Tag: family

Ahhh…

Christmas.

The season of goodwill, family discord, organised fun, 12 days of merde. Anyone who says they love Christmas is either living a lie or six years old. Against my will, having just been through a month of early onset SAD, I flew across the ocean in late December to a summer on the Argentine pampa, to appease my mother, whose priorities in life can now be broken down to two in number.

Uninterrupted siestas and family harmony.

I arrived. Having not yet unpacked, within 36 hours I was almost on a plane back.

On our first lunch, it quickly became clear my father’s anti-exploding-with-irrational-rage-about-literally-nothing medication had gone awol.

Such was the tension, such was the steam billowing out of both his ears, my mother had to grip the table with both hands to stop herself from leaving, my cousin did the finest act of international diplomacy I’ve ever seen, and all the while I sat there in shellshock, my right leg still numb from a 28 hour transatlantic KLM shitshow.

I’d been there for ninety minutes.

Things got worse before they got better.

My first few days were permeated by sleeping in til 11.30 and long walks in the pampa. The closed-door, it became known as, the door of my bedroom shut to the bustle of the house through mid-morning, became my parents’ affectionate codeword for ‘our son is having a moment’. I’d eventually make it downstairs, dopey-eyed and coffee-lorn, mumble for an hour about how I just wanted some privacy.

Harry Enfield stuff.

It wasn’t all struggle.

There was laughter and extended hugs, walks under the canopy of the huge trees. The sounds of the cotorra beneath the cedar and the swift chasing the chimango, the rustling of the eucalyptus. There were songs at table and poetry recitals, repetitive jokes, grave meteorological predictions about encroaching clouds, dinner by candlelight, stargazing.

At the beginning of Ana Karenina, Tolstoy writes:

All happy families are alike.

All unhappy families are unique in their own way.

He was implying I think that happy families are a fib. They don’t exist. What you get are short stretches of harmony. The unluckiest might not ever get there, the luckiest have it for the least brief of stretches.

How are families not going to fight each other, resent each other. The return to the nest, years after the flight from it, is a get-to-know-you all over again. Your folks aren’t used to it, you’re not used to it. My brother, with Victoria and Mary, me nursing a hangover from an unkind November, this melting pot and all the ingredients that went into it, every day was bound to bubble over.

On the afternoon of Boxing Day, after some more hi-jinx, sat on the terrace with my mother, papa off in the pampa counting cows, I lost it, started heaving, my face wet with tears. Darling you can go if you must, I understand, she said. I know how hard your father is to be around sometimes. You do what you need to.

There I was, six months away from 40, blubbing to my mum about how my holiday had become a holiday from hell, and yet, as unjust as all this felt, it was familiar. Isn’t that the problem with Christmas with los padres.

It’s time-travel.

You ain’t 39 son. You’re six. Enter the hissy fits, the screwfaces, the stomping out, the long walks. It’s totally infantilising. Around them you ride a DeLorean straight back to childhood. You’re standing there in front of the people that made you. You can do your best I’m a man of the world impression but the same shit that took you down when you had no front teeth to speak of is just as hard to swallow.

*

I remember in a restaurant in Knightbridge once with my mother, I must’ve been 26, I said pointing to her stomach, Mummy, do you think the fact that I came from in there, and that you made me in there, does that mean in some weird way you’ll have a connection, a strange sort of agency over me for the rest of your life that no force can break. Smiling knowingly as if I’d said something quite dumb she said, yes darling.

Now comes the period of our lives when our parents stop hanging about. It’s maths. Some have been gone for time now, some have started to leave only recently, many friends are now in the process of deep grief. Wondering where they are, how they can have left, just like that. It is a reminder for us lucky ones to double down. Life is short, it brings that much home, wrote a friend in an email yesterday. Her mother had died only the day before.

*

Back in the pampa, day became night became day, downstream we drifted towards the New Year. The fighting thinned out, the makeups became more productive. A rhythm was found. The New Year was welcomed in in the courtyard with dancing and speeches, all the Estancia sat round the table.

My brother and his fam flew back, leaving the three of us. Sidling into each new morning, days swaying into one another in the manner of the branches above our heads, we’d sit on the terrace in the evening discussing the hide and seek of the moon. I began to get out of bed at a normal hour.

