by Matt Coyne
“Fucking spot-on, Miss Jenkins.”
So it made sense to tackle this problem early, before you started talking properly. The problem is that I casually swear quite a lot, so for me this was quite hard. Hopefully by the time you read this, I’ve widened my own vocabulary and successfully curbed my potty mouth. But as it stands, in this your first year, I have a tendency to swear like Gordon Ramsay with his penis trapped in a car door.
It was at your mom’s suggestion that we introduced a swear jar. And it was only with the introduction of the jar that I realized how persistent my bad language is. Complying with the jar, I was almost permanently broke from putting in fifty cents every time I uttered an expletive. So in the end, to avoid personal bankruptcy, I negotiated with your mom for a sliding scale of fines:
Months after its introduction, I’m continuing to keep up with the swear jar, and it’s actually proving to be quite a positive thing. Don’t get me wrong, I still swear just as much as I did, but at the rate I’m going, by the time you read this there will be enough in the jar to buy you your first house.
So when you did start to talk, it was some relief that your first words weren’t in any way offensive.
It was June 24, in the same week as Father’s Day, and you said the word “Daddy.”
Okay, it wasn’t exactly your first word: for months you had been saying words like “weeeelk,” “bumder,” “oddjob,” “Barry,” and something that sounded a bit like “muung-beeaans.”
. . . And for weeks before that you’d been calling your mom “Bob.”
But on June 24, when you first said “Daddy,” at that point you still hadn’t said “Mommy,” and that was a big deal in our house.
I’m not going to lie. It was a hard-fought, sometimes underhanded battle for whether you would say “Mommy” or “Daddy” first. It was a cold war. Your mom tried to get you to call me Matt rather than Dad and repeated the words “Mom Mom Mom” to you, over and over and at every opportunity. For my campaign, I repeated the word “Daddy” over and over. But I also took advantage of the fact that some of your favorite toys had a function on them that allowed you to record your own voice. And I went round each of them, loading them up with “Dad Dad Dad” in an attempt to imprint it on your brain. Basically, we both used the finest traditions of North Korean brain-rinsing to try to get you to say “Mom” or “Dad” first.
And I won.
In fairness, babies often say “Daddy” first. Apparently, it’s easier for their mouths to form the word. And, knowing this and understanding that defeat would be tough on your mom, I tried to be sensitive to her feelings. It’s always best to accept victory with grace and humility.
So I restricted my celebrations to just a few dignified laps around the house, with you on my shoulders, singing “We Are the Champions,” and an hour or so of pointing at your mom and chanting: “Who arrre yer? Who are yer?” etc., while she sat and ate her dinner.
We also drew her a little picture to cheer her up.
MILESTONE NO. 6: YOUR FIRST STEPS
Well, this is awkward.
Believe it or not, I wrote a rough plan for this book. I’m just looking at it now. The plan was to cover the first year, and it was at this point that I was going to write about when you started walking. What it was like when you hit this defining first-year milestone. The big one: your first steps.
Only thing is, as I write this, you’re not walking. In fact, you’ve not taken any steps at all. First or otherwise. And you turn one year old tomorrow.
So, thanks a lot, Charlie boy, book ruined.
Or maybe not.
I’ve just spoken to my mom, your nan, and she tells me that it was always unlikely that you were ever going to be walking by the time you were one. Apparently, most kids don’t start walking until well after they’re a year old. In fact, she also tells me that I didn’t start walking until I was eighteen months. “You really were a lazy sod” is her opinion of my lack of walkiness.
So don’t feel bad that you weren’t striding around the place when you were twelve months old. By all accounts, your old man was just as happy to watch the world go by, or to scoot after it on my belly or ass.
And besides, I’m going to guess that by the time you’re reading this (in your teens or twenties or whatever), you’ve been walking a while and you’ve no doubt gotten quite good at it. You’ve probably taken millions of steps by now, some of them better than others, and it doesn’t really matter when you took your first one. Knowing where some steps take you in life, there is every chance that the first was never going to be the most important. So, you know what? Not walking yet? Who gives a shit?
