by Simon Carr
Research tells us how boys and girls play from an early age. And it’s all there before conditioning – boy chemicals make us play with more noise, more violence and a shorter attention span. Whether or not that’s how we like it, it’s how we do it.
Boys also have this he-man thing. We do superheroes. Girls fantasise less about being a superheroine. They are rooted more in the world around them. Girls have these friends whom they groom; boys are exultant throwers of lightning bolts. It’s no wonder we feel more fragile than girls, our hormones impel us out into a world beyond the safety of the group towards our magnificent, heroic, possibly tragic destiny.
And without the collegial virtues girls practise so well we feel isolated, out on a limb. After all, surrounded by strangers you have to take precautions.
And that’s why the conversation of little boys so often takes the form of crushing, killing, defeating their enemies, of exerting strange powers, controlling their environment. Their fantasies are of being in authority. They rule not only their world, they rule the world itself, ten seconds out on their universal videotape. They are invincible, invulnerable. This is the thing which particularly worries mothers – because mothers know exactly how vincible children can be.
No wonder susceptible mothers run so much interference on their sons. They hear the desperado chat and worry themselves sick. They think ahead, they visualise dangers, they anticipate disasters, they are never off the case. And because they worry so much about the big things they are also taken up by the small things.
Alexander’s New Zealand grandmother was saying goodbye to him as he went off to play. As he was getting away she was saying: ‘Won’t you be too hot with that on? You’ll be too hot. Why don’t you take it off? I wish you wouldn’t chew the ends of that string.’
Understandable? Of course. But equally, once you get into the habit of talking like this it’s difficult to stop. The mental routine of protection easily ends up not just keeping dangers out but keeping the child in. ‘Have you been to the lavatory today?’ Or, ‘Have you got a vest on?’ Or, ‘Don’t play with the spade, you’ll cut your toes off.’ This is maddening for anyone aspiring to being an overlord.
Alexander was naturally cautious of heights and had my ‘Stop!’ command lodged there, deep in his brain. So my purpose was to avoid that sort of constant, undermining static. But to do this required me to dismantle the entire apparatus of what I had been taught was domestic life.
In the first period – even after the spa-bath – I had no idea how difficult this ideal was nor how far off it we were. Alexander would ask to do a range of unsuitable things and I’d find myself saying no, quite automatically. I was wholly unable to Just Say Yes. This really was very surprising to me, discovering my own reality underlying the motherly symptoms. The source of this maternal behaviour is so deep that even fathers are susceptible to it.
Alexander’s rich and vivid fantasy life was especially irritating. His scatterbrained requests were absurdly impractical; anyone would deny them as soon as he made them. And we know, everyone agrees in this. We go rope-a-dope on kids. The gloves go up and they can pound away all they like with their: ‘Can we go to Disneyland?’ (during term time). ‘Can I watch a video?’ (at half past ten). ‘Can I have a Mars bar?’ (when I’m actually straining the peas for dinner). We say, ‘No.’ We don’t even think about it. We don’t even listen, we Just Go No. But there it is: that was the habit we had to control.
So when he asked if he could ride his bike in the house his grandmother said he couldn’t; and when he asked me the same question of course I said no as well. Then he asked why not. It was an odd request on the face of it. Why would anyone be allowed to ride their bike in the house? Of course not – but why not?
Two lines of defence were immediately available. ‘Because you’d get mud on the rugs’ was the first, but even as it came out the flaw was obvious and as he was pointing out how clean and dry the wheels were I was retreating to the next equally vulnerable position. ‘And you’d knock paint off the walls that have just been painted,’ I told him.
Even I didn’t believe this. He was wheelchair-proficient; he’d manoeuvred Susie’s wheelchair around the house for months without touching the paintwork. I was stretching for a reason beyond this rational, orderly objection – but there wasn’t anything there. We had no furniture to knock over; we hadn’t graduated to side tables and floor vases. The rooms were empty and carpetless – they were large. You could skid trail bikes in there. What was the reason he couldn’t ride his little trainer wheels in the house?
