What We're Teaching Our Sons

by Owen Booth

  The life we’ll be able to build for our sons.

  Then the pitchfork-wielding locals – who have come to snatch their daughters back from the divorced and separated and widowed fathers – break down the door and set fire to everything with their flaming torches.

  Later, in the airport as we wait for our flight to be called, our sons bring us copies of the local paper, show us the story about the sightings of the creature. They know how badly we’re taking this.

  They put their arms around our shoulders.

  ‘Tell us how life first evolved,’ they say, kindly. ‘Tell us again.’

  The Wonderful Colours of the Non-Neurotypical Spectrum

  We’re teaching our sons about the wonderful colours of the non-neurotypical spectrum.

  We’re teaching them about what the spectrum is, and what it means, and where some of them and some of us might be on it. We’re teaching them about how a person’s position on the spectrum might manifest itself in the particular things that they’re interested in, and/or how they might behave.

  ‘It’s a spectrum,’ we explain, ‘lots of people are on it. That’s the point of it.’

  Some of us, of course, are more on it than others. Statistically, that is. The spectrum is nothing if not a broad church.

  We’re currently in a branch of Games Workshop, about to buy our sons their first set of miniature role-playing figures. As we were once taken by our fathers to buy our own first set. Our sons stare in wonder at the rows and rows of tiny plastic orcs and space marines, at the shelves full of rule books, at the trays full of four-sided and six-sided and eight-sided and ten-sided and twelve-sided and twenty-sided dice.

  Nowadays, we explain to our sons, you can’t move for all the non-neurotypical people in films and books and television series. And of course they’re all geniuses and superheroes. But where were they when we were growing up?

  Where were they when we were playing Dungeons and Dragons and writing computer programs in our bedrooms and wondering why we were so weird? Who did those fathers among us who are on the spectrum have to identify with?

  Not, as we remind our sons, that this is about us. This is about our sons, wherever they are, on and off the spectrum.

  Our wonderful sons, who talk too loud or who don’t talk at all. Our wonderful sons who don’t always understand that other people might not share their enthusiasms. Our sometimes withdrawn and distant wonderful sons. Our wonderful sons who absolutely cannot keep still. Our wonderful sons who go to places where we can’t follow. Our wonderful sons who were obsessed with jigsaw puzzles at the age of two. Our wonderful sons who may or may not struggle with eye contact. Our wonderful sons who are statistically more likely to be interested in Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games, but only statistically. Our wonderful, systematising sons. Our wonderful sons who might find it difficult to interpret non-verbal social cues. Our wonderful, often overly literal sons. Our wonderful sons who may or may not struggle to know what is and isn’t appropriate in polite conversation. Our wonderful sons who sometimes can’t cope with loud noises, or certain textures against their skins. Our wonderful sons who like to do things a certain way, who always eat their dinner, for instance, one type of food at a time. Our wonderful sons who can’t do small talk. Our wonderful list-making sons.

  Our wonderful, beautiful, hilarious sons.

  Martians

  We’re teaching our sons about Martians.

  For the last few weeks a group of lonely billionaires have been all over the news talking about their plans to populate the Red Planet. They’re auditioning for brave and clever and able-bodied young men and women to help them build dynamic new low-tax civilisations on Mars and across the asteroid belt.

  In return they’re promising adventure and excitement and the potential for heroic deaths.

  Naturally, our sons are intrigued. For as long as they can remember they’ve been following the adventures of the unmanned Curiosity and Opportunity rovers as they roam the planet’s dusty surface. Those brave robots seem almost like family members.

  ‘Can we go to Mars?’ our sons ask us.

  We’re not unsympathetic. When we were children our fathers read The War of the Worlds to us as a bedtime story. We remember glorying in the destruction of Woking and London, which seemed like far less interesting places than the Martian invaders’ home planet. When we were our sons’ age we wanted to go to Mars too.

  It’s the potential for heroic deaths bit that we’re not comfortable with.

  ‘What about the radiation?’ we ask. ‘Without the protection of the earth’s magnetic field you’re going to be exposed to constant bombardment from cosmic rays.’

  ‘We’re young,’ our sons say, ‘what does radiation matter to us? We’re indestructible.’

  ‘Space sickness,’ we say. ‘Explosive decompression. Muscle atrophy and shrinking spines caused by low gravity. And that’s just the journey there. Do you know how many Mars missions have crashed on landing?’

  ‘It’s the guy who invented battery-powered sports cars,’ our sons insist. ‘If he doesn’t know how to successfully land spaceships, who does?’

  ‘What about aliens?’ we ask. ‘Or deadly space bacteria? Or meteorites? Or dust storms?’

  Our sons look at us.

  ‘You can’t protect us from the everyday dangers of life in the solar system,’ our sons say. ‘Sooner or later you’re going to have to let us go break our hearts on the sharp edges of the universe, whether you like it or not.’

  So we tell them we’ll think about it.

