How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  I can’t say I enjoyed it much. One of the things that got me through driving lessons the first time round was the thought that once I’d passed, I would not have to repeat the ordeal under any circumstances. Never again would I have to spend four hours a week pretending to be in accord with the personal prejudices of a right-wing lunatic with a brake of his own. Never again would I have my parallel parking technique criticized by someone I have come to hate. Never again would I need to grip the wheel in the ten-and-two position. If you’d told me at seventeen that fourteen years later I’d be going through the whole terrible business again, but in a foreign country, on the wrong side of the road, and with an even fatter and more objectionable man in the passenger seat, I think I would have lost the strength to carry on. Certainly there were times during my second period of indoctrination that I thought about giving up. But I told myself, “This is the only thing you could think of doing to make it seem as if you were training up for parenthood. If you fail at this, you fail at everything.”

  I persevered, and passed my test the first time. I kept the results to show my heavily pregnant wife that whatever she thought of my driving, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency thought different. And none of my children would ever have to meet the me that didn’t drive.

  * * *

  My wife’s waters break one night in the middle of EastEnders. There follows some debate about whether we should watch the end before going to the maternity ward. This is partly an attempt by two very nervous people to appear calm and wise before the fact: there’s no hurry; we’re already packed; why not? But it’s also a last-minute scrabble for purchase before we tumble over the lip of the unknown. Our lives are, by all accounts, about to be turned upside down. For all we know we may never have the luxury of caring about EastEnders again. And Peggy Mitchell’s just moved back to the Vic and has no idea that Sharon and Grant are quits on account of Sharon’s affair with Phil no longer being a secret. Life in the square is absolutely mental at the moment.

  As soon as the credits roll we go downstairs and get in the car. My wife insists on taking a long detour to the nearest McDonald’s drive-thru. We haven’t had supper and she doesn’t know when she’ll eat next. It will be many hours before this seems like a stupid idea.

  At the hospital we check in and my wife is examined. Everything appears to be normal, but labor proper is apparently some way off. We wait and wait. At some point a nurse suggests that I go home and get some sleep. This is put to me as the most practical and sensible thing to do in the circumstances. To me, it sounds insane, but I’m offered no other options and I have a strong desire to be counted among the rational. Eventually, I go. I’m convinced I won’t be able to sleep, but I surprise myself.

  It’s still dark when the phone I have placed halfway up the stairs to our attic bedroom—as far as its cord will reach—starts ringing. I have forgotten about this arrangement and trip over it on my way down. I end up on all fours on the landing feeling around for the loose receiver.

  “Is that Mr. Dowling?” says a voice, in response to the crash and muffled swearing I have substituted for “hello.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Things are progressing nicely here,” she says, “so this would probably be a good time to maybe start thinking about making your way in.” I have not lived in England so long that I can instantly grasp the meaning of a sentence like this at six a.m. There is a brief silence while I parse.

  “So you’re saying I should come now.”

  “That might be an idea,” she says.

  My wife is not the same person I left behind the night before. Then she was apprehensive but pragmatic, largely worried that she might be lonely or bored. In the intervening hours she has been transformed by pain into a wild thing. Between contractions she tells me how she spent the night stalking the corridors, a V-shaped pillow over one shoulder, in search of a dark, quiet corner, like an animal looking for a place to die. At one point, she says, she shut herself in a supply cupboard for half an hour. The cheeseburger she ingested—however temporarily—has long since been relegated to the very least of her present regrets; top of the list is getting pregnant, followed by meeting me.

  “Where have you been?” she says, eyes darting one way and another. She’s outside the ward, leaning against a wall as another contraction begins.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “They only rang me twenty minutes ago.”

  “Don’t touch me,” she says. “Just take this stupid pillow.” I lift it gently off her back and shoulder it like a Samaritan, with all the depthless inadequacy the gesture implies.

  In retrospect it is a mercy that I had no experience of childbirth, that there were no weekly TV programs detailing the quotidian heroics of midwives, the general uncomprehending idiocy of fathers-to-be or the sheer number of things that can go wrong during a routine delivery. I’m glad I had no idea that an epidural was not just tricky to administer but rather difficult to procure, like an item on a specials menu the waiter keeps trying to talk you out of.

  I’m glad I had no notion then, as I do now, that being an effective liaison between a woman in labor and the maternity ward staff requires rather more insistence than mediation, or that “I’m sure someone will be back in a minute” is not a helpful thing to say. I feel fortunate that I only learned about the true role of the father in childbirth—to be perpetually in the way, until someone finally suggests you go down the hall and make everyone some tea—on the job, and knew nothing of the impotent, hand-wringing anguish beforehand.

  The midwife is still desperate to get me involved. As labor enters its final stage she hands me a damp cloth.

  “You dab Mum’s forehead with that,” she says. “It will help keep her cool and calm.”

  “Got it,” I say.

  I go up to the other end of the bed, round the back of the heart monitor. I wait until another contraction begins, and then I lean forward and tentatively blot my wife’s hairline with one corner of the cloth.