‘Why didn’t you tell him the rubber tyres would mark the chipboard?’ a mother advised me eagerly. She had put her finger on the most powerful, if least persuasive, argument against taking the bike into the house (the chipboard had been laid to be covered by carpet). But her instincts were absolutely accurate. ‘No, you can’t ride your bike in the house, you’ll mark the chipboard’ sounded more than awful enough to stop him asking again; I would certainly have said it if I’d thought of it. But then I remembered the motel. The mental image of water leaping in great shoots round the room came back to me, and Alexander’s face as he hit the water and his hair flew round his head.
So I swallowed hard and bit back my opposition to his plan, and for the first time since the motel I managed the business: I Just Said Yes. Then he rode his bike carefully around the house for twenty minutes (leaving not a mark on the chipboard or a chip off the paint or a speck on the carpets) and he never asked to do so again.
The motherly view is that houses just aren’t for riding bikes in and that’s that. Homes are oases of calm and order, created largely by mothers and even now (research insists) largely maintained by them. They are a fragrant haven from the world and noisy, dirty, random, chaotic activity (fan, as we call it) properly belongs outside with the dogs.
That’s why boys get blocked. The best ideas are always inconvenient – by definition, genius is annoying. Brilliant spontaneity ruins what had been planned, or organised, or merely expected. Even when their proposals are appropriate we want to oppose them automatically. Boys say, ‘Can we go and dam the stream’ and we say, ‘I’ve got to buy a lettuce first,’ or, ‘I’ve got to wash my hair first,’ or, ‘Go and change, you’ll be too hot in that top – oh no, you can’t, your T-shirt’s in the laundry. Why don’t you do it tomorrow?’ Mothers say, reasonably, that it is they who have to clean up the mess, attend to injuries, soothe, comfort and make everything right again. But the protective impulse turns into a habit and the habit part of the relationship, and it creates a blocking dialogue between adult and child that can become dangerously one-dimensional.
Another instance: Alexander had wanted to put out a mousetrap one night. We had rats coming in from the reed marsh – big, fat-bellied, fighting rodents that could thrash about, dragging a trap across the room, long after the bar had snapped on their necks. It was an appalling noise with its own tragic narrative. So this was an exciting idea, an indoor form of hunting; there was the possibility of being woken in the night by horror and a death. And a rat. Surely we know enough now to recognise this as a very superior form of fun.
But his grandmother wouldn’t have a bar of it. ‘No, don’t do that,’ she told him, ‘someone might tread on the trap and hurt themselves.’
He said: ‘We could put it on the hearth so people won’t walk on it? And put some cheese in it?’
‘No, don’t put cheese in it, that’ll attract mice.’
Not put cheese in it for fear of attracting mice? Alexander’s so tactful about these things. He suggested: ‘Why don’t we put it on the veranda and catch a possum with it?’
‘No, don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Possums are too big for that small trap.’
‘They might trail their little tails across the trap and maybe we could catch them like that?’ he offered, on his last legs.
‘No,’ she repeated, ‘don’t do that.’
And observing this running interference I felt I
saw, as a grown-up looking at the world through a six-year-old’s eyes, something of the shadow side of the maternal talent. If the home depended on suppressing the childish desire to slaughter rodents in the sitting room, it became increasingly urgent to develop a new sort of home.
Because in order to make her objection sound reasonable, the motherly presence finds herself generating a whole series of morbid, contrived and frankly spurious reasons why we shouldn’t do what we want. This is the habit we can all so easily fall into. And as the habit grips, she creates a world haunted by strange and improbable fears (‘Use a straw to drink from the can or you’ll cut your lip! Don’t swing him around like that; you’ll pull his arms out of his sockets!’). And the particular point is that this world is not the one in which boys feel fulfilled. Creatures with the particular balance of dopamine, adrenalin, testosterone and serotonin (boys, for the sake of argument, or indeed tomboys) have a wide appetite for fun, freedom, excitement, speed, change, danger. In their formative years – and sometimes for life – they are constrained by an essentially maternal desire for safety, routine, hygiene and the preservation of the nurturing domestic environment so carefully and so personally created.