MILESTONE NO. 6: YOUR FIRST STEPS
MILESTONE NO. 6: REALIZING THAT MILESTONES JUST DON’T MATTER AS MUCH AS WE THINK THEY DO
So you’re not walking. Big deal.
Around this time, a few weeks before your first birthday, we took you along to a story-and-rhyme morning at our local library, and I listened in on a conversation that two moms were having, each with her own baby in her arms. (I was doing research for this book and not, as your mom suggested, “being a nosy bastard.”)
On the surface, this was a polite, friendly conversation about how each of their babies was progressing. But after a while it became clear that the conversation was actually a subtle battleground of one-upmanship.
It went a bit like this:
Mom 1: “So, very excited. Jessica has started to roll over.”
Mom 2: “Oh, Elliot was doing that very early. He’s actually sitting up on his own now.”
Mom 1: “Oh, well, that’s good. Jessica’s actually showing signs of crawling.”
Mom 2: “Well, Elliot is showing signs of standing up. We think he’ll be walking early.”
Mom 1: “Yes, Jessica seems much more focused on her talking, and everyone says she is very advanced for her age. I notice Elliot’s not too chatty.”
And so it progressed, with the advancements of each baby exaggerated with every skirmish. I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation (we had to leave), but I imagine, at the rate they were exaggerating, I could have returned an hour later to discover that Jessica had become a chess grandmaster, while Elliot had recently delivered a keynote speech to the UN on climate change, before curing diabetes. All of which was made all the more comical by the fact that there these babies lay, in their respective mothers’ arms, blissfully clueless, as one quietly shit itself and the other one stared at its own foot as if it were something from space.
So, Charlie, my boy, it is to this conversation that I return, as I think about you not walking. Because it is in this conversation between Jessica’s and Elliot’s moms that we see the worst in parents: the competitive bullshit that is ever-present, and the way in which “milestones” become the battlegrounds upon which competitive parenting is fought.
As your mom and dad, we tried not to fall for it, but we couldn’t help but peer over and measure you against the kids in class who were already crawling, the ones who were already burbling away, or the ones solving Fermat’s theorem on a whiteboard in the corner.
As I say, we tried not to fall for it, but all parents do. And, as a consequence of our being drawn into this nonsense, milestones are turned into markers of how our child is progressing, and they become nothing more than inexact measures of how we are performing as a parent. And when a milestone comes along that we don’t quite make, we start to worry that we might be doing something wrong. Which is bollocks. Because of course we’re doing something wrong . . . but so is everyone else.
The real shame of all this is that milestones become these negative monoliths, mile markers and targets to be hit, rather than what they should be, which is happy flagpoles by the side of the road that we can hang our memories from—memories that, when our little one is old enough, we can share with them . . .
Share with you.
So instead of telling you about your first steps, or any more of the standard tick-a-box moments of your firs
t year, I thought I’d tell you about a couple of milestones that are buried in the grass. Milestones from before you were even born. Milestones that matter. And maybe, when it comes down to it, they are the only ones out of all this lot that really do.
MILESTONE NO. -1 (MINUS ONE): HOW I MET YOUR MOM
I don’t doubt that this will come as a crippling shock, but: your dad, as a young man, wasn’t a massive hit with the ladies.
I know. Mind. Blown.
I collected comics and enjoyed sci-fi, Star Wars, that sort of thing. I even played the role-playing fantasy board game Dungeons and Dragons until well into my teens (I played as a Level 8 Magical Thief by the name of Fagin Swift-hands). And whereas now there is something cool about “geek culture,” back then there was no such thing; there were just the “losers.” To be a comic-collecting fan of Jedis was to be an outsider, and it was like kryptonite to girls.
