Things My Son Needs to Know about the World

by Fredrik Backman

  She doesn’t just come out and say it. She doesn’t. But you can tell that’s what she’s thinking.

  It’s in moments like those that I realize we might have given you too much stuff. We might have given you the wrong crap. I might have given you the wrong values. Been a bad role model.

  Because, Christ. I’m not going to kill that someone who scratched the car. I’m not crazy. It’s just a thing you say.

  It’s just a car, you know?

  I’ll settle this conflict rationally. Track down that someone and have a grown-up conversation with them. Voice my disapproval with this someone’s behavior. At the very most, I might break into someone’s apartment when someone isn’t home and do unmentionable things to all of someone’s karate trophies.

  Like an adult. Because it’s just… you know. Stuff. It doesn’t matter. But at the same time… now that we’re actually talking about it…

  I’m just realizing while I’m writing this that when I go to pick up the repainted car in a week’s time, I’ll have to give back the rental car.

  And then I’ll have to fit that damn car seat into ours again. Give me a second.

  Yeah. All right. I’m probably going to kill someone.

  First day of preschool

  I’m not saying I’m picking favorites here. Absolutely not.

  And I don’t want to put any pressure on you whatsoever when it comes to which of the other kids in your preschool I think you should be friends with.

  All I’m saying is that at the information meeting, the teachers explained that during the first days of settling in, they would ask us parents to go and wait in another room.

  And there was one parent who immediately asked, “Which room?” And then spent the rest of the guided tour of the building walking around that room with an iPhone in the air, checking where the best 4G coverage was.

  I’m not putting ANY pressure on you or anything like that. But I think that parent and I would get on well. That’s all I’m saying.

  You’re not saying anything. But it feels like this is what you’re saying.

  All right. So you’re, like, twelve weeks old.

  And I get up in the morning. Just after five. Pick you up. Go out into the hallway. Stub my toe on the doorframe. Hit my head on a light. Go into the bathroom. Bash my knee on the door. Put you down on the changing table. Knock over a pile of washcloths. Try to keep one hand on you on the changing table as I bend down to pick up the washcloths. Manage to poke you in the eye. You get angry. I hit my head on the underside of the changing table, reach around to turn on the tap, knock two perfume bottles into the sink. One of them breaks. Knock your trousers onto the floor. Attempt to keep one hand on you while I try to wet one of the washcloths without cutting myself on the glass, all while I try to avoid knocking over the rest of the contents of the bathroom cabinet and attempt to pick up your trousers from the floor with my toes like a monkey. When I eventually manage that and you’re wearing your trousers again, I realize I haven’t put a diaper on you. I pull off your trousers, put on a diaper, manage to knock over a huge basket of shampoo bottles or whatever the hell they are. Try to pick up the smaller bottles one by one with my toes. Manage to stick my finger in your nose. You get angry again.

  And once I’m finished, have turned off the water, gathered up all the little pieces of glass and the bottles of whatever it is, picked you up, and carried you back through the apartment to your bed, I realize I’ve put your diaper on the wrong way. And that you are, once again, not wearing any trousers.

  And you lie there so still, just looking at me so thoughtfully. Our eyes meet.

  And you know how some parents seem to know exactly what their child’s first words will be?

  That’s when I start to get an uneasy feeling that yours will be: “You are the weakest link. Good-bye.”

  The art of predicting if a practical joke is appropriate

  Let’s suppose that you and I meet a friend of mine, who has a daughter around your age, in the local supermarket. My friend’s girlfriend is busy ordering something over at the fish counter, so my friend and I immediately come up with the incredibly funny idea of swapping you kids in the strollers while she’s not looking, just to see how long it takes her to realize when she comes back that this is not actually her kid. Funny, huh?

  Yeah. So let’s suppose I then get maybe a bit overenthusiastic about the whole thing and sort of run away through the store with their daughter in my stroller, to hide.

  And then suppose I, let’s say, have maybe never actually met my friend’s girlfriend before. And then let’s suppose that the first thing she sees when she turns around from the fish counter five seconds later isn’t her boyfriend standing next to you, giggling, like he and I both planned. No, let’s suppose instead that the first thing she sees is a fairly chubby guy with a baseball hat who she’s never seen before in her life, running down the dairy aisle with her one-year-old daughter.

  Then it’s quite possible that this whole idea was a LITTLE bit funnier in theory than it was in practice. Let’s suppose that.

  So…

  When your mother’s and my friends come over to tell us that half of the couple is pregnant, apparently it’s okay for me to share in their general joy at the news. It’s also completely fine for me to high-five the nonpregnant half of the couple and to offer him a drink. It’s even considered, under certain circumstances, perfectly socially acceptable to punch him on the shoulder and grunt things like “You old dog.”

  It’s also okay, to a limited extent, to talk about how tired women get during the first few months of pregnancy and even make jokes about how your mother did virtually nothing but sleep during the first twelve weeks.

