How to be a Husband (17 page)

Fatherhood for Morons

A
t the outset of parenthood you may wonder what kind of father you are going to be. Don't worry: you are going to be your father, more or less. You may have long ago promised yourself you wouldn't emulate certain questionable parenting choices (“I'll never lock MY kids in a car while I watch an entire baseball game in a bar!”), but your disciplinary scowl, your strategy for tuning out those parts of a conversation that make no sense, and your habit of telling instructive stories from your past in which you figure as a terrible moral coward, all these will be based directly on your dad's child-rearing techniques. You won't even have to think about it; it will just happen. It's not your fault—you've only got the one role model, if that.

Or perhaps not quite just one. Some people don't grow up with full-time fathers, or even part-time fathers, or even fathers, but those of us who did still looked further afield for supplementary role models who seemed more progressive, more
patient, and more at home in the modern world where we would eventually come to live as grown-ups. They might be the fathers, or the much older brothers, of school friends, or even faintly groovy teachers. Most of my off-site role models came from television, and even then I cherry-picked, ignoring the typical TV dad's eagerness to punish dishonesty while still admiring his propensity to book vacations to Hawaii.

My father, however, remains the primary template. Every father-son experience is, in some sense, a son-father experience relived, with the roles reversed and the script unchanged. When it came time for my oldest son to learn to ride a bicycle, I turned it into the sort of rite of passage from which neither party emerges with much credit, simply because that's how I remember it. That way I could make direct comparisons, improve on my father's performance, and thereby contribute in some small way to the great sweep of human progress. I would show myself to be trustworthy: if I promised not to let go, I would not let go. I would not allow myself to run short of patience or let it show if I did. It would not be a frustrating, bruising experience. Not this time.

The bicycle is the boy's most prized possession, a reward for learning to swim, even though he hasn't learned to swim. By this time I've given up on swimming, fully intent on leaving all future instruction to professionals. But I don't think you can hire someone to teach your kid to ride a bike.

For six months I've pulled him around the park by a rope wrapped round the handlebars. He does not pedal, although he occasionally squeezes the brake once we've got going, in order to pull me off my feet. His balance is not good; whenever we
take a bend he leans toward the outside stabilizer, and the bike lists alarmingly. Even after six months, the bike is still a bit big for him. He is apprehensive in the saddle and, like his father, prone to panic. Unfortunately, he is also persistent. He does not get this from me. I don't understand why we can't just give up, like we did with swimming.

Eventually I untie the rope. I tell the boy I'm going to push from behind so he can learn to steer himself. He doesn't like it. He repeatedly tells me to slow down, even though we're proceeding by inches. I'm beginning to admire my own forbearance, which is, I have since come to realize, a bad omen. He pedals apprehensively as I jog along behind, applying constant forward pressure to the seat to stop his grinding to a halt. Twice he accuses me of letting go. I repeat my promise, but when my back starts aching from stooping and pushing, I do let go. He is about eight yards ahead of me when the bicycle drifts to the edge of the paved path. He tries to correct himself with a sharp left turn and—this is with the stabilizers still on, remember—tips the bike over. He spills onto the grass and lets out a bloodcurdling scream. The other people in the park turn toward the noise.

“I hate you!” he shrieks as I pick him up.

“It's fine,” I say, righting the bike. “You're fine.”

“It's not fine!” he shouts, tears jetting from his eyes. “Willy-man!”

My wife laughs when I tell her the story, but I don't laugh recounting it, or when I think about it later that night. That he felt moved to invent a term of abuse—to coin his own approximation of “dickhead” using the vocabulary available to him—in
order to make plain the intensity of his lack of regard, is deeply wounding. I want to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to admit that I basically deceived him when I implied that learning to ride a bike would be a fun and painless experience, because I knew he'd never attempt it if I told him the truth. But I have a stronger urge to say nothing, to carry on teaching as I was taught. I convince myself that it's never too early for a child to learn that a father is someone who lets go when he says he won't, because his back is weak and his patience is thin.

His grim determination means we are out in the park the next day, trying again. I am very much on the back foot on this occasion, a proven liar whose advice cannot be trusted, whose every instruction is picked apart.

“I know it seems odd,” I say, “but you need to lean the other way, in the direction you're turning.”

“Of course that won't work,” he says.

The next time he comes off the bike I cannot resist the temptation to tell him it was because he didn't listen to me. The argument that ensues is protracted and vituperative and ends with my picking up his bicycle and throwing it into a bush. It's not my proudest moment as a father. I wish I could say it was my unproudest moment, but there are several others vying for the distinction.

We take a long break from bike riding, the boy and I, while I reformulate my plan and probe my memory further. I recall that it was my mother who was there with me the day I finally learned to ride a bike, on a cold and windy morning in the empty beach parking lot. I don't know whether my dad had officially forsworn our bad-tempered and unpropitious lessons,
or whether he was just at work. I do remember a sense of urgency: my sixth birthday was looming, and everybody I knew could ride a bike.

The knack of riding a bicycle is, like any skill, a product of all that accumulated failure, but I only remember the moment when I felt the bike holding itself up of its own accord as I pedaled maniacally and my mother's encouragements grew faint. I didn't see her expression, because I never looked back.

We return to the park many weeks later. My wife is there with us, enabling us to deploy that most last-ditch of all parental strategies: the two-pronged assault. I have not asked for this, but I think she has sensed the reinforcement is necessary. As long as she is there to second my advice, to echo my stilted praise in slightly different words, then the boy's objections to my tutelage are effectively neutralized, and he knows it. He will not call me “willy-man” today.