The way I looked wasn’t bringing a great deal to the party either. I had my own individual sense of style. My signature look was characterized by center-parted hair down to my shoulders, and a taste for cardigans and band T-shirts. I was also quite skinny and wimpy, and had the fairly unimpressive vital statistics of Kate Moss after a nasty virus. So, with that picture painted, you can see why the possibility of me meeting someone special was quite remote.
But some great romances have remarkable beginnings.
Most don’t. And me and your mom’s? It didn’t. We met in a pub. That’s it.
Okay, as anecdotes go, that is pretty shit. But life is not a Richard Curtis film, and I think we should all be pretty glad that it isn’t. Because for two people to meet, it doesn’t need irony or coincidence or hilarious circumstances. Two people can come together anywhere, at any time, and there is something wonderfully mundane, ordinary, and everyday about it.
So I was standing in The Miner’s Arms (that’s the name of the pub, I wasn’t being cuddled by a miner) in Sheffield. I noticed your mom walk through the door, and I thought she was beautiful.
( . . . I’ve just taken a minute away from writing the last sentence to use a thesaurus. I wanted to find an alternative word to beautiful. A word that seems less sentimental, less overused, less like the name of a Christina Aguilera perfume. But there isn’t one. The other options were pleasing or handsome, which sounds like something you’d say about a cow—“pleasing, handsome, a damn good milker”—I’m just going to leave it at beautiful.)
I still remember what your mom was wearing, which I know sounds quite romantic but, I’ll be honest, it’s not that hard to remember. She was almost all in black. A black jacket, black skirt, black sweater, black tights. But also a pair of aquamarine Adidas Gazelles. In hindsight, she looked like she was attending a funeral but had nipped out for a run. I thought she looked cool as fuck.
But here is where the problem arose. She was cool as fuck, and I wasn’t. So when I saw your mom for the first time, it wasn’t with a sense of fireworks exploding or music playing in the background, it was with a sinking feeling: that there was no way that she would have any interest in me. No possibility that she would find herself staring back across the pub thinking: Who is that cool customer with the Jesus hair, shit-brown cardigan, and unmanly body shape of a fourteen-year-old gymnast?
So when your uncle Oz introduced us, I didn’t think: How can I get this girl to like me? What I actually thought was: I really, really hope that this girl is stupid or racist or has a terrible personality or is just an all-round dick. Something that will make me less bothered that I never stood a chance. It was defeatist, but it was realistic.
But, as we were introduced, she clinked my glass, and we talked for the rest of the night about nothing. Enough nothing that it became clear she was smart and kind. And as she mercilessly ripped the piss out of my cardigan, I thought: Oh, fuck. She’s funny. Damn.
It was in that moment that I hatched a plan to fool this depressingly dressed girl in the aquamarine Adidas Gazelles into thinking I was way more attractive, smart, interesting, and amusing than I actually was.
I asked her out, she said yes, and against all likelihood the plan worked.
Twenty or so years later, that plan is still going reasonably strong. Although I think she is beginning to suspect that I’m not as smart or funny as I originally made out. (Fortunately, it’s too late now; I’m like an old bathrobe that you don’t want to part with despite the fact that it’s crap.)
When I met your mom, I thought she was a “ten” and that I was a steady “five.” But she wasn’t the kind of person who cared. (Plus I’m funnier than she is, and everyone gains two points if they can make you laugh. And, as I point out to her sometimes, I’ll be able to make her laugh into old age when she looks like a fucking old boot, so the gap’s closing.)
Anyway, this was the moment when the two halves of your DNA collided in a controlled, fairly subdued explosion, and you were placed in fate’s mail.
And that’s it, as far as you’re concerned. Nothing happened, and there wouldn’t be another milestone for you for another sixteen years.
When we decided to have a baby.
MILESTONE NO. 0 (ZERO): WE DECIDE TO HAVE A BABY
So, where was I? Right, me and your mom met in a pub. I was drunk enough to ask her out, she was drunk enough to accept, and then nothing happened for sixteen years. Up to speed? Good.
