extreme parenting at More Than Just a Mother.