The Single Dad's Guide to the Galaxy: Parenting in the real world

by Roger McEwan

  Finally, and maybe most importantly, when all these tactics failed, when I wanted to take the easy way out and escape, the biggest thing I did was to not beat myself up. I would wake the next morning and give myself a mental cuddle rather than a good kicking. I clean the kitchen, brew some strong coffee and start again.

  If you’re anything like me you’ll have a queue of people in your life ready to find fault, criticise and generally make you feel guilty and unworthy. The last thing you should ever do is join that queue. I like the way Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post fame, described it when she said it was like having an obnoxious roommate in your head. So try talking to yourself as though you were talking to your best friend. ‘It’s okay, you’re fine.’ Or ‘It happens when you are under a lot of pressure, it’s no big deal, you can still have a great day’. Not the roomie from hell, ‘What the feck were you thinking, you eejit?’. Or ‘You ought to be ashamed, you are without doubt a gobshite parent’. I have no idea why but my obnoxious roommate seems to be Irish.

  Writing the majority of this book has been fun, but this chapter, together with a couple of others that didn’t make the cut, has been a test. In that regard my writing has roughly followed my experience of single parenting – in the main it’s been fun, an adventure, albeit unplanned. But there are a couple of areas that I would have preferred to sweep under the carpet, out of sight, out of mind. However, an account that included only the positive aspects and ignored the harder subjects and times would be false. A memoir through rose-tinted spectacles.

  I think most single parents will probably recognise aspects of this chapter in their own lives, whether they like to have the occasional drink or more. When the going gets tough, most of the time I’m able to rise to the challenge and emerge, win, lose or draw, better for the experience. But occasionally I wave the white flag and live to fight another day.

  Reflections

  Escape, via alcohol (or other means), can be tempting when pressure builds but try and make the trips few and far between.

  When you become a single parent, with no one around to judge, your drinking habits can deteriorate.

  If you recognise you are drinking too much and can simply stop or return to your previous level, great. If not, make some changes in your life to help such as:Reduce the amount of alcohol available.

  Find activities to do to occupy the quiet times

  Exercise more. This will at least help counter any excesses.

  If you over-indulge from time to time, don’t beat yourself up. Treat yourself as your own best friend.

  23. In the Thick of Things

  The things that matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least.

  Johann Goethe (writer and philosopher, 1749-1832)

  Rog, now fourteen, had an upcoming piano exam during a week he was at Rose’s. The piano and the ability to practise was, however, at my house. This didn’t present a problem as Rog is very responsible and we arranged that on Wednesday and Thursday he would walk to my house after school, let himself in and practise until Rose turned up after work.

  I came home on Wednesday around 6.30pm after the gym and I found the house as expected. It was exactly as I’d left it apart from an empty ginger beer bottle and various discarded snack food wrappers on the bench. No surprise there. The one change I hadn’t anticipated was that Rog had turned on his computer. I assumed that after he had practised for what he considered to be a sufficient length of time, he’d taken a break and played a game or surfed the net. Maybe Rose had been late. It has been known to happen.

  To encourage him to focus on the task at hand, and to make sure he knew that I didn’t miss anything, I left a note on his computer: ‘This is not a piano!!!’ I signed the note with a winking smiley face so he knew I wasn’t serious or annoyed.

  The next day the house was once again as expected. Another empty ginger beer bottle and accompaniments in the kitchen and the computer had once again been turned on. This time there was a note on my desk: ‘It’s a metaphorical piano.’ Rog signed it with the same winking smiley face.

  Now I’m not entirely sure that his use of the word metaphorical was appropriate, but I wasn’t about to challenge that aspect because my English and grammar is what I’d describe as tradesman-like. The point I’m trying to make is that your children go from being innocent and unknowing to incredibly clever and wise beyond their years seemingly overnight. When they were little I didn’t have to try hard to keep one step ahead of them. They believed everything Rose and I told them, evidenced by the existence of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and a range of invented characters designed to illicit the desired behaviour, usually sleep.

  This is the age when children are arguably at their loveliest. When you play hide and seek, unless you stand in the middle of the room with a lamp on your head, they never find you. And when they hide, their leg is always sticking out ninety degrees from the curtain or the bed, the two places they always choose. This provides you with the opportunity to develop your acting skills – ‘Oh forsooth, they’ve vanished like an old oak table. I fear I will have to summon the local constabulary.’ Admittedly it’s bad acting but the audience is forgiving. For an extra thrill we sometimes played hide and seek outside at night with torches. This allowed me the opportunity to occasionally explode from my hiding place just to hear Liv’s soprano scream. I’m amazed the neighbours never called the police.

  If you can’t stay one step ahead of your children when they’re little, you’re just not trying. Cathy once famously put the clocks forward an hour because she was feeling sick, which hurried her two off to bed early. If the Tooth Fairy catches me out, which he or she often did, and the children emerged in the morning looking disappointed and cashless, I would invent some vaguely plausible ruse to distract them while putting money under their pillow. ‘You see, you just didn’t look hard enough!’ After they wised up to the non-existence of the Tooth Fairy, I told them that she still might deliver at Mum’s house so don’t rip your tooth out, as Liv liked to do, until you're there.