I say nothing happened for sixteen years—that obviously isn’t true. I’m just not sure how relevant it is. We traveled a fair bit, bought a house, we got engaged.
We spent those years mostly happy, argued some. Because you argue with the people you love. That’s the way it works. (My sister, your aunt Jo, once stabbed me in the leg with a dart over an argument about whether a pop star called Jason Donovan was gay or not. Like I said, you argue with the people you love. A lot.)
Basically, me and your mom spent these sixteen years getting to know each other, and I now know everything about her.
For example, things your mom claims not to be scared of but actually is:
Thunder, lightning, spiders, flying, needles, daddy longlegs, the voices that people make when they inhale helium, leaving her supermarket cart unattended (even though she hasn’t paid for the contents yet, she still thinks someone will steal it), and bats.
She also claims not to be superstitious, but won’t cross on the stairs and won’t put shoes on the table—and if she sees a magpie, she salutes it and whispers under her breath: “Good morning, Mister Magpie” (I’m not even sure that’s a thing).
And because she is so much more together, and less flaky, than me, the things that I came to love about her more than anything are her imperfections. I love the fact that she pronounces the word avocado with an extra d, like “advocado.” And I love the fact that when she reads this bit, she’ll go apeshit that I told everyone that she pronounces the word avocado wrong.
Basically, before you came along, we were happy and had a pretty good life. We didn’t really talk about having kids. Weirdly, it just didn’t come up that often, and as we got older I think we both just kind of assumed that we wouldn’t have any.
Then one morning in 2009, I got a phone call from my dad, your granddad Gerald. He sounded kind of confused, and he stumblingly explained that he wasn’t feeling too well. That morning, he’d been in church, and when asked to do a reading he found himself halfway through and unable to concentrate. The words were spidering across the page and he couldn’t quite focus. Worried, we took him off to the hospital, and after a few days of tests, it turned out that he was more unwell than we thought and he had a type of cancer that had spread to his brain.
(Note: if you’re not Charlie and you’re reading this, I know what you’re thinking: Wow, this lighthearted book on parenting just took a serious left turn. Thanks a lot, Matt—two pages ago I was having fun, and now I feel like putting my head in the fucking oven. Well, don’t turn on the gas just yet. Because this is the story of how Charlie came to be.)
There are times for all of us whe
n circumstance will plunge its fist into your chest, tear out your heart, and show it to you, pink and beating. And for the year that my dad had left, as a family we were hollowed out. I miss your granddad a lot, and it feels like something is out of kilter with reality that you and he will never meet. You’d have gotten along.
But in the months he had left, we talked a lot about us as father and son. He apologized a lot for the mistakes he’d made as a parent. There weren’t any, but he apologized anyway. I apologized for my mistakes as a son. There were plenty, but he pretended there weren’t. And he talked about how he had come to terms with what was to come because his kids were settled and happy.
These were strange conversations. Maybe it’s because when you’re talking to someone who is dying, everything they say seems somehow profound and worth listening to.
What these conversations did, though, was make me see parenthood slightly differently. Your granddad was still a young man at the time of his diagnosis, and so had been given a pretty shitty deal. But he accepted that deal more easily because his children were happy, and I thought that a curious thing. There was no way, placed in his position, I could have so easily accepted such a raw fate, just because another human (even one that I was related to) was okay.
I started to realize that being a parent was defined by an odd sort of selflessness, an unselfishness I just didn’t have, and that the relationship between a parent and his or her kid was a genuinely unique one. And that maybe, as I lost one relationship to the great nothing, the closest I would ever come to finding it again would be from the other side of that equation as a dad to a son or daughter.
So when your granddad died, this experience, these conversations, and this new wisdom got scooped up with the feelings of mortality that come along with a parent dying. Your mom was close to your granddad, and she felt the same way, and all of this stuff was smashed together to make us realize that it might be quite good if you were in our lives.