We’d breakfast lunch and sup together. I hadn’t spent this much time with my parents since I was fifteen. Everyone had their topics. My father’s was his happiness, his wholeness, in his homeland, surrounded by his earth. Mine was spirit, synchronicity, woo-woo stuff. Guys, do you think that fly just landed on me for a reason. My mother’s topic, more important than any of ours, was being allowed to speak now and then. Two latin loudmouths interjecting and projecting.

But it was lovely.

That first week of January was something special. I wouldn’t have got there if I’d bounced, abused my superpower of finding the first available exit when things get heated. Like that line from American History X, if you leave now you will find no peace.

Life teaches you how to live it if you only give it time.

I’d get friend updates from Blighty now and then, each one in the middle of their own familial shitshow. ‘Bloody boring’, ‘traumatic’, ‘how long can this go on’. Maybe, I thought, I have it better than most. We might scream our heads off at each other, but there is a lot of connection. Lots of deep and meaningfuls, in-jokes, listening, taking turns to speak, walks under the moon, the odd bout of feet-tickling.

By the end, my heart was heavy.

Predictably on our Last Supper, one of my parents said something that threw me into such a prepubescent rage that I became catatonic for half an hour. Didn’t say a word. Eventually wandered off into the night, on one of my ‘walks’.

Parents.

Can’t live with them, going to have to work out how to live without them. Looking out across the laguna nursing a beer with my cousin Francisco, he said, you don’t know how much I’d give for an hour with papa again. Just an hour. So don’t take him for granted. Me acompaña, he said. He’s there, when I wonder what to do, I ask myself what would papa do. He talks to me.

This Christmas showed me the beauty and the horror. All things in opposition. Taught me to not take for granted the people that made me, that might have more to teach me than my stubborn mind might be willing to concede.

When Larkin said they fuck you up, he really was stating the obvious. I’ll see you and raise you, Phil. They give you the gift of life. And no life, however completely miserable, is pointless. Frankl went through the camps. Still, he said this:

Imagine you are sitting in a concert hall and listening to your favourite symphony, and your favourite bars of the symphony resound in your ears, and you are so moved by the music that it sends shivers down your spine, and now imagine it would be possible for someone to ask you in this moment whether your life has meaning. I believe you would only be able to give one answer, and it would go something like ‘it would have been worth it to have lived for this moment alone!’

Sat there alone the other night watching Arrival, my face cracked. Much more than a film about alien visitation, it was about the choice to spend time with the people we love, knowing it won’t and can’t last forever. The Heptapods, and their ability to see time non-linearly, had given the main character a vision of her future, in which she would have a child who she would then go on to lose to a rare disease.

If you could see your whole life from start to finish, she asks at the end, would you change things.

Einstein believed the same, that past present and future were happening simultaneously. Another thing he said, is there are two ways to live. As if nothing is a miracle. And as if everything is. There was a thing to think about. Why is there even anything at all. And still there is. We should be grateful for every day of our lives. Every hour. Every minute. Even a nanosecond of oxygen is subscribing to the miracle of everything.

To mummy and pops, reading this. (as they always do.)

Holaaaa.

Les extraño.

Tell them you love em, and you miss em. Even if they’re up in the sky. They’ll be listening, I think so. Hear what they have to say. If you can’t make it out, listen harder. They will whisper in your ear.

A lot of my homeys are having babies.

When I say homeys, I mean fellow men. I suppose they’re not having babies exactly, women have babies, men become fathers. At around one in the afternoon on the first Wednesday of December, my brother became a father for the first time. Seeing someone so close to me go through something so heavy is very hard to describe, harder still to understand.


To say it was amazing is a waste of a word, I haven’t really digested it yet. For him it was so heavy it was overwhelming, for my folks and me it was overwhelmingly joyous, but it was also a reminder about how little any human being really knows about anything.

Especially the serious stuff.

My contemporaries going through the process of having kids is for me the most clear-cut sign of how everyone is styling every single thing out to the Nth degree. No-one knows what they’re doing. They just pretend they do. I wrote once about how my parents didn’t have a clue what they were doing when they got married. Yet somehow they’re still together.


Seeing the expression on my brother’s face in the hospital room hours after he became a father was a reminder that most of the time in life, you have to make a decision and then adapt to the results. That’s the reality. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and step out into the abyss with nothing but blind faith to hold your hand.

Which is scary as hell, but not nearly as scary as doing the opposite. Making no decision at all. The sinister place Dr Seuss called…

The Waiting Place

So plunge into the decision we do.

Does it get any easier. Two award-winning docs following my man Guy through the process of becoming a pop paint the same bleak picture, and would suggest that no, no it doesn’t get any easier whatsoever.

