How to be a Husband

by Tim Dowling

  “I hate you!” he shrieks as I pick him up.

  “It’s fine,” I say, righting the bike. “You’re fine.”

  “It’s not fine!” he shouts, tears jetting from his eyes. “Willy-man!”

  My wife laughs when I tell her the story, but I don’t laugh recounting it, or when I think about it later that night. That he felt moved to invent a term of abuse—to coin his own approximation of “dickhead” using the vocabulary available to him—in order to make plain the intensity of his lack of regard, is deeply wounding. I want to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to admit that I basically deceived him when I implied that learning to ride a bike would be a fun and painless experience, because I knew he’d never attempt it if I told him the truth. But I have a stronger urge to say nothing, to carry on teaching as I was taught. I convince myself that it’s never too early for a child to learn that a father is someone who lets go when he says he won’t, because his back is weak and his patience is thin.

  His grim determination means we are out in the park the next day, trying again. I am very much on the back foot on this occasion, a proven liar whose advice cannot be trusted, whose every instruction is picked apart.

  “I know it seems odd,” I say, “but you need to lean the other way, in the direction you’re turning.”

  “Of course that won’t work,” he says.

  The next time he comes off the bike I cannot resist the temptation to tell him it was because he didn’t listen to me. The argument that ensues is protracted and vituperative and ends with my picking up his bicycle and throwing it into a bush. It’s not my proudest moment as a father. I wish I could say it was my unproudest moment, but there are several others vying for the distinction.

  We take a long break from bike riding, the boy and I, while I reformulate my plan and probe my memory further. I recall that it was my mother who was there with me the day I finally learned to ride a bike, on a cold and windy morning in the empty beach parking lot. I don’t know whether my dad had officially forsworn our bad-tempered and unpropitious lessons, or whether he was just at work. I do remember a sense of urgency: my sixth birthday was looming, and everybody I knew could ride a bike.

  The knack of riding a bicycle is, like any skill, a product of all that accumulated failure, but I only remember the moment when I felt the bike holding itself up of its own accord as I pedaled maniacally and my mother’s encouragements grew faint. I didn’t see her expression, because I never looked back.

  We return to the park many weeks later. My wife is there with us, enabling us to deploy that most last-ditch of all parental strategies: the two-pronged assault. I have not asked for this, but I think she has sensed the reinforcement is necessary. As long as she is there to second my advice, to echo my stilted praise in slightly different words, then the boy’s objections to my tutelage are effectively neutralized, and he knows it. He will not call me “willy-man” today.

  He’s also a little bit older, his legs a little longer. To my shame, I realize that when I first bought him the bicycle he was barely four. I’d been acting like a victim of the child’s persistence, when the pressure originated entirely with me.

  I’ve taken the stabilizers off the bike and lowered the seat as far as it will go. By degrees his mother and I get him to accept that if he feels the bike tipping he can just put his feet down.

  Running along bent over while holding the back of his seat is absolutely punishing, but the boy is making progress. When, by mutual agreement, I let go at the appropriate speed, he doesn’t look back either, not even once. You can’t really. If you look back, you just fall off.

  AUTHORITY

  Before I had children I imagined them chiefly as an outlet for my didactic impulses. I’m not a natural teacher, or a particular fount of wisdom, but I still have a strong need to divest myself of information as and when that information occurs to me.

  This is not the same as being good at it. I tell a story the way I would write one—beginning far too early in the proceedings, including details that turn out not to be germane, returning frequently to earlier points in the narrative to effect minor adjustments, pursuing discursive sidetracks in order to include facts I happen to know, and editing on the fly by instructing my audience which bits of what I’ve just said to disregard. I get there in the end. Unfortunately the listener, unlike the reader, is not presented with a product, but with a process.

  When a gentleman imparts knowledge to a woman in this manner, it is sometimes known, disparagingly, as “mansplaining.” It’s considered both sexist and patronizing, but it is the normal way of conversation among men—to go on and on about something you are pretending to know a lot about, pausing only when someone with a louder voice starts talking over you. Above all, one must never risk asking a question. It might well be the last thing you say all evening.

  To use this mode of discourse on women is not always intentionally patronizing; in many cases it is simply boorish, a failure to take into account the fact that your interlocutor is someone other than your brother. Men speak to other men as though they’re always about to be cut off, because they probably are. In my younger days I remember panicking when I spoke to women and they let my stream of chat run unchecked as if it were some kind of lecture. “Why isn’t she interrupting me?” I would think. “I’m almost out of words, and this anecdote has no ending! Oh Christ—she’s not actually listening, is she?”

  But my kids—they won’t know any better. They will listen to my undifferentiated spume of digressive memoir, rhyming aphorisms, and historical misinterpretation as if it were the Gospel. I won’t have to tailor my didactic nature to suit anybody but me. The answers I provide for their questions will be taken as scientific fact. But I had not reckoned on the questions.