However, under my regime responses to Alexander’s proposals would have gone like this: ‘A mousetrap? Excellent. We’ll nail the little sucker! But so I don’t crush my toes in the trap we’ll put it out of the way a bit. But where? The hearth? Brilliant! Your plan is cunning. Now what we need is a hide, we can build it out of sofa cushions, so we can sit behind it until midnight and get a BB gun and try and shoot it if it doesn’t go in the trap.’
As I never stop saying, mothers and fathers cover the spectrum of human behaviour. There are mothers who’ll watch their toddlers climb a ladder; there are fathers who’ll keep their boys in bubblewrap. But still I maintain my generalisation: the phrase that is central to motherhood is this: ‘You’ll put someone’s eye out with than!’
This phrase I first heard forty years ago when playing with one of those safety arrows fitted, for two reasons, with a rubber cap. In the first place the ingenious device allowed the arrow to stick to panes of glass and in the second it prevented anyone’s eye being put out. Mother’s terrifying warning made us think that the suction cup would fasten on to someone’s eyeball and the only way of getting the arrow back would be to take the eyeball with it – pop!
One of our glamorous neighbours in New Zealand had his eye knocked out as a boy – he was leaning out of a carriage window and collected a mailbag hook. But notice that he was leaning out of a railway carriage window – and the penalty for that was supposed to be not just losing your eye but your entire head. ‘Don’t lean out of the window, you’ll get your head knocked off!’
Eyes are well protected by the face and are actually very difficult to put out. But this rational point is irritating and has no persuasive power.
The fact is that fear and anxiety together are a natural and – in our matriarchal culture – integral part of mother love. Mothers feel more responsibility than fathers and so it is no wonder they – the protectors, keepers, carers – feel more fear and guilt and possessiveness. Whether the children are taught to follow cultural archetypes or genetic imperatives is always debatable. But the results are perfectly clear.
In a small way, I’ve seen the process in its infancy. At Alexander’s primary school in the depths of the country, a teacher asked one of the boys to fetch his school bag; he didn’t move for a fraction of a second and the girl sitting beside him leaped up, saying, ‘I’ll get it for him, miss.’
The teacher sighed. ‘You just can’t stop them,’ she muttered. I asked her what she meant and she came out with the secret. ‘The girls do things for the boys so they’ll be able to boss them about.’
Aha! That explained a lot about the relations between the sexes, certainly in that part of the world. ‘The girls do things for the boys so they’ll be able to boss them about.’ But maybe what’s going on is more elusive than that. Because the female structures that grow up around us are bounded by shadowy anxieties and subtle loyalties that start so early and so discreetly they are hard to see until they aren’t there.
The only reason I’ve discerned this is by living without women. It became apparent to me when the boys and I developed a game we certainly couldn’t have played with a wife or a mother in the house. It came to be called the King of the Bed game and this is how it worked.
Lounging around on the plumped-up duvet one morning, I was showing Alexander how he had nearly pushed me out of bed the night before. In the course of dramatising the action for him I used both feet to pitch him on to the floor and scolded him, telling him that he must not push me out of bed at night because it not only contravened the laws of physics (I hit a hundred kilos on a good day) but it also offended my dignity because I was (and here I adopted, I don’t know why, the persona of a lazy black soul singer) the King of the Bed. ‘Yah! That’s what ah am, king o’th’bed! An’ you know ah am becos ahm the awnly one on it!’
Eleven-year-old Hugo, hearing the unfakeable spontaneity, came diving in, dividing his attention between the two of us, one leg each – and we did the same to him. The bed was instantly wrecked, feet were flying (there was an injury but no time for tears). There were horse bites and important new discoveries in the science of tickling. The noise was appalling. The boys combined to bulldoze me with their heads. I flipped them both expertly through two hundred and seventy degrees (they helped) and they crashed, squealing, laughing, head first, into the mélange of pillows and bedclothes on the floor. I gloated over them. I was the King. The King of the Bed! This went on for an hour and a half. As we know, repetition is the highest form of wit.
