How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  “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 . . .”

  As I bend to retrieve tent pole number one, something like a cello string snaps in my lower back. I make a strange, involuntary sound, and as I jerk upright I jab the tip of the tent pole through the fly sheet, tearing a six-inch, L-shaped gash. I turn to see my two children staring at me as if I were an insufficiently diverting repeat of Red Dwarf. A light rain begins to fall.

  In the morning, I can barely move. A night in a sleeping bag on a slope has done nothing good for my back. The sun is blazing as I shuffle, crabwise and listing slightly to port, in the same direction as the streaming crowd, my two children ahead of me.

  “We need to stay together,” I say. What I mean is: don’t leave me. The festival has four main stages, a number of smaller tents, a vast array of foodstuffs, even a special children’s area, but it lacks the one thing I am desperate for: a chair. There is no sitting down to be done anywhere; there is only standing up and lying on the hard earth.

  We walk the festival from end to end, alternatively listening to music and eating food. My wife’s hostility toward my bad back is nothing compared to my children’s cold indifference. They ignore the sudden, sharp intakes of breath and the quiet swearing. They consult the schedule, then the site map, and then they start pulling my arms.

  “Ow!” I say.

  “This way!” shouts the middle one. “It’s starting.”

  I jostled by crowds and struggle to cope with uneven grounds. Under the weight of the rucksack that contains our stealables, my twisted frame contorts further; one of my shoulders rises up to touch my ear. By the middle of the afternoon, however, I realize that I’m not going to die of a bad back after all, because I’m going to die of exposure first. We all are.

  “We must have hats,” I say. “Find hats.”

  After scouring the site for suitable headgear we choose two trilbies and a porkpie hat from an overpriced stall. It makes me smile to see my children i
n stupid hats, until I remember I am wearing one too.

  It is after midnight when we finally get back to the tent and I can lie flat and suck on my giant wine bottle. Both boys are hyped up and in no mood to sleep. They are not the only ones. People are playing drums next to my head.

  When we finally get home the next evening my wife insists on the usual debriefing session following any foray where I’m in sole charge.

  “What was the worst bit of all?” she says, eyes shining.

  “Definitely the end,” says the middle one. “When we had to pile all the stuff on Dad and lead him to the car like a donkey.”

  “I could carry,” I say. “I just couldn’t bend.”

  “He was so slow,” says the oldest. “It took ages.”

  “What was the second-worst bit?” says my wife.

  “Do we have any painkillers?” I say. “Would the ER be busy right now, do you think?”

  Life does not fly by when you’re trapped at a festival with a bad back, or stuck in standstill traffic on the M5, or listening to a child play “Moon River” on the violin for the 230th time. But this stage does end abruptly: before you develop any sort of knack for dealing with it, it’s over.

  Suddenly you find yourself looking at photos on a pin board: three boys, arranged by height, sitting on a bench with an apple apiece; a moon-faced eight-year-old in a stripy sweater, holding a kitten; two brothers arsing about at the top of a sand dune. They look just like your life, until you compare them to the hulking creatures rolling fags in your kitchen.

  It’s true what the old people say—it does go by fast, and you’ll miss it when it’s gone. But you shouldn’t feel too guilty about letting these years breeze past you. If you try and savor them, they just go by faster.

  * * *

  At least once a week my wife is wont to declare, without prior consultation, that “tonight’s supper is free-range.” “Free-range” does not, in this sense, refer to the dignified and highly ambulatory life of the chicken that gave its withered left breast to tonight’s edition of Spicy Ricey. “Free-range” in this context means “you can take your food and go wherever you want with it, provided it’s nowhere near me.”

  No one in our house has ever objected to a free-range supper. I usually take my plate and a brimming glass of wine and sit in front of the television. I might be joined by a child or two, but they usually head for the computer, or the Xbox. I think the youngest one sometimes eats his supper in the bath while watching a movie on a laptop—an indulgence I find objectionable for many reasons, but have also vowed to try one day. My wife eats in the kitchen, alone and at peace.

  The shared meal is the very center of our family life, which is probably why we have so many methods of escaping from it. “Today’s lunch,” my wife will sometimes announce, “is silent reading only.” A range of newspapers and magazines is provided, but diners may also bring their own books, or even laptops. Everything is permitted, except talking.

  Sitting down together every night was not necessarily part of the original parenting plan. When the children were tiny they ate separately from us, but over time their supper hour got later while ours got earlier, until the two merged into a single, problematic sitting. As a meal the shared supper more or less succeeds—everyone sits, everyone eats—but as a social occasion it leaves a lot to be desired. As a proving ground for civilized dining, it’s positively counterproductive.

  Conversation is by turns bad-tempered—“Why are you being such a dick?” is a routine, if officially proscribed rejoinder—and exuberantly inappropriate. The youngest usually makes a bid to leave the table before I’ve even sat down. Catastrophic spills are common, and fights sometimes break out. Meals embarked upon with the best intentions occasionally end with my wife saying, “You’re all horrible,” and walking out.