  “Get that fucking thing away from my face,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  I’m pleased that on that day I’d never before heard the term “placenta previa,” and that the whole event occurred before the age of the smartphone, when I could have found out what it meant in an instant. I was in the lucky position of being able to assume that nothing out of the ordinary was occurring, and that there was always that much blood left over at the end. I’m pleased that the nature of the complication was never fully explained to me, so that by the time I understood what had almost happened, the danger had already passed.

  Thanks to my ignorance I could, in all honesty, simply savor the profound emotional head butt of childbirth, directing all my attention to my exhausted, parchment-pale wife and the little purple creature in the plexiglass box. I could just stand there and cry, not out of fear, but with the simple relief of a man who has been allowed to take a short break from being overwhelmed.

  It is well into the afternoon when the whole business is finished. While my wife’s being topped up with blood products, I am dispatched home again to spread the news: it’s a boy.

  When I return to the hospital a few hours later I find my wife sitting cross-legged in the middle of her bed, eating an apple and staring down at the sleeping infant lying on the mattress in front of her.

  I hang back for a few seconds without making my presence known. It is a scene that remains burned into my memory, indelible as a photograph, and the first instance of my feeling that peculiar sense of left-outness that comes with being a father. My wife is staring down at our son with the boundless but unremarkable fascination one reserves for parts of oneself long unseen: a broken foot finally freed after months in a cast. There was nothing I had witnessed about pregnancy or childbirth that made me feel I was somehow missing out—what I saw, you can keep—but this, I see in a glimpse, is the beginning of an intimacy I will never have with
anyone or anything. Perhaps, as a man, I’m even a little frightened by it. It’s not remotely mystical, but undeniably physical and matter-of-fact. I won’t say visceral; I stopped using the word “visceral” for a long time after that day.

  * * *

  In the first weeks of fatherhood my collective responsibilities fail to coalesce into anything I could describe as a role. It is, for the most part, donkey work: I clean, I run errands, I change the odd nappy.

  When it comes to parenting I’m basically an understudy, ready to step in and distract the baby for short periods so my wife can use the phone. The child requires more or less the same things from his mother as his father; it’s just that he prefers all of them to come from his mother: feeding, dressing, reading, eye contact.

  As he develops the rudiments of coordination, the boy starts to see me largely as an object for experimental violence. He sticks his fingers in my eyes and tries to push small objects up my nose. He sinks his fingernails into my throat while I am carrying him up the stairs. I pretend not to mind. If it can be considered in any way useful, I am happy to lie on the floor alongside an infant whose afternoon schedule is entirely taken up with trying to pull my lips off.

  With no seeming knack for child care, I begin to take pride in the sheer stamina required to do it badly. I revel in the stoic, manly patience required to feed a mouth that is dodging the spoon for sport, or to secure a nappy round flailing legs. One day, I think, you’ll be all grown up and changing my nappy. And oh, how I will kick. During the difficult times I picture myself as a tough but avuncular drill sergeant, the sort who leans close to your ear and says, “I’m not here to be liked, son.”

  But I am here to be liked. My life’s mission is to trick people into liking me. If I can’t make my own baby like me, what’s the point?

  His first word is “daddy,” by which he means “mummy.” His first complete sentence, coined for my benefit, is “Go away.”

  We rub along better when we’re outside together, where preferring his mother is not an immediate option. I enjoy driving around with him strapped in behind me. Here he serves a valuable purpose: if he’s in the car, then technically I’m not talking to myself.

  By the end of the first year, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned how to prepare four bottles of formula in assembly-line fashion. I’ve learned to change a nappy in under a minute. I’ve learned to make a one-year-old laugh by pretending to cause myself harm. I’ve learned that in the event of a supermarket meltdown, the last thing you want to do is remove a wailing child from the trolley seat. You’ll never get him back in.

  Somewhere toward the end of this period I quit my day job. I figure now is the perfect moment to become a full-time freelance writer, as oxymoronic as that job title turns out to be. It also means I can be around to wage my campaign to trick a baby into liking me. What I do not provide in money, I will make up for in sheer, unadulterated presence.

  In the most technical sense, I become a stay-at-home dad, although I think of myself more as a layabout-with-child. I’m not sure people even spoke of stay-at-home dads back then—“househusband” was the more common term for the less common thing.

  By quitting my day job I come to fulfill the letter, if not the spirit, of the distinction. My wife is not ashamed of my new at-home status, although she is at pains to point out to people that there’s a big difference between a househusband and a shut-in. During business hours I’m more like a helpful upstairs neighbor whose job happens to be staring out the window all day.

  I look like a stay-at-home dad, though, especially if you see me at the zoo with two toddlers at three p.m. on a Wednesday, when it happens that I have nothing better to do. If it’s a Saturday, I look like a divorced dad. If it’s the supermarket and it’s Saturday, I just look incompetent.

  The vast of bulk of my parenting is done as half of a tag team—lurching from crisis to crisis, making up policy on the fly, and presenting a united front despite marked differences in approach. My wife and I share the more tedious aspects of infant-rearing equally, at least in the sense that neither of us ever does anything without having a crack at getting the other to do it first.