  STAYING RELEVANT

  But there comes a point in time, quicker than you’d hope, when there’s little to be gained in trying to put one over on your children. From the day Rog, and therefore Liv, understood how the world worked, trying to pull the wool over their eyes became an exercise in futility. And it gets worse. With their new-found knowledge and confidence they’re not only aware, they also discover they too have the power of stealth and deception.

  After I’d put the children to bed, it must have been around Christmas, I was still hungry so I nipped into the kitchen. I spied the Christmas mince pies and quietly, as cellophane wrappers tend to make a racket, I eased one out. I hadn’t realised that Liv had followed me and was now hiding, and watching, from the alcove next to the kitchen. I must have been hungry because I shoved the whole thing in my mouth – they were only small – and nearly choked when she leapt out. ‘Caught you,’ she hissed, imitating Gollum (we’d been working our way through the Lord of the Rings films). Then, as a result of my overstuffed mouth, she added Gollum-style, ‘Ohhhh the fat one, he eats it whole.’

  If you tell little white lies past this point in your children’s development you can get yourself into trouble on the credibility front. I learnt this from an example that thankfully wasn’t mine, it was Rose’s. She told the children that as she’d started her new job in Wellington she couldn’t take time off to look after them in the holidays. Plausible and accepted – until two months later, having forgotten her earlier groundwork, she told them she was taking off for a week when she didn’t have them because she needed a break. Wheels and cogs turn quickly in my children’s heads. I don’t know what the repercussions were but I know that in the next school holidays she took the week off. My children, Rog especially, have memories like elephants and have no problem playing the guilt card mercilessly. Here’s a saying worth remembering: always
tell the truth, it’s easier to remember.

  When the children reached this more knowing age my philosophy recognised that it was time to stop treating them as the children. Not that I think you should treat them as a fully formed adults, not yet, but more in the manner of adults with training wheels. To do this I didn’t develop a plan to guide how we interacted, I didn’t even have a vague idea. I could’ve read one of the myriad of books on parenting tweenies and teenagers written by ‘experts’ who have researched the field and come up with sound, sensible advice. That would have given me some ideas to try, but with the benefit of hindsight I don’t think they’re necessary.

  As my children became more confident our relationship evolved naturally to match the altered situation. On reflection, it became evident that this happened simply because I was closely involved in my children’s lives. I was in step and that meant that when things needed to be tweaked, they were tweaked. If you aren’t in step then your relationship will probably feel more like a series of staggered, and staggering, lurches as you periodically try to catch up. In between times the communication gap between you and your children will grow and you’ll lose relevance and gain frustration. This is a phenomenon often brushed off as ‘You can’t talk to teenagers’. You can’t if you don’t know what’s important in their lives. They’re maturing and you’re being left behind.

  I was talking with a married male friend who related an incident that he’d had with his thirteen-year-old son. The story itself isn’t important, it was his perception of the situation and how he handled it that I found intriguing. To cut to the chase, he told me that he realised he was still treating his son as a small child. When this dawned on him he decided to treat him like an adult. It was good that he recognised the problem but I think his action was too much of a leap. From listening closely, I got the impression the relationship went from parent-child to something closer to manager-employee overnight. That has to be confusing. In theory a manager-employee relationship is an adult-adult relationship, but it’s often not because most managers think and act like teachers.

  Apart from the speed of change, another important point from this story is that treating your children more like adults shouldn’t equal treating them more like just any adult. That’s like treating your partner like any other woman or man and the reason that’s unlikely to go down well is because it’s dumb. You need to treat your children like the very special soon-to-be adults that they are to you.

  I didn’t do anything in particular to change the way I treated Rog and Liv and we navigated and negotiated our way through these years together. I couldn’t treat them identically either. Apart from them being a boy and a girl, Rog was older and therefore needed more latitude. As younger siblings do, Liv grew quicker by learning from Rog’s example but our relationship was still different. Like the previous observation, trying to have the same relationship with all your children is also dumb because they’re individuals. There are many aspects that will be common, but many others will be substantially different. It’s not one size fits all, even if you have twins!

  I appreciate that this may be hard advice to heed because it isn’t a simple recipe of doing A, B, C and D and Bob’s your uncle. Self-help books are appealing because they’re sold on this basis: they tell you their generic solution and all you have to do is implement it successfully, which is usually impossible. They have that TV shopping channel formulaic feel to them: ‘For only $99 plus postage and handling get the ten-minute parent workout, a sure-fire short cut to a wonderful and fulfilling relationship with your children’.

  There aren’t short cuts and it’s only hard work if you make it hard work. If you’re fully engaged with your children you’ll all enjoy the good old days you’ll remember and they don’t last for long. Soon enough they’ll turn into fully formed adults and will be heading out into the world.

