Dad You Suck: And other things my children tell me

That evening my wife comes home from her bookshop and immediately launches into a tireless inventory of my failings. This has become a weekly event, which coincides with the shop’s late opening – my wife has spent many hours being polite to people, and she has already said all the nice things she is going to say today. I get whatever’s left. My oldest son knows it’s Thursday again, and he has come down to watch.

‘You didn’t slice the bread,’ she says, peering into the bread bin.

‘The slicing machine was broken,’ I lie. I have developed a dread of the bread slicer at the supermarket, the repeated operation of which only serves to underscore the grinding futility of existence. Also, it strikes me as vaguely unhygienic.

‘No, it wasn’t,’ my wife says, turning to the child. ‘Your father is hopeless.’

At this point it dawns on me that it is my wife’s life purpose to drain my self-esteem at every opportunity. Instantly, I feel lighter. My shoulders drop back, as if I were spreading invisible wings. My wife seems to notice the change. She is staring at me intently.

‘Your hair’s looking a bit thin at the front,’ she says. She turns to the boy. ‘Your father is losing his hair, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m married,’ I say. ‘I no longer need hair.’

‘He has to say that because he’s going bald.’

‘She’s just trying to flatten my self-esteem,’ I tell the boy. ‘She can’t help it. It’s her life’s purpose.’

‘She’s like a self-esteem roller,’ he says.

‘That’s very good,’ I say. ‘I can use that.’

My wife glares at both of us.

‘No, you cannot use it,’ she says. ‘I’m not allowing it. You cannot write that I am like a self-esteem roller.’

‘Yes I can,’ I say. ‘I can use it if I want.’ I look at the boy. ‘Can’t I?’ He thinks for a minute.

‘Five pounds,’ he says finally.

‘Done,’ I say.

People occasionally ask me if I find writing about my children in a weekly newspaper column ethically challenging. The truth is, I never really thought about it until people started asking, and by then it was too late to stop. I had never intended to write about my children – the column was always meant to be about me – but I soon found that it was almost impossible to keep them out of the narrative, because they talk all the time. They interject, they interrupt, they ask impertinent and largely irrelevant questions, and they repeat stupid things I’ve said in what they think is an amusing approximation of my voice.

A domestic scene from which all childish input has been artificially excised, for reasons of privacy or ethics or being a good father or whatever, immediately loses its claim to veracity. Consider this brief dialogue between a husband and wife:

Wife: You’re having supper with your family. Are you ever going to say anything?

Husband: No. Can someone pass the salad?

Wife: Oh my God. I can’t live like this.

All very kitchen sink, but I think you’ll agree something is missing. Now read it again, with the omitted dialogue restored:

Wife: You’re at supper with your family. Are you ever going to say anything?

Youngest child: Can I get down?

Husband: No. Can someone pass the salad?

Middle child: You’re the salad.

Wife: Oh my God. I can’t live like this.

As the above scene illustrates, the real problem with writing about children is not a question of privacy, but one of passivity. The writer is meant to be a neutral observer of existence, a position not exactly compatible with fatherhood, which is generally considered a more hands-on business. My wife thinks I should do more about my children’s mealtime behaviour than find it column-worthy.

I accept that writing about children has its grey areas. Perhaps, in assuming the role of narrator, I am altering my relationship with my sons in ways I don’t understand. It’s conceivable that by writing about my family I am experiencing fatherhood at one remove, like someone who films his life on his phone. It could be that instead of prioritizing my children’s happiness, I am simply prioritizing my version of events.

Like anyone else, children have a right to ownership of their lives and may object to being traduced in print on a weekly basis, although in my experience it’s rarely a problem that £5 won’t fix. By a longstanding tradition begun on that evening when my wife came home from her bookshop, that is the fee payable to my children when I quote them directly, although it is their obligation to spot the quotation and claim the money. Since this would require them to read my column on a regular basis, it means that in practice I hardly ever have to shell out.

For me the hardest task of fatherhood was always the oppressive obligation to lead by example. Nothing worries me more than the possibility that my sons are using me as some kind of role model. As it is they’ve been present on countless occasions when I have, as we say in my homeland, completely lost my shit. During these stressful moments I have often wished to turn to them as a judge might to a jury and say, ‘Please strike the next few minutes from the record’, but then, within the week, I will have committed my less than exemplary behaviour to print. Indeed, many of those instances are chronicled in the pages ahead. It’s not because I’m any less ashamed now; it’s because if I left them out there wouldn’t be enough for a book.

Perhaps this is my life’s true purpose: maybe I’m here to teach my sons that self-esteem comes and goes – it can get rolled right out of you at short notice – but that you still can get by in life without any, as long as you don’t want to be a contestant on The Apprentice. That, at least, is my experience. And for what it’s worth, my example.