  “When are you going to die?” asks the oldest one, age three. I pause thoughtfully, pretending it’s a question I had never before considered.

  “Oh, not for a long time,” I say.

  “Yeah, but WHEN?”

  He’s not much older when he leans forward in his car seat one day—after a long, contemplative silence—and says, “Mumma can never escape from us, can she?”

  “Sorry?” I say.

  “Because we could just follow her wherever she goes,” he says. It’s always tricky to answer a question when you strongly suspect your interlocutor of possessing more relevant information than you. What does the boy know that I don’t? Has she got plans to move towns and take a job at the local library under an assumed name? Or is it just something he imagined, or dreamed, or saw on TV? What sort of reply could cover all these eventualities?

  “Mumma can run,” I say. “But she can’t hide.”

  I also imagined that along with my wisdom, my very bearing would command a certain innate respect, a natural awe that I should probably offset rather than encourage so as not to become a distant, authoritarian figurehead. I deliberately cultivated a benign, nonintimidating presence from the outset, more family dog than father, although I began to distance myself from that persona once we got an actual dog. I thought of my future role as approachable, collegiate, instructive. I reckoned that as they grew my children’s respect would be a natural by-product of my inspiring example. I even dared to imagine my own little audience following me around laughing a bit too eagerly at my strained jokes; it would be just like hosting Loose Ends.

  What I did not foresee was a day when, while interviewing a newly demobbed Apprentice contestant in the course of my work, I would flip through my notebook in search of an incisive question I’d jotted down earlier, only to come across a page on which the words “DAD YOU SUCK” had been written in two-inch-high block capitals with a black marker.

  I did not envision a time when, during one of my lectures about manners and public etiquette in a noodle bar, my children would take turns poking chopsticks into my ears, until the theory that I was possessed of a sense of humor about myself had
been comprehensively disproved. I did not imagine that the oldest one would develop a habit of greeting me by slapping me lightly on both cheeks, or that the middle one would hijack my Twitter account in the night to post heartfelt admissions of loserdom (“Hi, I suck at everything I try in life”) or that the youngest would insist on addressing me as “Daddy me laddy.”

  Episodes like these prompted some questions of my own: When did I graduate from caregiver to figure of fun? Why is it so amusing to prick my pomposity? At what point did I actually become pompous? If I were being charitable to myself, I would probably argue that I am partly complicit in my children’s efforts to undermine me, that on some level I’m even abetting it, because sons in particular need an opportunity to distance themselves from a father’s authority even at an age when they remain obliged to acknowledge it. But that’s not what I’m doing; I never even thought of that. I’m just making them laugh, and not on purpose. And as they get older, I just seem to get funnier.

  Is it to do with my personality, I wonder, or is it something about the times we live in? I have a sneaking suspicion that my self-importance may be in some innate way self-sabotaging, if only because I suck at everything I try in life. But I also know that when I was a child grown-ups were more or less exempt from ridicule.

  In the winter of 1974 my father walked into a glass wall at the Hilton in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was striding across the deck of the indoor swimming area, wife and four small children trying to keep pace with him, past a neat line of deck chairs toward the hotel’s poolside restaurant. He was attempting to slip between two occupied tables when he hit the glass at full speed—this particular panel was missing the eye-level H decal that marked out the two flanking it—much to the consternation of the diners on the other side.

  My father was knocked to the ground by the impact. I remember him crawling around on his hands and knees for what seemed a long time, dazed and unable to grasp what had just happened to him.

  “For Christ’s sake, Bob, get up,” said my mother.

  “I’m trying,” he said as blood dripped from the end of his nose. He was fine after a few minutes, but we did not eat in the hotel restaurant that night.

  I try not to think about how my children would react if something similar happened to me, but I know from bitter experience that they do not hesitate to laugh when I slip on ice, or when I’m being questioned aggressively at passport control, or when I’m freaking out about data loss, or being on the wrong motorway in Italy, or when I object to having chopsticks inserted in my ears in public. Were I to walk into a glass wall, I sometimes think their only regrets would be about not having the presence of mind to film it.

  No one laughed when my father walked into the glass wall at the Hilton in 1974; it wouldn’t have occurred to me. Mind you, I didn’t feel a tremendous amount of empathy either. I was too busy feeling guilty, because I’d known the glass was there all along. I’d spotted the illusion on an earlier foray to the lobby that afternoon, and had been vaguely planning some stunt to fool my family. For that reason I was pleased we were heading right for it; I just hadn’t reckoned on my father getting quite so far ahead of me. I never intended for him to walk into the glass, but there was a discernible moment when I realized he wasn’t going to stop, and I still chose to say nothing.

  I felt terrible about the incident for years afterward, but I never admitted the truth. I figured God would get me back for it someday. Perhaps, at last, He has.

  SPORT

  My biggest recurring worry, once I realized I was to be the father of boys, was that I would let them down when it came to the question of sport. After twenty years in Britain I still can’t do enough football chat to last through a whole haircut. My father’s enviable record of sporting achievement and dedicated spectatorship was not something I could look to for guidance; he didn’t know anything about soccer either. I was flying blind.