  It’s actually even okay to go so far as to happily exclaim, “I’ve never played as many video games as I did those weeks!”

  This is all okay. What is not okay, on the other hand, is to refer to those weeks as “the best of the entire pregnancy.” It’s very important, that last part. Crucial.

  Marked for life

  Apparently, lots of fathers get tattoos to celebrate their newborn children. Portraits. Dates of their births. Those kinds of things. And I’ve thought about it too. But in that case, I want it to be something really symbolic. Something that will really sum up the relationship you and I have, you know, as father and son? Right now, I’m thinking about a tiny, tiny tribal tattoo in the form of a puddle of milk puke on my shoulder.

  WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BEING A MAN

  They say that it’s a father’s job to teach his son what it means to be a man. But I don’t know. They say that sooner or later the majority of men turn into their fathers. But I hope that isn’t true.

  Your grandfathers are different kinds of men than I am. Prouder and tougher men. With different kinds of skills. For example, they know exactly how to determine the quality of cars just by kicking the tires. And if you give them any electronic product, any one at all, they can judge whether you’ve paid too much for it in three seconds just by weighing it in their hands. (You have always paid too much for it.)

  They haven’t been wrong in a discussion since the midseventies. (And even then, they weren’t wrong, they just admitted that someone else might also be a little bit right.)

  They don’t stop for directions. They don’t ask for help. They never argue about money, only about principles. They’ll never understand why you would pay anyone to do something you could just as easily do yourself (and their sons will never understand why you would want to do anything all wrong by yourself instead of hiring an expert to begin with, which is actually the cause of almost all of our intergenerational conflicts). They’re a different breed, pure and simple. They know how an extension cord works. You can wake them up in the middle of the night and they’ll tell you today’s mortgage interest rate down to the decimal point. No matter what you buy, they’ll look at you with disappointment in their eyes and ask you what it cost. And though you’ll lie and lower the price by 20 percent,
they’ll still say, “$29.95?! They TRICKED you! I know a place where you could’ve gotten it for…”

  Every time you go over to their houses, they’ll force you to tell them the exact route you took to get there. And when you finally admit that you didn’t take their “special shortcut” this time either, since you don’t feel all that confident driving over train tracks and are actually pretty sure there are bats in those caves, they’ll look at you the way William Wallace looks at the traitor at the end of Braveheart.

  That’s the kind of men they are.

  They can go out onto a lawn at dawn, empty-handed, and come back in from a newly built deck. I mean, come on. The only thing I’ve ever finished with my own two hands is Grand Theft Auto IV. (And I cheated.)

  Your grandfathers built their own houses before Google even existed. Can you comprehend the scope of that accomplishment? They’re not people. They’re Swiss Army knives with beards. They’re proud and they’re tough and it’s entirely possible that they don’t always say the right thing at the right moment. This whole idea of shared parental leave wasn’t exactly on the agenda when they became fathers, and it’s entirely possible that they might not always be great at talking about things you can’t kick the tires of or weigh in your hand. But they’re hard workers. They’ve pulled their weight in society. They can file their own taxes and fix a microwave oven and put up a tent and change the oil in a Ford Escort. These men tamed nature. They survived the beginning of time. In the total wilderness. They didn’t even have Wi-Fi when they grew up. Just think about that. Their entire childhood was an episode of Survivor.

  Seriously.

  You know that technique of opening a beer bottle with another beer bottle? It took me, no kidding, well into my twenties to realize that my dad hadn’t invented that. The first time I saw someone else do it, my first thought wasn’t “Wow, I guess Dad didn’t come up with that after all.” My first thought was: “WOW! It’s spreading!”

  I don’t know whether that says more about my dad or me.

  * * *

  But at some point, I stopped giving him credit for things. Somewhere along the way, my generation started to take his generation for granted. And now here we are, with our specialist skills and our CrossFit and our designer-cut beards and our Facebook statuses, but we don’t know how to fix a leaking faucet. Or what a camshaft is. Or how to build a deck.

  We kind of messed up, to be honest. The whole point of evolution should be to make each generation smarter, stronger, and quicker than the one before. And sure, my generation is great at a lot of things. Modern things. No thirty-year-old is ever going to be beaten by a sixty-year-old in a game of Super Mario Kart, you can bet your behind on that.

  But if the apocalypse comes, if the world is devastated by a World War III fought with nuclear weapons, and what’s eventually left of humanity peers up out of its bunker a few years later to see a barren, unforgiving, desolate landscape, and these last few survivors decide to gather the very smartest, toughest, and most capable individuals who are left to lead the rebuilding of our species: well, no one’s going to come looking for my generation.

  Or, no, that’s unfair. Of course they’ll come looking for us.

  To ask where our parents are.

  Not because my generation’s skills will be useless in that situation, that’s not what I’m saying at all. We’re just not going to be able to use a single one of them until someone has reinvented electricity.

