How to be a Husband (18 page)

“For Christ's sake, Bob, get up,” said my mother.

“I'm trying,” he said as blood dripped from the end of his nose. He was fine after a few minutes, but we did not eat in the hotel restaurant that night.

I try not to think about how my children would react if something similar happened to me, but I know from bitter experience that they do not hesitate to laugh when I slip on ice, or when I'm being questioned aggressively at passport control, or when I'm freaking out about data loss, or being on the wrong motorway in Italy, or when I object to having chopsticks inserted in my ears in public. Were I to walk into a glass wall, I sometimes think their only regrets would be about not having the presence of mind to film it.

No one laughed when my father walked into the glass wall at the Hilton in 1974; it wouldn't have occurred to me. Mind you, I didn't feel a tremendous amount of empathy either. I was too busy feeling guilty, because I'd known the glass was there all along. I'd spotted the illusion on an earlier foray to the lobby that afternoon, and had been vaguely planning some stunt to fool my family. For that reason I was pleased we were heading right for it; I just hadn't reckoned on my father getting quite so far ahead of me. I never intended for him to walk into the glass, but there was a discernible moment when I realized he wasn't going to stop, and I still chose to say nothing.

I felt terrible about the incident for years afterward, but I
never admitted the truth. I figured God would get me back for it someday. Perhaps, at last, He has.

SPORT

My biggest recurring worry, once I realized I was to be the father of boys, was that I would let them down when it came to the question of sport. After twenty years in Britain I still can't do enough football chat to last through a whole haircut. My father's enviable record of sporting achievement and dedicated spectatorship was not something I could look to for guidance; he didn't know anything about soccer either. I was flying blind.

After a lot of private fretting, I decide to approach the eldest shortly after his birthday. I begin my little speech with all the caution of a man who suspects he's already left something important too late.

“Now that you're eight,” I say, “we need to make a big decision.”

“I'm nine,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “So we need to decide which football team we support.”

“What are you talking about?” he says.

“It's traditional, I believe, for British sons to inherit some form of allegiance to a team from their fathers, but since I don't have anything to pass on, I thought we could look at . . .”

“We support Chelsea,” he says.

“What?”

“We're Chelsea supporters.”

“Since when?” I say.

“Since always,” he says. I have no idea what “since always” means to a nine-year-old, but I'm not really in a position to dispute the contention.

“Oh,” I say, a little disappointed. “How are they doing?”

“They're fourth, but they have a game in hand.”

“I see. Can you just quickly explain what that means?”

That was it—an issue I'd worried about for eight years was solved with one two-minute conversation. If only all of fatherhood were so simple. But it turned out nothing else of it was that simple.

My children were not raised in a sport-spectating household, but they live in one now, a universe entirely of their own making. I do my best to join in: every year when the football season starts, I make another doomed attempt to cultivate a knack for commentary. I know the rules, but I remain incapable of making intelligent remarks during an ongoing match. I can't tell the players by their numbers, or their positions. When the referee blows his whistle I rarely know why. At some point in the second half I invariably say something that betrays my failure to realize the teams have swapped ends.

“Why is he passing it that way?” I shout. “What the hell is wrong with . . . Oh, I see. Nothing.”

One Sunday evening in October I walk into the sitting room to find the middle one watching a game. I sit down beside him, looking in the direction of the television without really taking it in, letting the commentators' meaningless blather wash over me.

“What's the score?” I ask.

“Ten–seven,” he says.

“Really?” I say, leaning closer to the screen. “That's an unusually high . . . hang on. This is
football
football. American football.”

“Durhh,” he says. Great, I think: here is a sport I actually understand, sort of. This is the game of my people! Quick—what would my dad say next, if he were here?

“Who's playing?” I say. A safe enough opening. I don't want to overplay my hand. I mean to wear my lifetime of knowledge lightly.

“The Jacksonville Jaguars and the Houston Texans,” he says. I cannot, alas, allow his simple error to go uncorrected. He'd do the same for me.

“There's no such team as the Jacksonville Jaguars,” I say.

“Yes, there is,” he says. “Look!”

“Well, I've never heard of them,” I say. “They sound made-up. And Houston are called the Oilers.”

“No, they aren't,” he says.

“I think you'll find they are,” I say. “Because of, you know, all the oil.”

“When did you last watch an American football game?” he says. I think about my answer for a moment.

“Twenty-two years ago,” I say, “or thereabouts. But there certainly wasn't any . . .”

“Dammit!” he shouts at the television, exactly the way my father would.

“What's happened?”

“Penalty,” he says.

“For what?”

“Taunting,” he says. “Fifteen yards.”

“Taunting?” I say. “Since when can they penalize you for being a dick?”

“Shush!” he says. “Just watch.”

The Houston Oilers, I later learn, moved north, and eventually changed their name to the Tennessee Titans. In 1999.

*   *   *

T
hroughout parenthood—usually when you're on your knees with exhaustion—older people have a habit of coming up to you and saying, “Enjoy it—it goes by so fast.” And they're right—it does go by fast. Just not at the time.

In the thick of it, parenthood seems never-ending, its compromises deep and permanent. In a few short years I have gone from being appalled by the low hygiene standards of small children to being appalled by my own low hygiene standards.

I had always imagined that my children would at some point graduate from being charges to being minions—that I would be able to assign them tiresome chores or dispatch them on small errands in exchange for their upkeep. It would be like having an army of tiny personal assistants.

This never really came to pass. It's true that for the promise of fifty pence a six-year-old will look for your glasses all day, but he will not find them. An eleven-year-old will not look, not even for a fiver.