  After a lot of private fretting, I decide to approach the eldest shortly after his birthday. I begin my little speech with all the caution of a man who suspects he’s already left something important too late.

  “Now that you’re eight,” I say, “we need to make a big decision.”

  “I’m nine,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “So we need to decide which football team we support.”

  “What are you talking about?” he says.

  “It’s traditional, I believe, for British sons to inherit some form of allegiance to a team from their fathers, but since I don’t have anything to pass on, I thought we could look at . . .”

  “We support Chelsea,” he says.

  “What?”

  “We’re Chelsea supporters.”

  “Since when?” I say.

  “Since always,” he says. I have no idea what “since always” means to a nine-year-old, but I’m not really in a position to dispute the contention.

  “Oh,” I say, a little disappointed. “How are they doing?”

  “They’re fourth, but they have a game in hand.”

  “I see. Can you just quickly explain what that means?”

  That was it—an issue I’d worried about for eight years was solved with one two-minute conversation. If only all of fatherhood were so simple. But it turned out nothing else of it was that simple.

  My children were not raised in a sport-spectating household, but they live in one now, a universe entirely of their own making. I do my best to join in: every year when the football season starts, I make another doomed attempt to cultivate a knack for commentary. I know the rules, but I remain incapable of making intelligent remarks during an ongoing match. I can’t tell the players by their numbers, or their positions. When the referee blows his whistle I rarely know why. At some point in the second half I invariably say something that betrays my failure to realize the teams have swapped ends.

  “Why is he passing it that way?” I shout. “What the hell is wrong with . . . Oh, I see. Nothing.”

  One Sunday evening in October I walk into the sitting room to find the middle one watching a game. I sit down beside him, looking in the direction of the television without really taking it in, letting the commentators’ meaningless blather wash over me.

  “What’s the score?” I ask.

  “Ten–seven,” he says.

  “Really?” I say, leaning closer to the screen. “That’s an unusually high . . . hang on. This is football football. American football.”

  “Durhh,” he says. Great, I think: here is a sport I actually understand, sort of. This is the game of my people! Quick—what would my dad say next, if he were here?

  “Who’s playing?” I say. A safe enough opening. I don’t want to overplay my hand. I mean to wear my lifetime of knowledge lightly.

  “The Jacksonville Jaguars and the Houston Texans,” he says. I cannot, alas, allow his simple error to go uncorrected. He’d do the same for me.

  “There’s no such team as the Jacksonville Jaguars,” I say.

  “Yes, there is,” he says. “Look!”

  “Well, I’ve never heard of them,” I say. “They sound made-up. And Houston are called the Oilers.”

  “No, they aren’t,” he says.

  “I think you’ll find they are,” I say. “Because of, you know, all the oil.”

  “When did you last watch an American football game?” he says. I think about my answer for a moment.

  “Twenty-two years ago,” I say, “or thereabouts. But there certainly wasn’t any . . .”

  “Dammit!” he shouts at the television, exactly the way my father would.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Penalty,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “Taunting,” he says. “Fifteen yards.”

  “Taunting?” I say. “Since when can they penalize you for being a dick?”

  “Shush!” he says. “Just watch.” />
  The Houston Oilers, I later learn, moved north, and eventually changed their name to the Tennessee Titans. In 1999.

  * * *

  Throughout parenthood—usually when you’re on your knees with exhaustion—older people have a habit of coming up to you and saying, “Enjoy it—it goes by so fast.” And they’re right—it does go by fast. Just not at the time.

  In the thick of it, parenthood seems never-ending, its compromises deep and permanent. In a few short years I have gone from being appalled by the low hygiene standards of small children to being appalled by my own low hygiene standards.

  I had always imagined that my children would at some point graduate from being charges to being minions—that I would be able to assign them tiresome chores or dispatch them on small errands in exchange for their upkeep. It would be like having an army of tiny personal assistants.

  This never really came to pass. It’s true that for the promise of fifty pence a six-year-old will look for your glasses all day, but he will not find them. An eleven-year-old will not look, not even for a fiver.

  I spend most of my time in search of their stuff, or fulfilling their demands, or coping with the fury of someone whose maths homework won’t disgorge from the printer because of a connection issue that is somehow my fault. It turns out that parenting is a lot more like being a personal assistant than having one. In fact, it’s a lot like being Naomi Campbell’s personal assistant, but without the travel.

  Up close this time of dirt, tears, insolence, and missing gym shorts doesn’t feel like something one should necessarily cherish. From a distance it may resolve itself into a fuzzy, happy-family tableau, but I’m not sure how far back you’d have to stand.

  Pat, the man who introduced me to my wife, who was best man at my wedding, is sitting in our kitchen and laughing at us.

  “Take that out of here!” shouts my wife at the younger two, who are fighting over a deflated football while the dog barks.