  So I want you to know that it’s not easy to teach you what a man is. I’ll do what I can. I’ll try to explain this miraculous place of advanced technological discoveries and worldwide information networks and democratic revolutions and medical advances. But I’ll never be able to teach you half as much as the men who can tell you how we got here.

  You take their feelings for granted, I know that. You don’t find it strange at all that they whisper “I love you” in your ear all the time. But you taught them those words. They became different men when you came along.

  Because it’s quite possible that the men from your grandfathers’ generation made a mistake or two in their own parenting when my generation was young. But if that’s the case, they’re making up for it now by covering over the cracks and faults in ours.

  * * *

  So it’s not easy to teach you what a man is. Masculinity changes. That’s the whole idea.

  It’s almost impossible even to discuss it with other adults. For a society that constantly claims we shouldn’t make any distinctions between men and women, we sure spend an awful lot of time defining exactly what those differences are. The discussion can get confusing. And by that, I don’t mean “confusing” in the same way as when they’ve moved everything around in our local 7-Eleven (again). I mean confusing in the sense of that polar bear turning up in the first season of Lost, and we were all “What the HELL? Is that a POLAR BEAR?” (You haven’t seen Lost. I know. But let’s just say it was… weird.)

  I know I’m still learning about what the word “inequality” really means. Every day. I have to. I’m a white, heterosexual, Western European man with an education and a job. There’s not a single organism in the entire universe who knows less about inequality than me.

  But I’m trying to learn. And I hope you’ll know more than I did.

  That you’ll never fear justice. Never misinterpret the fight for equality as a war between the sexes. That you’ll never believe that a woman doesn’t deserve the same rights or freedoms or chances that you do. I hope you’ll know that, above all, most people are not looking for special treatment, most people don’t want everything to be the same for everyone, most people just want things to be FAIR for everyone. I hope you’ll get that, way faster than I did. And I hope that you’ll never get it into your head that just because a woman deserves every opportunity you do, you have to stop holding the door open for her when you can. That you’ll never think it’s impossible to be equals and behave like a gentleman at the same time. Because, as your grandmothers will teach you, that’s rubbish. There is plenty that can be said about your grandfathers’ generation of men, but they wouldn’t have had time to learn about everything in the world if the women of their generation hadn’t taken care of everything else while they did.

  And I’ve done what I can to teach you to never feel threatened by strong women. I married the strongest one I’ve ever met.

  The world will constantly try to tell you that it’s possible to divide every single human quality or skill or characteristic into those that are “male” and those that are “female.” But I don’t know. I might win a fight against your mother. It wouldn’t exactly be “gorilla vs. bear,” you know? More “gorilla vs. koala.”

  But she would destroy me in a footrace, no matter the distance. And she’s way funnier than I am. And she gets people. She’s someone everyone trusts. I can easily think of a hundred people who would follow her blindly into war. I can barely get people to follow me on Twitter.

  In terms of brains, though, it’s harder to measure for sure. I mean, on the one hand she’s definitely smarter than I am, everyone knows that. But on the other hand: I got her to marry me. So I still feel like I have one up on her.

  And I’ve noticed that you’ve already learned that your ability to make her laugh largely determines your chances of being able to get away with stuff you’ve messed up. Hold on to that skill. It’ll take you a long way. It’s what brought me this far.

  And when she laughs. My God. I never feel like more of a man than I do right then.

  So… it’s not easy to teach you what a man is. It’s different things for different people. With different people.

  People used to shout, “Stand up like a real man,” in every possible context when I was a teenager. It took me a good few years into my twenties to realize that real men can also stay seated, shut up, and listen. And admit when they’re wrong. So don’t make the same mistakes I did. Never go to a game of anything and shout, “You’re playing like a woman!” at an athlet
e, as though that word were the definition of weakness. One day, you’ll be holding a woman’s hand as she gives birth and then that’ll make you feel more ashamed than you’ve ever felt about anything. Words matter. Be better.

  And never let the terms of masculinity be dictated by someone who thinks it’s bound up with sexuality. If you really want to know something about what it means to be a man, just ask Gareth Thomas, who stood up in a locker room and told his teammates on the Welsh national rugby team that he was gay. I might not know much about much in this world, but I know for damn sure that no one in that locker room was more of a man at that moment than he was.

  I want you to always remember that you can become whatever you want to become, but that’s nowhere near as important as knowing that you can be exactly who you are. I hope I was just the dysfunctional prototype. I hope you tell me a million times over what an idiot I am.

  Because I can’t teach you how to be a man. That’s something you need to teach me. That’s the only way forward.

  Because they say that, sooner or later, all men turn into their fathers. And I really hope that’s not the case.

  I hope you become much better.

  That you never stop running toward the gate, laughing, when one of your grandfathers picks you up from preschool. That you never stop making them laugh so much the walls shake. Because the only thing you can give to men who already have everything is a second chance. And you’re all of their second chances. Every day.