I spend most of my time in search of their stuff, or fulfilling their demands, or coping with the fury of someone whose maths homework won't disgorge from the printer because of a connection issue that is somehow my fault. It turns out that
parenting is a lot more like being a personal assistant than having one. In fact, it's a lot like being Naomi Campbell's personal assistant, but without the travel.

Up close this time of dirt, tears, insolence, and missing gym shorts doesn't feel like something one should necessarily cherish. From a distance it may resolve itself into a fuzzy, happy-family tableau, but I'm not sure how far back you'd have to stand.

Pat, the man who introduced me to my wife, who was best man at my wedding, is sitting in our kitchen and laughing at us.

“Take that out of here!” shouts my wife at the younger two, who are fighting over a deflated football while the dog barks.

“I could not live like this,” he says, laughing. Pat is single and has no children, but because of his hand in our partnership he regards our day-to-day existence as a vast, picaresque misadventure laid on for his amusement. He drops by most weekends to see how it's progressing.

“Get off!” shouts my wife at the cat, which has jumped onto the worktop to sniff the butter.

“Your cat has no tail,” says Pat, laughing.

“I told them I didn't want the tail,” says my wife, climbing onto a stool to swat the little worms that have been migrating across the ceiling all week, northeast to southwest. They're coming from somewhere in the store cupboard, but I have been unable to locate their exact point of origin. The oldest enters with wet hair.

“Where are my shoes?” he says.

“They're probably where you left them,” says my wife.

The football bounces into the kitchen, knocking a mug off
the table. Pat laughs. The younger one chases the middle one through the room and out the other door.

“I'm going to kill those two,” says my wife.

“I need my fucking
shoes
,” says the oldest, stomping out.

“How can you live like this?” says Pat, laughing.

“Only with the tireless assistance of my helpmeet here,” says my wife. I look up from the newspaper to see that she is indicating me with an oven glove.

“Sorry?” I say.

For the most part parenting is, as in the above example, a shared activity, but I tend to think of fathering as that fraction of parenting that I do on my own, when my wife is working, or when she insists that a week in Majorca will only be a holiday for her if the rest of us don't come. It gives me a chance to measure my child-rearing skills against a baseline of competence, and the opportunity to speculate on what it would be like to be a solo, full-time parent.

There is, of course, nothing remotely heroic about a father's looking after his own children—especially not the way I do it—although when it happens in public I still sometimes feel I'm being watched as I were some kind of absurd novelty, roughly equivalent to a monkey smoking a pipe. Again, that could have something to do with the way I'm doing it. But there is no question that the bar has been set very low for fathers. You can show up at the school gates in your emergency glasses (one earpiece only) with hair like a bonsai elm, toting three kids flecked in breakfast, minus one lunch, and nobody says a thing. You can pick up in the same outfit in the afternoon, you can be late, and you don't have to bring cupcakes. To be a father out
there, on your own, is to present a direct challenge to the notion that parenting is some kind of competition sport.

“We had a good day,” I say to my wife on our return from an afternoon out. “Except for him. I shut his thumb in the car door.”

“You what?” says my wife, examining the oldest one's swollen, navy-blue digit. “Why did you do that?”

“It was an accident, not a punishment,” I say. “Gimme a break.”

This lone parenting most often occurs in the course of my normal fatherly duties—an overambitious supper cooked in my wife's absence, a load-lightening cinema excursion, the odd school event I have to do on my own, the kind of Saturday outing where I lie about where we're going until everybody's in the car—but occasionally it's touched off by my saying something rash out loud.

“A music festival?” I say one fateful evening. “Yes, of course I will take you to a music festival.”

Perhaps it's because my children are boys, but when I'm on my own with them in public I'm often conscious of setting either a good or a bad example. I'm worried they're learning how to be men from me, or worse, that they're just learning too much about me. I've always been gratified by the extent to which my children have not taken after their father—they seem fairly confident, easygoing, and at home in the world—so I try to limit their exposure to the sight of me operating outside my comfort zone. The problem is that most things worth doing lie outside my comfort zone. Back in 2007 a music festival struck me as the sort of managed environment where not too much
could go wrong. That's probably because at that point in my life, I'd never been to one.

It's already dusk when I arrive with the older two, having squandered valuable daylight hours in standstill traffic a regular festivalgoer would have known to expect. What I had expected was some sort of system for transporting our gear from the distant car park to the festival proper that didn't involve me just carrying everything. There isn't. They do have a system for taking my two bottles of red wine off me at the gate, though.

“No glass,” says the gatekeeper.

“How convenient,” I say.

“You can either drink it here or leave it here,” he says. This is precisely one of those instances where I'm conscious of setting an example. I can't down two bottles of wine in front of my children. What about one bottle? Half a one?

“Hang on,” I say. I shrug off all my baggage and pull a full one-point-five-liter plastic water bottle from my rucksack.

“Drink,” I say to the oldest. “Drink a lot.” I pass it to the middle one and command him to do the same. I take a large swig and pour the rest on the ground. The two bottles of wine fill it to the brim. They're not the same kind of wine—they're not even from the same region—but the situation warrants desperate measures.

“I'm pretty sure we can buy more water once we're in there,” I say. “Let's go find out.”

By the time I've managed to trudge to a space that will allow me to put up our tent—a £69, two-pole monstrosity with the footprint of a bouncy castle—it's too dark to see the nettles that are clearly the only reason this particular patch of ground
is still available. My children lie on all our stuff, arms folded, while I offer a running commentary that I hope will prove mildly instructive.

“First, we peg out the bottom of the inner tent,” I say as the middle one shines a torch in my face. “Then we take tent pole number one, and . . .”