by Tim Dowling
As the twentieth century draws to a close, I find myself the father of three boys under five.
The youngest is born under circumstances that seem positively routine compared with our first outing. When I return to hospital six hours after the birth, my wife is dressed and ready to go, the baby packed up like hand luggage.
Initially, at least, there are few additional costs associated with the new baby. We already have all the stuff. Back at home I dig out our old baby monitor, only to find that it’s made up of several mismatched components—parts accidentally swapped during group holidays and weekends away. After some experimentation I come up with a configuration of speakers and charging units that seems to work.
It’s not much use as a baby monitor anyway, because the baby is in our bedroom with my wife, and most nights I’m dispatched to the spare room, where I am better situated to serve the nocturnal needs of the other two. This arrangement was not my idea. I don’t object—I get marginally more sleep most nights—but I don’t like the way it makes me seem. Having opted out of the ritual of exhaustion, I’m banned from grousing, or from conducting my life on an emergency timetable. And I’m still exhausted.
We mostly use the baby monitor during the day, when I sit in the kitchen making lists while my wife breastfeeds in bed and issues commands through the transmitter on her nightstand, next to the Moses basket, where the baby never sleeps. It is effectively a one-way intercom, allowing me to give free voice to unattractive thoughts. In the kitchen, no one can hear me complain.
“Nappies,” says the baby monitor. Every list starts with nappies.
“The thing is, I’m tired too,” I say, to no one. “I can’t read this list, or feel my face.”
“Onions,” says the baby monitor. In the background I hear The Jerry Springer Show blaring from the bedroom TV.
“I’ve forgotten how to write ‘onions,’” I say. “I’m going to have to draw a picture.”
“Okay, let’s bring out Brad,” says the baby monitor, in Jerry Springer’s voice. Brad’s fiancée, it transpires, has a surprise for Brad. From where I’m sitting, it doesn’t sound like a happy surprise.
“I wonder what it is that’s made Brad so angry,” I say, listening to the audience whoop for a while, forgetting who I am and how I came to be on Earth.
“Bin liners,” says the baby monitor. I let out a long, theatrical yawn and write “bni larnz.”
“Anything else?” I say. “I should go while I still remember how to drive.”
“If you’re just sitting there,” says the baby monitor, “you could bring me some Twiglets.”
“Yes, of course.”
“We’ll be right back after this,” says the baby monitor.
There can be no paternity leave for the stay-at-home dad, because I have nowhere not to go to. Instead I just slack off for a few weeks, dodging phone calls, filing late copy, and writing with severely impaired concentration. Few of the publications I write for notice the difference. It is clearly possible to carry on working under these conditions indefinitely, so I do.
I have a small office in the attic, but I often have to come down and work wherever in the house I’m needed to provide minimal parental cover. My biggest skill as a stay-at-home dad is not child-rearing; it’s being able to type while everyone around me is screaming. I’m hardly the primary carer (we have an au pair called Kate, so technically I’m the tertiary carer or, if you like, the parent of last resort), but I am such a domestic fixture that my oldest son actively disapproves of my going anywhere, as if it were a liberty fathers simply didn’t take. He spends a fair amount of time away from home himself—at nursery, or swimming—but when he gets back he likes having me available for a lengthy chat about How Chickens Get Dead.
In spite of my stay-at-home status, I am occasionally required to leave the house. At the end of a rare three-day stint commuting to someone else’s office, I come home to find the oldest one looking very disappointed indeed. He says he never wants me to go to work again, and I promise I won’t. A few months later, when I tell him I have to go away for two days on an assignment (to Scotland, if I recall, to visit the set of a TV program), he starts rolling around on his bed, his little fists clenched in fury.
“Why can’t you just write about this family?” he hisses.
There’s a lesson there: be careful what you wish for, children.
The millennium arrives on the tenth anniversary of the night I first convinced my wife to kiss me. I forget to remind her of this when I kiss her again at midnight, at a big party in a big tent. It is not unlike that first New Year’s Eve a decade before, in that we are both very drunk.
As a child I had once calculated the age I would be on January 1, 2000: thirty-six and a half. An immense sense of disappointment instantly swept through me as I realized I would be too old, decrepit, and joyless to appreciate the significance of such a huge event. My life would basically be over by then. Would I even notice the millennium?
To be honest, my prediction wasn’t that far off. On a typical Wednesday afternoon in the year 2000, the Apocalypse could get under way without my noticing. I am pleased, for the moment, to be considered the primary breadwinner, because it gives me an excuse to stay in my office on the day that Music & Movement takes place.
When the local toddlers’ music class got canceled, my wife decided to move the fixture to our house, arguing that it required no more than a CD player and a box of cheap rhythm instruments. It’s still called Music & Movement, even though it’s mostly Shouting & Crying, plus somebody’s au pair hitting a tambourine. Even with my office door shut, I can feel it through my shoes.
At some point my wife also decides we need a dog. I disagree—it’s my job to disagree—but I am not obstructive. I like dogs and I don’t really see how more noise or mess will make a difference at this stage. I have adapted to the chaos; it’s my normal working environment. Theoretically, I can carry on like this indefinitely.