But obviously having a child is far from bleak, that wasn’t my point. The reason I started this post talking about homeys is because it concerns the male response to parenthood. Like much of life, females have a head start on us, being that they are more involved in the natural side of the world. Pregnancy for men is pretty abstract, I mean they go through none of the hormonal fireworks associated with the mother, they hear about cravings and feign a raised eyebrow and mumble something like… vanilla ice cream again, how interesting.


Post-birth they also find themselves at the shallow end of the utility-pool, because they don’t have breasts. Turns out breast-feeding is about more than just nutrition. It’s skin to skin contact, eye to eye gaze, the rocking is an embodiment of rhythm, it forms the beginning of the establishment of the relationship. And breast-feeding even produces children with higher IQs. But pops miss out on all of this. Instead they look on quizzically, pretend to be taking it in, and then balls up the first 53 nappy changes.

A new father would be much better placed to tell you this stuff. But in his defence, while some women don’t feel maternal at all, the maternal instincts of some men are off the charts. Shortly after Mary was born, my father described how he saw my brother connecting to her with a type of totally animal intuition, emanating from both his heart and his body. Maybe men with more evolved emotional centres find a way of connecting with their newborns in a way other men find harder, I don’t know.

My brother said he always wanted to have a girl.

He says right at the beginning the idea freaked him out. But when they found out pretty early on in the pregnancy that she was going to be a she, he said he much preferred the idea. He’d heard about how men have more issues with boys, how a daughter is the apple of her father’s eye. I also have a sneaking suspicion that, more so than a boy, he felt like a daughter would be more of a protector, and my brother quite likes company.

I don’t have a girlfriend and with one sorry exception I can’t remember the last time I went on a date, so I’m pretty far from the following predicament. But personally, the idea of being a father to a daughter makes me really quite scared, like almost queasy. And try as I might i can’t get to the bottom of it. I have a feeling the reason is a bit more complex than sports, something a little deeper than Peter Griffin’s moment of dawning realisation in the maternity ward.

I think it’s to do with how little I understand women.

Add in some Freudian stuff, sprinkled with my belief in the matriarchal setup of the world, that how contrary to our delusions women run things, they control everything, but at a much deeper level than equal pay etc. Nature is female, women carry life inside them, men are tools, that kind of thing. And the weird idea that this figure of dominance, this embodiment of feminine power, would be so tiny and helpless but I think just pretending to be, doesn’t convince me at all. Perhaps it’s something to do with that thing that we never really escape the womb. Despite what we might think, we’re all kinda still in there.

Like Hesse’s quote about trees rustling.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear the trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home.

*

There’s a French-Canadian film called The Barbarian Invasions. About a man diagnosed with a terminal illness, and it follows the last few months of his life surrounded by his family and his mistresses. It’s a serious film, heart-breaking but also hilarious. There’s a scene right at the end, where our man close to his deathbed, when he receives a satellite video message from his daughter, who is on a boat stranded out in the Southern ocean, unable to get back to him, knowing she will never get the chance to see him again. It’s a goodbye.

When casting the role of the daughter, who appears just once in the whole film in this scene, the actress Isabelle Blais recorded herself doing a read-through and sent it by email to the director Denys Arcand. He recounts that when he saw it for the first time, he broke down, sobbing uncontrollably. And once he’d recovered, he called her to say the part was hers.

It’s been too long since I last saw you. My daddy. My papuschka. I’ll have missed you my whole life. Tell yourself that I’m a happy woman. That I’ve found my place. I don’t know how you did it, but you managed to pass on your lust for life, you and Mum raised incredibly strong children. It’s a miracle really.

And then she goes big.

It never really fails to reduce me to a blubbering wreck.

It’s basically the opposite of Peter Griffin in the maternity ward. It made me think the real reason why I’m so scared of having a baby girl one day, that perhaps I wouldn’t think twice about were it not a girl, is that the stakes are too high.


There’s something about the bond between a father and a daughter that sits right at the top of the cake. You don’t mess with it. Like, what is stronger in human nature than that. Her looking up at him, him looking back down at her. It’s different to father-son, it’s more hardcore it seems to me, it might be the single most precious dynamic that exists. And so perhaps rightly so, it scares the life out of me.


I think I’m afraid my hypothetical daughter would see right through me. She’d realise what a deficient human being I am, erring and bumbling and messing things up. And what’s more she’d be female. Those strange beings I uphold as dominant to men in almost every way. I couldn’t hide from her.

