No children please, we’re getting married.

Some time ago, we were invited to a wedding. I assumed in my crazed with motherhood sort of way that the children were also invited. They were not, the bride’s mother politely told me. At least I found out before I arrived for the calm, serene, adult ceremony, hey? Ed stayed home with the children, and I had a good time, and though I certainly don’t think children should go everywhere, their absence at a wedding rankled.

When I got married, I don’t think I even thought about children. We didn’t have any. Neither did any of our sisters or brothers or friends. All our cousins — well, most of our cousins — were pretty grown up so we never had to consider whether to invite the little ones. I suppose we did, by default, and now, I’m glad that we didn’t disinvite one of the potential results of men and women hanging out too long in each other’s company without underwear on.

It’s not like I’m all about children. I like my own and some of the others, although even then, I don’t like them all the time. I think that while children have their uses and amusing moments, in their pre-civilized phase, they can be a handful. A nuisance even. I certainly wouldn’t invite them to the opera or think they belonged at a bar or in a strip club. Still, I assumed that weddings included children unless they were some sort of weird, high society extravaganza with ice swans and caviar amuse bouches. Weddings are the public expression — the extrusion into society — of the private love two people share. Children are another public expression of that private love. But more than that, children are a part of the society before which two people are witnessing their love. They belong at these celebrations, as surely as they belong at baptisms, funerals and all the other rites of passage that mark a person’s life. They will measure out their own lives by these celebrations more than they will remember a whole year of school. They will remember how they met the relatives they otherwise have no chance to see. They will remember dancing with their cousins, with their elderly aunties. They will have the chance to look at where they have come from and where they are going. If we exclude them from these moments, we sterilize ourselves and our whole society.

A friend of mine recently wrote to me: “This culture does not recognize children as a fundamental component to our culture (they are considered an add on and a burden).” She is right. Children are not seen as part of our culture and neither are their parents. We are far more acceptable when we have left the children somewhere else, when we can masquerade as unencumbered adults. Children are larval, not yet acceptable. They grow towards acceptance only as they begin to resemble adults.

Part of the blame must be laid at capitalism’s door, which measures the worth of an individual by his or her earnings. Just like mothers are devalued in a capitalist society because we earn no salary and do not therefore contribute to the GNP, so are children merely leeches.

I long for a world, for a society, where all of us, children, old people, mothers and workers alike, are equally valued. Are not excluded. Are celebrated. Are welcome. Our society could take one tiny step towards that by including the children where they belong, by respecting their need for us, their place with us. By not shunting them off to some other place when the strongest songs of our lives are playing. By, even though they will sing off key and come in at the wrong places, letting them sing with us. How else will they learn the song?

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