Except that 2000 is also the year the money runs out.
My career strategy until this point had relied entirely on the regular promotion of commissioning editors who like me. Several have moved from magazines into newspapers, then from one newspaper to another. The year before I’d started to write for the deeply understaffed Independent on Sunday, where I’ve since been made to feel indispensable. I write profiles and TV reviews and magazine features. I regularly get rung up to fill in for AWOL columnists at short notice, and I have two regular slots of my own. I barely have time to write for anyone else, which means I don’t have to do the one part of my job I’m really bad at: casting around for more work. I wake up, change a nappy, drink a coffee, and spend the rest of my day with my nose pressed to the computer screen, making money.
Then there’s a surprise change of editor, and I’m history, just like that. It’s not a sacking, because I’m not on staff. I don’t even have a contract. All I had was a lot of eggs in a single basket, and now I don’t have that anymore. It’s the sort of setback that all freelance writers face on occasion, but this is the first time it’s happened to me. From one tax year to the next, my earnings halve.
At this point, my wife is not working at all. Our youngest child is still not a year old. For some years we have been living our lives at the very edge of our overdraft facility, and the sudden absence of a regular income tips us into dangerous territory immediately. For a while our marriage, which has stayed buoyant through repeated bouts of birth and death, looks as if it might founder over money.
Fighting about money is the worst kind of fighting. Money is freighted with associations—notions of power, control, success, status, dependence—so that when you fight about money, you’re always fighting about something else as well. For this reason arguments over money are particularly unpleasant. They also last longer, and they’re the most difficult to resolve: at the end of the fight, you still don’t have any money. Studie
s have shown that financial disagreements between couples are a huge predictor of divorce, bigger than disagreements about chores or sex.
Before we ran out of it, I hadn’t realized how rarely my wife and I disagreed about money. We never fought about spending or earning. We weren’t extravagant. Money came, money went. Our financial affairs were managed calmly, if haphazardly. That was fine; neither of us aspired to be in charge. We lived, as many people do, a short distance beyond our means. But the mortgage was covered every month, and it seemed we’d learned to manage the perpetual juggling act. If we were pilfering small sums from the future, that was the future’s problem.
However, in the time since I’d accidentally assumed the role of primary breadwinner, much has changed. Our division of labor has become, shall we say, a bit gendered. Because I can plausibly claim to be too busy earning, I’m excused a certain amount of parenting and general household bother. I never have to sit in a room with eighteen toddlers dinging a triangle and mouthing the words to “Nellie the Elephant.” In my bid to prioritize work, I have begun to ignore the cat sick on the stairs.
By the time the money stops coming in I’ve begun keeping regular office hours, staying put at my desk, busy or not, until at least five p.m., so that I can arrive downstairs when my children are having supper, in a rough approximation of my own father’s nightly return, when he would come in from the car and place his cold hands on the backs of our necks and we would squeal with delight.
“Get off, Daddy,” says the middle one. I remove my warm, clammy hand from his collar.
“Look who it is,” says my wife. “Your absentee father.” She hands me a bowl of mush to post into the baby.
“How was school?” I say to the oldest one.
“Not fine,” he says.
There are bills left out for me to see, bills with red stripes across the top. I know we don’t have the funds to pay them, and I’m not exactly making a killing by pretending to be busy. I’m not fooling anyone, not even myself.
For two months I make the terrible mistake of waiting to see what happens. Nothing happens. Work does not magically come my way; my sudden disappearance from the world of freelance journalism has not caused a ripple. No one is saying, “Hey, whatever happened to that guy who used to write that thing sometimes?”
Discussions about what to do next are tinged with rancor.
“This is not about whose fault it is,” says my wife, which to me sounds a lot like: this is your fault. My self-esteem plummets. I’m surprised how bound up my earning power and my self-worth have become; it’s only been a few years since they’d been—out of necessity—completely decoupled. Now I’m starting to wonder how we ended up in the precarious position of relying on an idiot like me for financial support. Can I get away with blaming my wife for that?
My efforts to reestablish contact with former editors are answered by e-mails with vague promises in them. Nothing, I can see, is going to go right soon, certainly not soon enough to get us out of our growing financial hole. I begin to wonder if I can get my old day job back, which might well mean the end of freelance writing, which might well be for the best.
Fortunately my wife, who is weird about many things, is not remotely weird about money. One of her greatest assets is her ability to separate financial issues from emotional ones, and to deal with the former with a certain brisk disdain. After several psychologically traumatic (for me) arguments about money, my wife decides that my complete failure as the primary breadwinner is, as far as she’s concerned, an issue to be revisited later, at leisure, when I least expect it.
“Stop freaking out about your career,” she says. “It’s a bad patch, that’s all. We just need to get some money from somewhere.”
It is, she insists, a simple matter of a loan. Her readiness to incur more debt is, in an odd way, a tremendous vote of confidence; it demonstrates a willingness to gamble on future success. Unable to share her confidence, I settle for keeping my mouth shut.
