What We're Teaching Our Sons

by Owen Booth

  ‘Okay.’

  We are aware that our attitudes to women are a work in progress. We’ve had to re-evaluate our opinions and past behaviour a number of times, usually following exposés of the activities of rich and powerful men. We’ve had to ask ourselves ‘Is this us? Is that who we are? Are these the men we want our sons to be?’

  And this, of course, is a good thing. There’s a lot to be undone. We’re taking nothing for granted. We don’t want our sons to be defined by their gender any more than we want women to be defined by theirs. Any more than we want to be defined by ours.

  We don’t mind being defined by our roles as fathers, all things considered.

  We know we’ve had a tendency to romanticise women in the past, to idealise them as mythical beings with special powers, to imagine they could grant us life-changing wishes if we could only win their hearts by completing a series of impossible, fantastical tasks. Thankfully, parenthood knocked most of that right out of us.

  But we’re also up against the clock.

  And so we spend the next two weeks searching uncharted seas and cutting our way through an impenetrable jungle before free climbing an unmapped escarpment and fighting our way across a haunted cloud forest to the fabulous ice cave where The World’s Most Beautiful Women guard the secret archive that contains all the answers.

  They’ve been expecting us.

  And it’s clear from the look on their faces that we’re not off the hook yet.

  The Importance of Good Posture and Looking After your Teeth

  We’re teaching our sons about the importance of good posture and looking after your teeth.

  We’re teaching them about the dangers of plaque and tooth decay and gingivitis, about the potential debilitating effects of chronic back pain in later life. We’re reminding them about getting regular exercise and drinking lots of water. We’re warning them not to stand too close to the television, or the microwave, or our mobile phones.

  The mundanity of it all is crushing, we know. But we’ve invested a lot in our sons’ fragile bodies, we tell them. We want them to look after those bodies for as long as they can.

  ‘Look at us,’ we say to our sons. ‘We’re falling apart.’

  ‘We know,’ our sons tell us, without even looking up.

  We tell our sons, again, about the times when we broke our ankles, and our wrists, and our ribs, and our collar bones, about our torn knee ligaments and exploded Achilles tendons and collapsed discs, about our failing eyes and ears and prostates.

  ‘It’s not the age,’ we tell our sons proudly, ‘it’s the mileage.’

  We attempt to compare injuries with our sons’ mothers. The mothers look at us, amused.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ they say.

  By the time we realise our mistake it’s already too late.

  The mothers order bottles of white wine, start discussing the impositions and indignities visited on their bodies by multiple pregnancies and childbirth and breastfeeding. They share horror stories of tears and stitches and weakened pelvic floors and blocked milk ducts and much, much worse. They explain why they can never go on a trampoline again.

  It’s nightmarish. We don’t want our sons to hear this. We don’t even want to hear this ourselves, and we were there when most of it happened.

  We throw ourselves on the mercy of our sons’ mothers, beg their forgiveness. We promise to worship and respect their bodies for ever, in whatever state of sexy decline they happen to be. It’s the least we can do. Frankly, we’re amazed that they can look at any of us without wanting to kill us.

  ‘Most of the time,’ they say. ‘Only most of the time.’

  We bathe our sons and brush their hair, inspect their skin and look in their eyes. We check between their toes, and count their teeth again. We scrub under their nails.

  They indulge us, patiently.

  Then they go back to climbing walls and falling off bikes and skateboards and throwing themselves out of windows and off the roofs of houses, with no consideration or thought for the future whatsoever.

  Fatherhood

  We’re teaching our sons about fatherhood.

  And about climbing trees.

  We’re simultaneously teaching our sons about fatherhood and climbing trees in the woods behind the houses where we grew up. We’re helping our sons climb to the top of the same trees that we climbed when we were their age, on a windy October afternoon, with the promise of rain and the potential for a thunderstorm before the day is out.

  We haven’t been back here in years.

  ‘Is this even safe?’ our sons ask us. ‘Why do we have to do this?’

  We’re following our sons up the trees, climbing behind them, pointing out potential handholds and footholds, ready to catch them if they slip. The trees are already starting to sway impressively.

  ‘We used to climb these trees all the time,’ we tell our sons. ‘It’s fine.’

  Of course, the trees are taller, older, and quite possibly weaker than they were when we were children. Plus, there’s the weight of all the added fathers that we didn’t account for. But we’re trying to pass on something useful here. About fatherhood and climbing trees.