A mother in the household would have made it impossible for a number of reasons.
We could never have made the essential noise (‘What are you doing in there?’). I would never have attempted this Barry White impression (few men will claim to be King of the Bed in their wife’s hearing). Nor could we have wrecked the bed like that (‘Those sheets will need washing now, the dogs have been in here, and do try not to rip them, and mind their necks!’). And we couldn’t have employed the necessary violence (‘Someone’s eye will be put out on the bedpost!’).
But none of these expressions of anxiety would have revealed the real one. There would have been some undertow, some invisible rip making the whole episode impossible. Call me paranoid if you will, but I think it’s this. Each of these boys’ mothers would have sensed the male intimacy we were generating and would have felt we were getting on better with each other than we were with her – and that would have been disloyal of all of us.
As this idea is a confrontational one I tried a reality check by asking a project manager’s wife: ‘Bodge, if your kids got on better with Tom than with you, would you mind?’
It’s not just because she’s a lawyer that she told the truth. ‘That would really fuck me off,’ she said. ‘You must be joking! You’ve done all the bonding, you’ve done all the work at night, you’ve got up for all the feeds. If the boys naturally went to Tom instead of me I’d be furious.’
King of the Bed was an impossible game in a married bedroom, there in the heart of the house, in that tender expression of a woman’s secret place. That is not the place to be forming a gang of three and shifting the balance of power in the household.
If it’s hard for mothers to adapt to a regime like this, it’s harder for grandmothers. They did things very differently, as we all remember. These new, loose ways can be construed as a criticism of, or at least a commentary on, the methods they used a generation ago. Add to that – in my case – quite a lot of drinking and falling asleep in Alexander’s bed at eight o’clock, and of staying up late to watch unsuitable films, and you have to admire my mother’s flexibility (maybe it was something to do with the yoga she’d been practising since India).
And there was also the state of the house. The contemporary record itemises a Sunday evening after a Sunday
lunch: twelve empty bottles of wine on the table top. There’d been eight of us to lunch, but two drivers hadn’t drunk. A vast teddy bear sat up to a half-empty plate of pizza pieces with no vegetables, pools of ice cream melt and caramel topping. Five sets of children’s T-shirts and tops on the arm of the sofa. A pair of mud-encrusted shoes (Alexander has crawled under the whole length of the house where the pipe burst). Two wet patches on the carpet where Chippy the dog has disgraced herself. Papers bestrew the floor. Crisp packets. An armchair has been pulled up to within a foot of the television. And as for the sink – let’s not go there, as women say.
My mother edged round this situation of indigenous mess and chaos, looking for a point of entry. I came home one day and felt everything was going to be all right. She was playing a sort of sitting-room tennis with Alexander. The coffee table had been tipped on to its side and the players were squatting either side of it on the floor, lobbing a ball of folded socks to each other. ‘Too late, Bozo!’ he cried and ‘Take that, Chuckles!’ and ‘Ha ha! Hooray for Beedle Bop!’
Family life. The movie.
Housework was the big surprise, even though I’d watched so much of it.
There was the shopping, wasn’t there? There was the putting of clothes into the washing machine. And hoovering the carpets when they’d changed colour, and stacking that amazing cupboard, which not only stores but cleans the dishes. That was all fairly straightforward but it wasn’t until this period that I realised there was an invisible hand turning house into home, into one marvellous, nurturing organism.
This is the principle that creates twenty-one meal ideas for the week along with a broad idea of who’s going to eat them; that has allocated space for loading the washing machine and that also programmed in the drying and ironing that completes the task. Not only buying in the toothpaste but creating the toothbrushing time, as well as the appointments with the dentist (the dentist! Oh God, the dentist!). This is the managerial ability that stocks the sock drawer with matched pairs of socks folding into each other. It’s an amazing feat of central planning and is beyond time management, this is a philosophy of living. It all adds up to an invisible force field where routine expectations – if only to turn up to the table, bath, bed – create the intimate relationships we know as a family.