  I wish I could say that the family lunch becomes easier to stage as the children get older, but it actually gets harder. Teenagers fight among themselves more. The swearing only gets more baroque. With each passing year, everyone learns to eat a little faster. I never imagined I would pine for the days when the youngest two were still in high chairs, and spent the entire meal delicately applying food to their faces like makeup.

  I’m not saying I do not enjoy a chaotic Sunday lunch, because I do. I have a reserved seat at the end of the table, so for once I feel nominally in charge. The children aren’t usually in a rush to be elsewhere, because they’ve usually just got out of bed, and the meal gives me a chance to catch up with their business. As someone who rarely leaves the house other than to walk the dogs, I find the recounting of an ordinary school day fascinating, especially if they do the teachers in different voices. I have a particular fondness for stories about people being arrested on the bus, and I am rarely disappointed on that score. When this avenue of inquiry has been exhausted, I enjoy hearing a brief summation of my children’s weekly achievements.

  “What’s the best thing that happened to you this week?” I say, indicating the youngest with the tines of my fork.

  “I missed maths because of a fire,” he says.

  “Well done,” I say, turning to the middle one. “What about you?”

  “They read out my tweet on the poker channel,” he says.

  “You must be very proud,” I say.

  “I recorded it on my phone,” he says. “Look.”

  “No phones at the table,” says my wife.

  “I’m finished,” says the youngest.

  “No, you’re not,” my wife says.

  “Pass the salad,” I say.

  “You’re the salad,” says the middle one.

  “Ah,” I say. “Touché.”

  I’m sure I will miss these days once the children excuse themselves from the table in order to move to Australia, but at the moment the best thing about a big Sunday lunch is that it means Sunday supper is automatically downgraded to free-range.

  TIPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL FAMILY MEAL

  • Where possible, don’t limit it to family. Sunday lunch with other people invited is much easier, provided you can get other people to come. The presence of non–family members has an eerily civilizing effect on adolescent boys in particular. And the presence of other children helps to dilute the bad behavior of yours.

  • Contrary to my wife’s opinion, you cannot curtail a graphic dinner table discussion about newsreaders vomiting live on air by introducing the topic of homework.

  • Sometimes the best time for a family meal is a day when the whole family is not present. Partial gatherings are usually more successful, and removing one child from the equation always makes things go more smoothly. I don’t know whether family meals are more harmonious in my absence. I don’t give a damn how they behave when I’m not there.

  • You can cram a lot of togetherness into twenty minutes. Children do not, as a rule, like to linger over meals, and consider any noneating time spent at the table to be a form of imprisonment. Obviously manners, discipline, and a parent’s tiresome need to make a point occasionally require a child to stay in his chair longer than he might care to, but if you get a quarter of an hour out of him, you’re doing well.

  • Introduce new recipes and exotic foodstuffs only on free-range nights and at silent reading lunches. It takes children some time to acquire new tastes, and you don’t want to hear anybody’s opinion the first time.

  17.

  Keeping the Magic Alive

  My wife and I do not say “I love you” to each other every day, or even once a month. I don’t begrudge couples who do, but I would like to put in a good word for the ones who don’t. It can’t be the end of the world, this failure to be consistently demonstrative, and if your relationship—like mine—is partly founded on a shared distrust of the falsely effusive, it’s hard to invest any faith in the power of some snuggly incantation.

  I personally believe there are lots of ways to expres
s one’s feelings that don’t rely on those three words uttered in that exact order on a regular basis. It’s perfectly possible to replicate the gist of a commonplace exchange like “I love you” and “I love you too” using slightly different language. In our house, for example, we prefer “You’ll be sorry when I’m dead” and “I know.”

  Unfortunately, nothing I have read about maintaining a happy, healthy relationship supports my position. All the tips I’ve absorbed over the years have stressed the importance of making an effort, of saying the actual words out loud and forcing oneself beyond the embarrassment that comes with doing anything out of the ordinary for the first time. Almost every prescription for upholding romance mandates ritual reinforcement, regular doses of affection, and the constant transformation of positive regard into demonstrative behavior. It’s invariably presented as difficult and time-consuming work. “We have a myth that love should be easy,” a relationship counselor once told me when I had the temerity to complain about the effort implied by his advice. “Love is a skill; you have to learn it and practice it.”

  I still want love to be easy, and for that reason I am terribly susceptible to any method that sounds as if it might constitute a shortcut. This was what first attracted me to a newspaper article suggesting that four hugs a day is the secret to a happy marriage. I know from experience that my wife is suspicious of unscheduled displays of affection, but written down like that, four hugs just didn’t seem like that many.

  “Four hugs a day,” I say as my wife tries to squirm her way out of hug one. “I think it’s the way forward.”

  My approach for hug two, just before lunch, is from the front—moving in slowly, arms low, palms showing, approximately the technique you would use to take a picnic basket away from a bear.

  “Thank you,” says my wife, petrifying under my touch. She doesn’t seem to be responding positively to the treatment, but that’s okay. One of my favorite aspects of the quick-fix prescription is the total lack of nuance, subtlety, or follow-up. The newspaper article doesn’t suggest alterations to the technique in the event of a poor outcome. It just says “four hugs.” I find I’m even beginning to enjoy her irritation a little. It doesn’t matter whether she likes it or not. I win either way.