*

My mate Alfie has a five year old daughter called Iris. He told me the other day that although he didn’t think he would be the type of person to admit this, Iris is his best mate in the whole world. He says he tells her all the time. And he said if it came down to it, he’d hang out with her above anyone else.

He also said this.

Whatever veiled moments of glory life might throw our way from time to time, they sure as hell won’t come about as a result of inaction. Life demands that we live it forward. This whole thing about my friends becoming parents being an act of blind faith, seeing my brother with Mary and the emotions she’s brought him even just over the course of the five short weeks of her life so far, me freaking out about the idea of being a dad to a little girl one day, they’re all examples of the same thing.


We have this idea that we need to believe something strongly before we decide to do it. But actually much of the time, what we need to do is act. And then figure out what the hell is going on, while we go. Like Douglas Adams’ character Dirk Gently says in The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul…

I may not have gone where I intended to go.


*


 But I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

At the end of 21 Grams there’s a Sean Penn monologue about the weight of the human soul. Which starts with the line.

How many lives do we live. How many times do we die.

Watch it, it’s beautiful.

With the exception of light at the end of the tunnel experiences spoken from hospital beds, or coffins with scratched ceilings, or reincarnation, I think we must only die once. In terms of the heart stopping and the soul escaping and the flesh rotting. The dust to dust idea.

I’ve always been drawn to things that we can’t understand or explain, maybe for the reason that we can’t understand or explain them, and up until recently when it came to the idea of the next chapter I was happy to sit on the fence with the sun on my face dangling my legs in the late-afternoon breeze. But strangely, these days I find it hard to believe in an after-life.

I think I agree with Bertrand Russell.

When I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.

But why should we have the arrogance to assume that only logic and science within the spectrum of human understanding is what is actually out there. There is an argument for the existence of God based on ants. It runs that if ants can walk the earth in their billions unaware of the existence of us, the self-styled omnipotent species of earth, then equally why should it not be possible that something greater than us should exist outside the spectrum of our own understanding.

It’s a question that has polarised humanity’s best minds. One of my most rational friends and father of three months Gregory Kennaugh from Putney believes that we must hang around in some form or other after the landlord finally kicks us out into the cold. Einstein was a fan of mystery too. This coming from a man the sum-total of whose credibility rested on nothing less than absolute conclusive proof.

I know one thing. That at some point in the future, certainly bedecked in boxfresh AF1s…

I will wax from the pulpit about the certainty of an after-life.

*

The after-life quandary is just an example of how our opinions on things change in relation to the different stages we are at in our lives. Anyone who has reread old diary entries and looked perplexed as they see a page written in their own hand-writing, spewing forth thoughts that could never possibly have come from their mind, will acknowledge how much our brain can change. Not just a particular opinion. But a complete outlook.


Just as spring eventually loosens winter’s grip and autumn pulls down the blinds on long heady summers, over the course of our life we will encounter change, not just from the outside but from within. Right now, despite its insistence on remaining tediously cold, spring is changing everything in our natural environment. There is a continent-wide shift in play.

We too are the trees through the seasons.

The trees themselves, their whole entity, they don’t change. But over the years their trunks will morph and fatten, their branches will grow out in different patterns shaped by the wind, they might be felled in storms or pruned by zealous park-keepers, and every year their leaves will spring and bask and die and fall. The trees are always changing, yet somehow aren’t.


I think it works as a metaphor for how we as people change. Those who maintain that people never fundamentally change are both right and wrong. Like the trees we are capable of change and yet incapable of it. We are the tree, but we are also its morphing trunk and falling leaves. And just like the tree, our lives are made up of seasons.

The Wonder Years was great because it pitched the idea of simultaneous time. The mature narrator, speaking to us from inside the mind of a teenage Kevin, was a reminder that time doesn’t have to be linear, that the different stages of our life are interconnected and playing out simultaneously.

I’m reminded almost every day how connected I am to the six year old inside me. I’m looking out for him all the time, I’m still fighting his battles, I still feel his pain. If I stretch my imagination I am also connected to the 75yr old in me. He’s studying me quizzically right now by the fire in his carpet slippers, watching as my actions and today’s life choices form the tapestry of the life he has to look back on.

Old age is staring me in the face in a more real way too. In the form of two of the people closest to me in the world. As my parents move towards the music and take the floor in a slow-dance with their mortality, I realise they haven’t changed. They’re still the same children whose blurred photographs stare back at me from old photo albums, the same expressions of joy or boredom or surprise spread across their faces.