  ‘Can we get down yet?’ our sons ask.

  More and more we recognise that we have become our fathers, that we wear their faces and speak with their voices. We are not un-conflicted about this. We’re aware of our fathers’ many faults and limitations, as they were aware of their fathers’ faults and limitations, and as our sons are, or soon will be, painfully aware of ours.

  ‘No,’ we say.

  ‘We can’t do this,’ our sons say.

  ‘Yes you can,’ we say, ‘we believe in you.’

  ‘How is that supposed to help?’

  ‘It just is.’

  ‘It isn’t helping.’

  ‘It will. Trust us.’

  And then, inevitably, someone slips.

  The thing about fatherhood, we want to tell our sons, as we all dangle from the tree, thirty feet above the ground, hanging on to each other, rapidly running out of ideas, is that it’s only when you have children that you realise how much and how fiercely your own father must have loved you.

  And this is a wonderful, life-changing thing to realise.

  Unfortunately, it isn’t going to help our sons for a few years yet.

  Death

  We’re teaching our sons about death.

  We’re taking them to the funerals of close and distant relatives and old friends and people we hardly know. We’re accidentally ending up at the wrong funerals and nevertheless being invited to the wakes on account of our sons being so polite, so nicely dressed.

  ‘We’re sorry for your loss,’ our sons tell the family members of the deceased. ‘It must have been a shock/difficult time/relief, eventually. Would you like a canapé?’

  We’re teaching our sons about why people die, about what might happen to them afterwards. We’re teaching them that death may or may not be the end, depending on who you ask. We’re equivocating because, for God’s sake, this is death we’re talking about.

  We’ve made it to the point in our lives where half the people we know have either got cancer or are thinking about it. And everyone else keeps dropping dead seemingly just because they can.

  We’ll take whatever comfort we can get.

  We take our sons to the beautiful funerals of their wonderful maternal grandfathers. It’s a lovely send-off. There’s a jazz band and hundreds of people. We get to do a reading, manage not to mess it up. We all decide that this is how we’d want to go, wonder what a person has to do to get that many people to turn up and honour their life.

  Afterwards we push our sons on the swings, looking ridiculous in our dark suits in the park in the middle of the day.

  ‘When will you die?’ our sons ask us.

  ‘Not until you’re really old,’ we tell them. ‘Not until you’re bored of us.’

  We try to ignore those weird aches and pains we’ve been getting
, that odd niggle, the amount we used to smoke, the headaches, the things that keep us awake at night.

  ‘When will we die?’ our sons ask.

  ‘You’ll never die,’ we tell them, confidently. ‘By the time you’re old, scientists will have worked out how to implant your heads onto the bodies of giant, killer robots. It’ll be horrifying.’

  We watch them trying to imagine this. They’ve had a lot to take in today.

  ‘What about the cat?’ they ask.

  ‘Well, the cat is pretty old,’ we say.

  Our sons think about the cat, think about everything else. Eventually they make a decision.

  ‘Maybe we should kill it,’ they say.

  Ghosts

  We’re teaching our sons about ghosts.

  We’re telling them about unquiet spirits, about poltergeists and spooks, about phantoms and wraiths and spectres and ghouls. We’re explaining that, by the time you get to our age, there are ghosts all over the place.

  Most days, we tell our sons, we can hardly move for all the ghosts.

  ‘But we thought there was no such thing as ghosts,’ our sons say, looking nervous.

  It’s a wet Saturday afternoon and we’re all stuck in the house. Us and our sons and all the ghosts.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ we say.

  The ghosts that haunt us include:

  The ghosts of missed opportunities, the ghosts of better, simpler days, the ghosts of thwarted ambitions, the ghosts of failed relationships, the ghosts of relationships that never even had a chance to fail, the ghosts of our careers, the ghosts of lost friendships, the ghosts of lost friends and family members, the ghosts of decisions we should have made, the ghosts of the optimism of youth, the ghosts of the perfect summer evenings of youth, the ghosts of the all-day drinking sessions of youth, the ghosts of our potential, the ghosts of our decision-making ability, the ghosts of a significant chunk of our sex lives, the ghosts of our assumptions, the ghosts of time wasted in grief, the ghosts of time wasted trying to avoid grieving, the ghosts of our smoking habits, the ghosts of all the money we could have earned if we’d focused a bit more, the ghosts of the other children we might have had, the ghosts of the men they might have grown up to be, the ghosts of all the things we should have said, the ghosts of who we might have ended up as, the ghosts of who we could have been.