  It’s the fifth of August. We realise that somewhere on Mars the plucky little Curiosity rover will be playing ‘Happy Birthday’ to itself, as it has been programmed to do on the same day every year since its touchdown in 2012.

  We imagine our brave sons topping some Martian hill, watching as the pale and distant sun rises on their cold and beautiful new world, forty million miles away from our arms.

  We wonder what songs they’ll sing.

  The Ones that Got Away

  We’re teaching our sons about the ones that got away.

  We’re teaching them about missed opportunities, and roads not taken, and bad timing, and bad luck. We’re explaining how every choice that a person makes, or doesn’t make, ends up contributing to the way that their life turns out. We’re telling them that sometimes it doesn’t matter what choices you arrive at, or how well you plan, or how hard you want or deserve something.

  ‘Sometimes the odds are just against you,’ we say, and sigh for emphasis.

  ‘So you just think about that next time,’ the younger sons tell their older brothers, narrowing their eyes and drawing their fingers across their throats.

  We take our sons on a tour of all the places where we’ve made spectacularly bad decisions, where we couldn’t talk our way out of things any more, where we ran out of luck. Where the courses of our lives took huge and irreversible turns, whether we liked it or not.

  We have to hire a fleet of buses to accommodate everyone, book the hotels in advance.

  We visit out-of-season Dutch seaside towns and French vineyards and Finnish saunas and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan. We go back to beach parties in south-east Asia that have been running, non-stop, for over twenty years. We stand on the decks of wrecked oil tankers and wish we could have shouted ‘port’ instead of ‘starboard’. We stare up at the big walls of Yosemite and remember the knots that didn’t hold.

  We think about the ones who got away, wondering where many of them are now.

  In fact, we know exactly where many of them are now. We looked on the internet. It took us about five minutes. They’re happily married or single or cohabiting or living in experimental modern partnerships, with or without children or their dream careers or challenging situations to overcome. With exactly the same big and small problems as everyone else.

  ‘Does everyone always end up wishing their lives had turned out differently?’ our sons ask.
They’ve been thinking things over. We’ve all been on the bus for hours, driving through endless banana plantations. We’re not sure what country we’re in, or why we’re here.

  ‘We don’t wish our lives had turned out differently,’ we say, turning to our sons, and we mean it. ‘If our lives had turned out differently then we wouldn’t have had you.’

  ‘You might have had other children though.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have been as good as you.’

  ‘Everyone says that about their children.’

  ‘That’s because it’s true,’ we say.

  And it is.

  Our sons digest what we’ve been saying. We think about the children we didn’t have, remember what that felt like, remember what we would have given, then, for things to be different.

  ‘You might have had girls,’ our sons say, with mock horror.

  ‘Girls are all right,’ we say. ‘Your cousins are girls. They’re great.’

  ‘Still.’

  We think about it.

  ‘Yeah, it would be weird, wouldn’t it?’

  Our sons put their heads on our shoulders, watch the banana trees going by out of the bus window. And we know that, given the choice, we would be happy to lose everything again, and more, just to end up here – wherever here even is – right at this moment.

  Right now.

  Video Games

  We’re teaching our sons about video games.

  We’re telling them how video games have helped get us through some of the most difficult times in our lives, and how they’ve made us miss out on some other times altogether. We’re explaining how video games cemented our most important relationships, and how they were responsible for the loss of at least half of our twenties. And our thirties.

  We tell them how their mothers spent hours playing Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia when they were pregnant, sitting on giant bean bags in front of the TV.

  We don’t tell them about how, as thirteen-year-olds, we sneaked out of school to play Dragon’s Lair in the arcade in town the day it was released. Even our own fathers don’t know that. We don’t want to be giving our sons any ideas.

  ‘You’re standing too close to the screen,’ we keep telling our sons.

  Our sons wait until we leave the room again, and then all shuffle back to where they were before.

  We tell our sons the story of the boy whose father died when he was very young, leaving him with scattered memories of their time spent playing video games together – and an old games console that the boy couldn’t bear to look at for ten years.

  When the boy finally turned the machine back on at the age of sixteen, we tell our sons, he found that his father’s best lap from the racing game they used to play together was still saved on the hard drive.

  His father, preserved for ever as the ghost car you race against when you’re trying to improve your lap time.

  His father, endlessly speeding away from him, as the boy spent the next few months playing the game obsessively, gaining a few fractions of a second every day.

  Imagining his father’s hands on the wheel of the car in front, his father’s eyes in the mirror.

  Until the day that the boy became good enough that he was able to catch and overtake his father’s car, and watch him recede into the distance. And then be wiped from the machine’s memory as the boy crossed the finish line, his own perfect lap finally replacing the old man’s.

  Our sons glance at us, look back to the screen.

  ‘But how does that even –’

  We sit down next to them, pick up the spare controller.

  We’ve got a few years on them yet.

  The Extinction of the Dinosaurs

  We’re teaching our sons about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

  As all fathers, everywhere, must eventually teach their sons.