So we go to the bank and borrow against our home for what I hope will be the last time (not even the second to last, as it turns out), and then I set about slowly rebuilding my tepid freelance career from scratch. In the meantime, I find myself available for a shitload of parenting.
SOME INDEPENDENT FINANCIAL ADVICE
• All the financial planning advice you will ever receive as a couple comes with an unspoken but implicit step one: First, Get Hold of a Bunch of Spare Money. If you have completed step one, the rest is easy. If you haven’t, any subsequent advice is useless.
• If you do come across a bunch of spare money, and you also have a mortgage, then you should use all the extra money to pay down your mortgage. You probably won’t, but you should at least give it some thought, if only so you realize that it isn’t really spare money at all.
• The most important financial skill in any marriage is the ability to treat money—or more specifically a lack of it—as a common enemy. Don’t fight about the money. Fight the money.
• Cede control where appropriate. It’s simple: if you’re stupid about money, then you need to defer to the person in your marriage who isn’t. Earning more of the money, or all of it, shouldn’t grant you any special influence over its dispensation. It’s not your money—you’re married.
• The priorities of family spending are remarkably straightforward, and should not normally leave you with leftover money to argue about. Knotty questions of pride, status, power, and independence are for people who have come across a bunch of spare money, in which case I should have your problems.
• If you’re married, you need a joint account. An unwillingness to commingle your finances is, essentially, a reluctance to commit, and demonstrates either a lack of faith, a predilection for deceit, or a certain pessimism regarding the future.
• A periodic reckoning of where you stand financially is the best way to avoid a possible marriage-ending panic about debt. If your finances appear to be on a solid footing, including a comfortable savings cushion in case of future downturns or emergencies, check your figures. You’ve either forgotten something or you’ve added wrong.
IN SICKNESS
“It started four days ago, with a little sandpapery catch at the back of my throat,” I say, pausing to examine my tongue in the bathroom mirror. “Then came the usual blocked nose; followed by streaming eyes and intense sinus pain. Yesterday, of course, was all about the chesty cough.”
I am saying all this to myself, because my wife left the room as soon as I uttered the words, “I’m ill.” She has no more interest in my symptoms than she does in my most recent dream.
“But now my throat hurts all over again,” I say. “Which is weird.”
In direct violation of the contractual clause that figures so prominently in old-fashioned wedding vows, neither my wife nor I has any patience when the other is in sickness. We have both developed a remarkable tolerance for illness in children—my kids are certainly the only people who’ve ever thrown up on me whom I’ve subsequently sought to reassure by characterizing the incident as no big deal—but our distaste for spousal ill health is unyielding.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Neither of us could be described as members of nature’s nursing squad, nor are we model patients. Spouses often get the same contagious illnesses at the same time, generally from each other, so there’s always the difficult question of where to lay blame. Malady is also a competitive arena, where men are said to cheat through exaggeration, while women possess certain genetic advantages: they are, for example, immune to man flu.
Make no mistake: this is a double failing, and a big one. When you see how much comfort a little sympathy, and a portable telly, can bring to a bedridden child, it’s not hard to imagine what a fraction of the same could do for a marriage. Treating a poorly spouse with an attitude that could best be summed up as “I’ll love you again when you’re better” is not at all conducive
to Gross Marital Happiness. In our house this indifference is not confined to the odd head cold.
I have the normal range of maladies for a man my age, plus a few so rare I’ve been obliged to name them myself.* I also have a bad back. At one time I thought of it as a mildly interesting part of my character, a Kennedy-esque infirmity that I bore with much stoicism and a certain amount of silent wincing. It seemed, if nothing else, a noble enough reason to excuse myself from a parents’ evening: “My back’s gone; sorry.”
My wife does not feel the same way about my long-standing complaint. She thinks it’s boring, and an unworthy topic of conversation. Whenever my back goes out she finds the timing opportune. If the problem persists for more than a day she grows suspicious, because it’s impossible to determine the extent to which I’m exaggerating my symptoms.
“That rubbish needs to go out,” she says, pointing to two full-to-splitting black sacks side by side on the kitchen floor. She can see that I am leaning over in the doorway like a flower with a bent stem, but she chooses to ignore my obvious incapacity. I haven’t come down for tea and sympathy—just tea. In hindsight, it was a hideous miscalculation. After a long sigh, I shuffle toward the rubbish.
“I know your back hurts,” she says. “Stop acting.” She has always refused to accept that extreme lower back pain comes with its own set of behaviors: walking with a hesitant, asymmetrical gait, head to one side, as if the room had suddenly tilted; sinking to one knee to retrieve things from the floor; frequent small grunts of pain, or louder gasps, if your wife is in a different room; an expression of deep uncertainty when rising from a chair. Of course I’m acting; on its own a bad back doesn’t look like anything. If I didn’t walk around the house looking like a depressed question mark, no one would know I was suffering. In terms of visible signs of distress, those stigmatics have it easy.
I turn and position myself between the two sacks. Squatting and grabbing them each by their slimy top knots, I attempt a straight-backed clean and jerk. But one sack is much heavier than the other, wrenching me into a painful posture. I can’t help it—I yelp like a kicked dog.