They mean the world to me because I love them. But to the outside world they’re anonymous people in the autumn of their lives. There’s an old lady in my local Tesco who regularly holds up the supermarket queue to talk to the cashier, much to the ire of the line groaning under the weight of their baskets. But it could be the only conversation this lady has all day. She might have lost a few braincells, but she was also probably the matriarch of a large family. In her prime she had guys queueing round the block just to speak to her. She has seen all of life. She demands our respect.

*

Same as Alf, regardless of where he posts his letters.

Old people are us. Because one day, we’ll be them. If we don’t respect them we disrespect ourselves. And the cycle of life that we are involved in. I wonder if this trigger-happiness to dehumanise the old is something we need to start checking ourselves for. Why should it take a leap of imagination to think of old people as young once? Is it not all part of the same grand arc of life. Just as the leaf grows hesitantly out of the branch, dances for a while in the summer breeze before turning brown and falling to the ground. Alf could tell you that.

Funnily enough Alf is the lead character in all of this. I’d send him a letter, but I’m not sure he’d know how to return it. Oscar Wilde said that the tragedy of old age was not that one was old, but that one was young. Alf is all of us, by reminding us that one day we will be just like him. We are all connected. Young and old are all the same.


This doesn’t change because we sprout nose hairs or start to feel the force of gravity weigh more heavily on us. It doesn’t change because the distance to our feet can feel unbreachable when the time comes to put our socks on. It doesn’t change because we post all our letters in the dog poo box. We’ll still feel the same inside as we did when our bodies worked without a second thought. Our parents would be the first to tell us that.

*

At the end of Prufrock, a 22 year old T S Eliot writes from the perspective of a man both looking back on his life, whilst wondering what old age might bring.

I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottom of my trouser’s rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

*

We can start singing, even if the mermaids won’t.


We can at least remind ourselves to from time to time.

I read something recently which stayed in my head.

Showing people photos of your children is not asking for their honest opinion.

I’ve found this to be the case. I don’t think many of us really care. Not after the first photo, which everyone displays a certain curiosity to see, to see if the baby is normal-looking and doesn’t look possessed and looks vaguely like both parents. Louis CK has a segment saying something similar.

Hypocritical of me then, to write something consisting exclusively of photos of a kind not that removed from the one so far maligned; photos of my parents on the day of their wedding. Photos that tick the same boxes you could argue, photos of people beloved to you, but of no great interest to those whose attention you’re so fervently drawing them to.

But I can justify the below. To start with, photos of the past are more interesting than photos of some unformed future. Which is essentially what photos of kids are, representations of some unclear, little-formed, unpleasantly snot-strewn future.

Secondly, if it wasn’t for the day represented below, I wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t be reading this. So the below relates to you too. The third reason is that it’s topical. My parents got married thirty five years ago yesterday.

They made a swanky photo album.

My mother.

My Argentine cousins dressed as gauchos.

My grandfather looking pretty 19th Century.

My mother levitating.

The vicar looking like a character from Tintin.

Papa pleased because he made the papers.

My Argentine grandparents looking fly.

Only eyes for one.

My mother having regrets.

Papa getting his gurn on.

The best man.

The Holy Trinity.

Welcome to the faaaamily.

Father and daughter.

Speeches that evening.

My cousin’s thank you letter.

*

But there’s another reason that these photos are interesting to me. And that’s because recently more than a few of my friends, contemporaries, people I’ve grown up with and known for a decade-plus, have done exactly the same thing as my parents did that day. Get married. And now more than a few of them are having babies. Which is where the showing people photos of your kids diatribe came from.

But the one common denominator in all of this is that not one of them, not from where I was standing, knew a thing about what they were doing. Getting married, getting pregnant, having babies, watching them grow, no-one has the faintest idea what they’re up to. They just style it out. Which is why digging up old photos of a wedding that happened thirty-five years, demanded I reframe my understanding of them.

Where before these faded photographs showed me a man and a woman going through the perfectly rehearsed motions of something they were always meant to do, something predestined, I think differently now.

From seeing my friends fumble and err and style it all out, I realise my parents were none the wiser either. The photos above are documents of this. They didn’t have a clue. At no point throughout any of the day documented above did they know either what they were up to, or what they were letting themselves in for. Growing up we think our parents have all the answers.

They don’t. And we won’t. I assume things will never really make sense. I suppose we begin to care less about understanding nothing.