  There are fathers – I’m using that term deliberately than the warmer term ‘dads’, who will end up wondering why their adult children don’t have a lot of time for them. They’ll hear from them on their birthday, Christmas, maybe Father’s Day if their spouse reminds them, or if they need money, but seldom else. No dropping in or unexpected phone calls because they just want to talk. Harry Chapin’s song ‘Cats in the Cradle’ describes this situation succinctly. There’s a massive difference between staying in touch because you feel you should – an obligation – and because you want to, which is friendship. Fathers who believe that they can make up for lost time by having more to do with their children when they’re older are, I think, in the main going to be disappointed.

  In saying that, it’s never too late to get closer to your children if you’re doing it for the right reasons. You can’t change the past and you can only influence the future. The day you become aware of why the gap between you exists is the day you can start doing something about it. I wouldn’t suggest bounding back into your children’s lives like a reborn Ebenezer Scrooge. I’d start by taking a greater interest and communicating on a regular basis for no reason. It takes time to develop a relationship; biological considerations gain you few, if any, Brownie points.

  I suspect that the underlying problem for many fathers, and far fewer mothers, is that they haven’t come to terms with the concept that when you have children you no longer come first, your children do. Always. I empathise with parents who, through personal circumstances, aren’t able to be around as much as they’d like, but those who choose to be absent, who prioritise work and their own interests, or take time for themselves when they could be spending it with their children, will one day have a lot of time to reflect. Maybe that’s what they wanted.

  TRUST

  Having a close relationship with your children as they develop means your life as a parent becomes easier, not harder. This is because the relationship is built on trust. I trust my children to act responsibly, but maintain a wary eye for signs that I need to intervene. They trust me to be fair and consistent. As previously noted, trust is fundamental in all adult relationships and without it you’re back in the playground. In my first ‘real’ job we were managed like children and so, when the manager left the building, we acted like children and started playing cricket in the corridor and generally goofing around. When we saw his or her car return, we scrambled back to our desks and looked busy.

  Please, however, don’t think I have it completely sorted and my children act perfectly and like adults all the time. They don’t. They’re adults-in-training and I still have to be a parent from time to time. I police bedtime and the biscuit jar, nag about clothes and drag them away from the computers and screens. But if I need to, I can trust them to put themselves to bed or turn their light off after half an hour’s reading. They manage their own homework, know the chores they need to do and I can leave them at home, now they are old enough, without fear that I’ll come home to a nightmare.

  When I came back from overseas, just before I succumbed to jetlag I explained that I would get dessert after I rested my eyes for five minutes. I woke up fresh as a daisy at 3am to find that they’d eaten dessert, put the plates in the kitchen and were tucked up in bed asleep. They would have brushed their teeth as well. My children have worked out that there are times that they must act responsibly and times when the world is fair game.

  Money is an area that I think can indicate how much trust you’ve developed with your children. I keep containers on my desk for loose change as it weighs down my pockets. I don’t count it and I’ve no idea how much is there. Rog and Liv dip into this when they need it for school although they always ask. I told them, when I showed them the containers, that I trusted them 100 per cent. If it didn’t work out, I would change the system. My hunch is that they prefer to be thought of as trustworthy and treated like an adult.

  Slightly more daringly, they also know the pin number of my bank card and credit card. Once they knew one they knew them all as like 99 per cent of the population, I have one number for
all my cards. I didn’t plan to give it to them, it happened because during its all-too-frequent use they picked up the number. I don’t see it as an issue and I can’t be bothered having to remember a different number, although it did create an interesting situation in the supermarket.

  ‘Can I pay?’ Liv asked.

  ‘Sure, where’s your wallet?’

  ‘I meant with your card, eejit.’ Liv uses the word from Mrs Brown’s Boys with affection. I think.

  ‘Okay,’ and I gave her my bank card which she swiped through the EFTPOS terminal. Just as she went to put in the pin number, a red-faced checkout lady came bustling over.

  ‘She can’t pay,’ she said loudly and stridently. Liv took a step back and it felt as though we were under a dazzling spotlight. Supermarkets are generally boring places but we were starring in our own ‘play for today’ and entertaining our fellow shoppers.

  ‘Why would that be?’ I asked slowly.

  ‘Because she’s buying alcohol and she’s underage.’

  ‘No she isn’t …’ The checkout lady, minus her checkout, looked confused as my twelve-year-old Liv definitely looked under-aged. I helpfully added, ‘… buying alcohol that is. I am. It’s for me.’

  ‘But she’s paying.’

  ‘No, I’m paying, it’s my card.’

  ‘Does she know your pin number?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That’s madness!’

  I smiled and shrugged. There was little point in trying to describe why Liv knowing my pin wasn’t a problem. The non-checkout lady was now very confused. She thought for a few seconds before taking us right back to square one as though the previous conversation hadn’t happened.