  ‘What do the ghosts look like?’ our sons ask.

  ‘Well,’ we say, ‘a lot of them look like us. But less tired.’

  Our sons decide to draw pictures of the ghosts, get out paper and felt tip pens. In the pictures the ghosts all look like white sheets with holes for eyes. They float around in the sky, scaring stick figure versions of us and our sons. In the pictures our hair stands on end. Our mouths are open ‘o’s.

  ‘Why have we all got swords?’ we ask.

  Our sons look at us like we’re idiots.

  ‘So we can fight the ghosts together,’ they say.

  The Ultimate Fate of the Universe

  We’re teaching our sons about the ultimate fate of the universe.

  We’re teaching them that, assuming the universe continues to expand as it has done for the last 13.8 billion years, then its eventual heat death – sometime after 10100 years from now – is inevitable.

  We’re at Disneyland Paris.

  Why are we at Disneyland Paris, we ask ourselves, in the middle of August, on the hottest day of the year? Our sons don’t ask why we’re at Disneyland Paris – they love Disneyland Paris.

  Apparently we’re at Disneyland Paris because this is the sort of place that fathers take their sons. And because we got a package deal.

  ‘First the stars will start to go out,’ we tell our sons, as we stand before the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril rollercoaster ride. ‘With no hydrogen left to fuse into helium and power the stellar engines, the sky goes dark in around a hundred trillion years.’

  Our sons nod, fidget, shift excitedly in the queue. It was the same with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. And the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. And Thunder Mountain.

  ‘Next, the few galaxies that haven’t already accelerated away from us across the cosmological horizon start to fall apart,’ we explain. ‘Dead stars and planets drift out of their orbits or tumble into black holes. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies have long since crashed into one another and been obliterated.’

  Disneyland Paris is horrific. Everything smells of burnt popcorn. Everywhere you look actors are staggering around in demented animal costumes.

  At least we brought our own sandwiches.

  ‘By 1040 years, depending on the rate of proton decay, most forms of matter as we know them have ceased to exist,’ we tell our sons. ‘Slowly evaporating black holes make up most of what remains of the frozen, empty universe.’

  We hand out the sandwiches. You’re not supposed to bring your own food into Disneyland Paris. We had to smuggle the sandwiches in. It feels like a victory.

  ‘And then, for an almost unimaginable length of time, nothing at all happens.’

  Nobody wants to hear this sort of thing. It’s depressing, we know. But it also gives you a sense of perspective. Of scale. It gives you a different angle from which to analyse the frustrations and struggles of your life. One day, we’re sure, our sons are going to need that kind of perspective. To be able to find solace in the immense meaninglessness of everything.

  ‘You’re probably wondering what happens if protons don’t decay,’ we continue, as we all take our seats on the rollercoaster.

  ‘If it turns out that protons don’t decay,’ we shout over the sound of the excited screaming as the cars begin their first climb, ‘then cold fusion via quantum tunnelling eventually turns the wandering, burnt-out stars into iron.

  ‘And for a few trillion trillion trillion years,’ we yell as we reach the crest, ‘these magnificent iron relics will bear witness to the passing of our age, silently ringing across the infinite depths of space.’

  But we’ve lost them. We’ve begun our descent. Gravity has won again.

  And so we never get to explain that the iron stars, too, will eventually collapse under their own gigantic mass, before ultimately evaporating away to leave a universe empty of everything except lonely, drifting photons. And silence. And an eventual, unremarked end.

  Still, we have time.

  We can wait.

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks to Dan Coxon, Hayley Webster, Thom Willis, Eley Williams, David Southwell, Joanna Walsh, Richard Smyth, Rachael de Moravia, Daniel Edwards, Julia Silk, Kit Caless, Helen Garnons-Williams, Gary Budden, the Booth Family, and Emma Roberts, without whom none of this would have happened.

  About the Author

  Owen Booth is a journalist, copywriter and father of two sons. He lives in Walthamstow, London. He won the 2015 White Review Short Story Prize and was recently awarded third prize in the Moth Short Story competition. His work has been published in numerous print and online magazines and anthologies.

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