  “He’s crying again,” says my wife, gently punching me awake.

  “Oh God—why are my eyes so dry? I must have been sleeping with them open.”

  “Deal with him,” says my wife.

  “But I went half an hour ago,” I say.

  “He’s your child, and he’s crying,” she says. “It’s not about whose turn it is.”

  “You’re saying that,” I say, “because it’s your turn.”

  “Go.”

  “I think he’s stopped now,” I say.

  “He hasn’t.”

  “So what, shall I bring him back here for you?”

  “No.”

  It’s not ideal, but it’s the system. Coparenting, I think they call it.

  12.

  Alpha Male, Omega Man

  A few years ago I wrote a novel. For our purposes there are only four things you need to know about this book:

  1. It failed to set the world alight, and then, eight months later, it failed to set the world alight again, in paperback.

  2. Despite this double failure, it’s actually not bad at all.

  3. It is now available on Kindle.

  4. It contains a brief scene in which the main character, a freelance journalist, is rung up by a newspaper commissioning editor, and asked the following question:

  “Would you describe yourself as an alpha male?”

  Not understanding the purpose of the question, the writer refuses to give a straight answer. The commissioning editor goes on to say that a recent study has suggested that alpha males are evolutionarily unsuited to our modern, feminized society, that the aggression and dominant posturing that once gave them an advantage is now counterproductive. He wishes to commission fifteen hundred words about the lesser male types—the beta males, the gammas, the deltas—in a particularly base form of journalism known as an alphabet piece.

  “So what we want from you,” he says, “is the whole Greek alphabet, all the males from alpha to omega, but funny.”

  I made up this little scene, fiction-style, not to illustrate some point about the quiet rise—or not—of nonalpha men, but simply to furnish my main character with the worst journalistic assignment imaginable. An alphabet piece is a horrible prospect on its own—it’s a hackneyed, spent format, with the intolerable burden of having to come up with twenty-six separate gags, and the inevitable need to fudge the entries for Q and X. For all the work required, they’re never as funny as they should be. I ought to know—I’ve written a fair few in my time. What, I thought, could possibly inspire more dread in a weary freelance hack than another pointless alphabet piece? Then I thought: What if you had to use Greek letters instead?

  In the novel the main character tries, and fails, to turn the assignment down. He displays a marked lack of enthusiasm for the idea, and insists its successful execution lies beyond his limited capabilities. He demurs from several angles, to no avail.

  “You’re definitely not an alpha male, by the way,” says the editor. “I’d put you somewhere around tau.”

  “I don’t even know where that comes,” says the writer.

  Writing this scene was, as I recall, a pleasantly cruel morning’s work. In the end, however, the joke was on me: a few days later I realized the narrative would be best served by reproducing the fictional article in full, so I had to sit down and write the whole fucking thing myself. It took me a week and a half, and I only managed twelve hundred words. I was as glad to have it behind me as any assignment I have ever accepted.

  Six years later I am sitting in my office minding my own business when my phone rings. The person on the other end is a researcher from the radio program Woman’s Hour. She says she wants to speak to me about alpha males.

&
nbsp; Alpha males are on the wane, she tells me. A recent magazine article has claimed that their hypercompetitive, domineering personalities put them at a distinct disadvantage in our modern, feminized society. According to somebody somewhere, beta males are taking over the world. A sense of déjà vu begins to steal over me as she speaks.

  “So,” she says finally. “Would you describe yourself as an alpha male or a beta male?”

  “I think I come somewhere around tau,” I say. There is a pause.

  “I don’t know the Greek alphabet that well,” she says.

  There follows a brief discussion in which I characterize myself as a meek and inconsequential man. It is a sort of pre-interview, at the end of which I am invited to appear on Woman’s Hour. I display a calculated lack of enthusiasm for the idea and suggest that it may lie beyond my limited broadcast capabilities. There is something about my low self-esteem that delights her.

  That was the first time I ever felt the need to sit down and consider the whole concept of the alpha male in human society, and my first thought was: It’s basically bollocks, isn’t it? An alpha male is something you find in charge of a wolf pack. As a sociological term it doesn’t mean much when applied to a species that shops at Uniqlo.

  It turns out I was wrong: the term doesn’t apply to wolves either. In the wild a typical wolf pack is dominated by what used to be known an alpha male and an alpha female—an alpha couple—but biologists don’t call them that anymore, because their elevated status within the pack is not due to size, aggression, or a keen sense of competition. It’s because all the other wolves in the pack are their pups. A wolf pack is a family, and the alpha male is the daddy.

  Chimps also produce alpha males, as do many primate groupings. But then bonobos, from the same genus as chimps, live in a society where females are dominant. In any case, the alpha male isn’t a type—it’s an office, and in a strictly linear dominance hierarchy, there’s just one. Whether an alpha male’s status is by dint of size, strength, age, aggression, or the assiduous grooming of others (much of the work of being an alpha chimp is tiresomely political), it’s not really analogous to anything in human society. If chimps could get ahead by lying on their CVs, they would probably do it our way.