TD

CHAPTER ONE (#u3f909afe-96f8-53bb-be69-2d1d68c0739b)

Whenever I hear the term ‘co-parenting’, I think back to those long-ago early mornings when my wife and I would try to lever each other off the edge of the bed, in the tacit understanding that the first person to hit the floor would be obliged to go and tend a crying infant. You couldn’t call it teamwork, exactly, but since we were both equally determined not to be the one to get up, it was broadly fair. Later I came to realize that the only real help one parent can give another is an offer to take the child – or the children – a considerable distance away for an agreed period of time.

‘Have fun,’ my wife would say, shutting the door on us. ‘Don’t come back early.’

I should really use a separate word to signify the kind of parenting I do when my wife isn’t around to share in the joy of it. For lack of a better term, let’s call it ‘fathering’. These intervals tend to differ in tone and style from co-parenting, and often end with me listing things we needn’t tell Mum about. I don’t mean for it to undermine the parenting best practice we’ve agreed upon as a couple, but I won’t pretend that fathering isn’t characterized by a certain drift from established methods. I just do whatever works, even after it stops working.

On a typical Saturday I find myself at a loose end in London with my three children and my friend Mark, who is visiting from America. My wife, meanwhile, is working in her bookshop all day. We have already dropped by for a visit, and we have already been asked to leave. I’ve made no further plans.

Our options are subsequently curtailed by rain. The children are hungry. Hungry children can be cranky and short-tempered, but in my experience they are also listless and biddable, and this is how I like it. If you keep promising them food, they will keep walking. They might complain, but they lack the energy for real rebellion. So I am strolling through the pouring rain with three slope-shouldered boys moaning and dragging their heels behind me. This, I think, is about as good as it gets.

Eventually, when I feel we’ve used up enough afternoon, we stop at a noodle bar for a late lunch. The children spot iced tea on the menu. To them, iced tea is an exotic American treat, like powdered pink lemonade or bubblegum-flavoured jellybeans. To me, an American, it is tea with some ice in it that costs £4, but I find myself in the mood to reward their patience. The food arrives, spirits lift and we all chat volubly. A strange sense of fatherly competence begins to steal over me. Only later in life will I come to recognize this feeling as a bad omen.

There is a lull after the plates have been cleared when the waiter seems to forget all about us. I’m trying to carry on a conversation with Mark, but the younger two, their blood sugar levels restored, have begun to poke each other with chopsticks as part of a game that is rapidly getting out of hand. I threaten to separate them. When they continue I carry out my threat, deftly sliding them apart and sitting down on the bench between them. As soon as I resume the conversation, they start poking each other behind my back. Then they start poking me. When I turn to remonstrate with the youngest one, the oldest leans across the table and sticks the point of a chopstick in my ear. This, I decide, is a step too far.

I accept that there must be something inherently amusing about my sense of humour deserting me. I don’t know why this is. No one laughs when my wife has a sense-of-humour failure, sometimes not for the rest of the week. But the children are hysterical, giggling maniacally and poking me over and over again with chopsticks, in the ribs, in the arms, in the side of my head. I am hissing for them to stop, and doing my most threatening eyebrows.

More than once I try to restore order by saying, ‘OK, I’m serious now’ but this only makes them laugh louder and poke harder. If I’m quick enough I can snatch a chopstick away – after a few minutes I have a big handful – but this is a noodle bar; there are lots of chopsticks lying around. At one point the youngest child actually goes to the counter to ask for more.

Before long I have completely lost control of the situation. Everywhere I look I catch the eye of someone staring at me with either pity or scorn, or some sieved mixture of the two. None of them is our waiter. My debit card has been sitting on the little dish for fifteen minutes, and still he hasn’t appeared.

I look at Mark, who is also looking at me with pity and scorn, and clearly wishing he was doing it from farther away. I shrug my shoulders at him wearily, and then recoil as the point of a chopstick stabs into my neck.

‘It’s because you gave them iced tea,’ he says.

When you have young children in London, most weekends break down into a basic binary choice: Science Museum or dinosaurs. Because the Science Museum is right next to the Natural History Museum, it’s an argument that can continue for your entire journey there. The choice never mattered to me, because I came to hate both places more or less equally. Once a PR person offered me the chance to spend the whole night in the Science Museum with my children and a bunch of other kids and parents. It sounded like some kind of community punishment order. I’ve never done anything wrong enough to deserve that.

There is, of course, a wealth of culture on offer in London, much of it child-friendly. Over years of weekends I enthusiastically made the case for many enticing alternatives: plays, galleries, street parties, food festivals, exhibitions, one-off happenings. And every time I did, my three children would look at me blankly. Then two would say ‘Science Museum’ and one would say ‘dinosaurs’.

Eventually I learned to lie about where we were going.

‘This is boring,’ says the youngest one, slumping against a temporary fence. He has a point. My three sons and I have made a trip to see the Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens, the majority of us under protest. The temporary pavilion – they put up a new one every spring – architecturally intriguing though it may be from the outside, is presently closed for some private event. Through its glass walls we can see someone giving what appears to be a lecture to a seated audience. I tell the youngest one he’s lucky, that it would probably be even more boring if we were inside.