He's also a little bit older, his legs a little longer. To my shame, I realize that when I first bought him the bicycle he was barely four. I'd been acting like a victim of the child's persistence, when the pressure originated entirely with me.

I've taken the stabilizers off the bike and lowered the seat as far as it will go. By degrees his mother and I get him to accept that if he feels the bike tipping he can just put his feet down.

Running along bent over while holding the back of his seat is absolutely punishing, but the boy is making progress. When, by mutual agreement, I let go at the appropriate speed, he doesn't look back either, not even once. You can't really. If you look back, you just fall off.

AUTHORITY

Before I had children I imagined them chiefly as an outlet for my didactic impulses. I'm not a natural teacher, or a particular fount of wisdom, but I still have a strong need to divest myself of information as and when that information occurs to me.

This is not the same as being good at it. I tell a story the way I would write one—beginning far too early in the proceedings, including details that turn out not to be germane, returning frequently to earlier points in the narrative to effect minor adjustments, pursuing discursive sidetracks in order to include facts I happen to know, and editing on the fly by instructing my audience which bits of what I've just said to disregard. I get there in the end. Unfortunately the listener, unlike the reader, is not presented with a product, but with a process.

When a gentleman imparts knowledge to a woman in this manner, it is sometimes known, disparagingly, as “mansplaining.” It's considered both sexist and patronizing, but it is the normal way of conversation among men—to go on and on about something you are pretending to know a lot about, pausing only when someone with a louder voice starts talking over you. Above all, one must never risk asking a question. It might well be the last thing you say all evening.

To use this mode of discourse on women is not always intentionally patronizing; in many cases it is simply boorish, a failure to take into account the fact that your interlocutor is someone other than your brother. Men speak to other men as
though they're always about to be cut off, because they probably are. In my younger days I remember panicking when I spoke to women and they let my stream of chat run unchecked as if it were some kind of lecture. “Why isn't she interrupting me?” I would think. “I'm almost out of words, and this anecdote has no ending! Oh Christ—she's not actually listening, is she?”

But my kids—they won't know any better. They will listen to my undifferentiated spume of digressive memoir, rhyming aphorisms, and historical misinterpretation as if it were the Gospel. I won't have to tailor my didactic nature to suit anybody but me. The answers I provide for their questions will be taken as scientific fact. But I had not reckoned on the questions.

“When are you going to die?” asks the oldest one, age three. I pause thoughtfully, pretending it's a question I had never before considered.

“Oh, not for a long time,” I say.

“Yeah, but WHEN?”

He's not much older when he leans forward in his car seat one day—after a long, contemplative silence—and says, “Mumma can never escape from us, can she?”

“Sorry?” I say.

“Because we could just follow her wherever she goes,” he says. It's always tricky to answer a question when you strongly suspect your interlocutor of possessing more relevant information than you. What does the boy know that I don't? Has she got plans to move towns and take a job at the local library under an assumed name? Or is it just something he imagined, or dreamed, or saw on TV? What sort of reply could cover all these eventualities?

“Mumma can run,” I say. “But she can't hide.”

I also imagined that along with my wisdom, my very bearing would command a certain innate respect, a natural awe that I should probably offset rather than encourage so as not to become a distant, authoritarian figurehead. I deliberately cultivated a benign, nonintimidating presence from the outset, more family dog than father, although I began to distance myself from that persona once we got an actual dog. I thought of my future role as approachable, collegiate, instructive. I reckoned that as they grew my children's respect would be a natural by-product of my inspiring example. I even dared to imagine my own little audience following me around laughing a bit too eagerly at my strained jokes; it would be just like hosting
Loose Ends
.

What I did not foresee was a day when, while interviewing a newly demobbed
Apprentice
contestant in the course of my work, I would flip through my notebook in search of an incisive question I'd jotted down earlier, only to come across a page on which the words “DAD YOU SUCK” had been written in two-inch-high block capitals with a black marker.

I did not envision a time when, during one of my lectures about manners and public etiquette in a noodle bar, my children would take turns poking chopsticks into my ears, until the theory that I was possessed of a sense of humor about myself had been comprehensively disproved. I did not imagine that the oldest one would develop a habit of greeting me by slapping me lightly on both cheeks, or that the middle one would hijack my Twitter account in the night to post heartfelt admissions of
loserdom (“Hi, I suck at everything I try in life”) or that the youngest would insist on addressing me as “Daddy me laddy.”

Episodes like these prompted some questions of my own: When did I graduate from caregiver to figure of fun? Why is it so amusing to prick my pomposity? At what point did I actually become pompous? If I were being charitable to myself, I would probably argue that I am partly complicit in my children's efforts to undermine me, that on some level I'm even abetting it, because sons in particular need an opportunity to distance themselves from a father's authority even at an age when they remain obliged to acknowledge it. But that's not what I'm doing; I never even thought of that. I'm just making them laugh, and not on purpose. And as they get older, I just seem to get funnier.

Is it to do with my personality, I wonder, or is it something about the times we live in? I have a sneaking suspicion that my self-importance may be in some innate way self-sabotaging, if only because I suck at everything I try in life. But I also know that when I was a child grown-ups were more or less exempt from ridicule.

In the winter of 1974 my father walked into a glass wall at the Hilton in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was striding across the deck of the indoor swimming area, wife and four small children trying to keep pace with him, past a neat line of deck chairs toward the hotel's poolside restaurant. He was attempting to slip between two occupied tables when he hit the glass at full speed—this particular panel was missing the eye-level
H
decal that marked out the two flanking it—much to the consternation of the diners on the other side.

My father was knocked to the ground by the impact. I remember him crawling around on his hands and knees for what seemed a long time, dazed and unable to grasp what had just happened to him.