  We’re teaching them about the impact of the fifteen-kilometre-wide asteroid or comet that struck the shallow seas off the coast of Mexico approximately sixty-six million years ago, and which likely threw so much rock into the atmosphere that the sun was blocked out for a year. We’re explaining about the short-term effects of the global firestorm and the long-term effects of the global winter that followed the impact.

  ‘Everything that didn’t burn to death, starved,’ we tell our sons. ‘Pterosaurs and dinosaurs on land. Plesiosaurs and mosasaurs and ammonites in the sea. Just about every animal on earth that weighed more than around twenty-five kilograms went extinct.’

  ‘Except crocodiles,’ our sons say. ‘Crocodiles survived.’

  ‘Well, yes, except crocodiles,’ we say. ‘But crocodiles can go without food for a very long time.’

  ‘But if crocodiles could survive …’ our sons say, ‘then how can we be sure about everything else?’

  ‘Crocodiles are ectothermic!’ we say. ‘Plus, they live in streams. Animals that live in streams tend to feed on detritus that gets washed in from the land. There were dead animals everywhere. That’s a very specific, specialist food source. Most animals couldn’t have exploited that niche.’

  Our sons just look at us. They’ve heard this argument before.

  So we put together a series of expeditions to explore the Venezuelan jungle, the remote mountains of New Guinea, the high Antarctic desert. We send mini-subs to the bottom of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. We spend two years contracting horrible tropical diseases, and accidentally discovering new species of man-eating snakes and giant spiders, and rewriting the history of the last ice age.

  But no dinosaurs.

  Our sons remain unconvinced.

  ‘Dragons, too,’ they say.

  There follows a stand-off. Until eventually, inevitably, we give up.

  ‘Okay, fine,’ we say, admitting defeat. ‘Dinosaurs and dragons still exist. Somewhere.’

  Our sons are satisfied with that. Everyone goes away happy.

  But.

  But one day, we promise ourselves, we’ll explain to them that the asteroid-induced catastrophe at the end of the Cretaceous period was only one of at least five generally recognised global extinctions – and that it wasn’t even the largest.

  The Permian-Triassic extinction 250 million years ago, we’ll tell them, killed more than seventy per cent of all land animals on the planet, and over ninety-five per cent of all marine life. Even insects.

  That’ll give them something to think about, we decide. That’ll give them pause.

  Art

  We’re teaching our sons about art.

  We’re teaching them how to look at art, how to think about it, how to ask questions about what it is and what it isn’t. We’re explaining to them about painting and sculpture and print making and conceptual art and performance art, with practical demonstrations.

  We take them to an art gallery where a heroic artist is putting on a piece of performance art. We’ve checked in advance that the performance is suitable for minors. Because you never know.

  It turns out that the gallery is full of parents and children. It’s half term and everyone is desperate for something to do, something to look at, some excuse to get out of the house. And art is as good as any other temporary distraction.

  In the middle of the art gallery the heroic artist sits in a cage wearing running shorts. The heroic artist has a huge artistic beard. The programme tells us that the heroic artist has been inside the cage for a week now. For the past week, inside the cage, the heroic artist has been getting on with the ordinary business of his life, which consists of thinking artistic thoughts, eating, sleeping, appearing in magazines and on television and on websites, and going to the toilet.

  To accommodate all this there are a table, a chair, a bed, a phone, a laptop and a portaloo inside the cage.

  It’s quite a big cage.

  We watch the heroic artist going about his business for a while. Nothing much happens. We wonder if that’s supposed to be the point.

  ‘What do you think about the piece?’ we ask our sons, as we all stand around s
troking our chins. ‘What does it mean?’

  The heroic artist looks up. He’s interested to know what our sons think too. He’s wondering if he’ll be able to incorporate their thoughts and opinions into his show, to widen his appeal.

  ‘Maybe it would be better if there were wild animals in there with him?’ our sons say. ‘And the artist only had a certain amount of time to escape from the cage. To make things more interesting for everyone. Not for the man to die. Not necessarily.’

  We raise our eyebrows at the artist.

  He stares back at us, not sure what he should do next.

  Women, Again

  We’re teaching our sons about women, again.

  As if the last time wasn’t bad enough.

  Our sons give us a list of all the important things that we’ve failed to cover so far. It includes male–female friendships, the experience of having sisters, women in the workplace, female superheroes, violence against women, famous women throughout history, the tallest woman who ever lived, feminine archetypes in literature and film, consent, discrimination, The Ten Most Dangerous Women in the World, equal pay, and the woefully inadequate provision for women’s sexual and reproductive health around the world, including in otherwise ‘developed’ countries.

  ‘Among other issues,’ our sons say.

  ‘Of course,’ we say.

  We are not unaware of the importance of getting this right. For everyone’s sake. We take the responsibility of raising a generation of better men, of better people, seriously. So we ask our sons to give us time to pull together some sort of presentation for them, to do some more research.

  They agree to give us a month.

  ‘Women ninjas,’ say the younger sons. ‘Include some women ninjas.’

  ‘Women ninjas. Right.’

  ‘And a lady dragon.’