Either I am a poor excuse for a father, or everyone else is lying to themselves and others about family life. (Or both, of course: I’ve been teaching enough basic logic recently to know that these are not mutually exclusive options, that both propositions can be true simultaneously, even if it is not especially likely in this conversational context.) Assuming the latter—at least for now, to maintain the illusions necessary to keep me from running away come Saturday morning—there are some home truths that could do with an airing.Click to play
The first is this: weekends with children are really hard. As much as I love my kids, 48 hours at a stretch…is a stretch. Like Peter Cook in speaking of his intestines—though, in this particular clip the immortal line “I wish my intestines were shorter” is tragically omitted—I sincerely wish the same of my weekends. This desire is likely a reflection in part of my own childhood, when—from the age of 8—I had school six days a week, where my weekends started when I got home “after games” on Saturday afternoon around 4pm, settling down near the hearth with a mug of hot chocolate in front of the tv, to watch the wrestling and then catch the football scores on Grandstand, read by the nearly inimitable Len Martin, a man who could—by intonation alone—impart the news of wins, losses and draws before you heard the name of the away team (Leeds United …(5), Manchester United…(1)—League Division 1 1971-72 season, oh happy days!). When I was a child, my only fully free day was Sunday: as dedicated non-church-goers, we were able to lie in, and play around the house until—rather occasionally, and usually sometime after lunch—we would ‘go for a run in the car’ (as my great-aunt liked to say). Or not. The key characteristic of Sundays was their very uneventfulness. Not exactly indolence, or conscious relaxation, more a marked slowing in the passage of time.
Things are different now. The pressure to cram each weekend with what turns out to be a poorly co-ordinated schedule of household chores and rewarding activities, ‘fun for all the family’; to clamber like over-burdened free-runners—a child in each hand, and one in a buggy—over a chaotic and abrasive landscape of sharp hurdles—domestic duties, social obligations, and healthy outdoor experiences—instead of letting time pass over us for just a day—is enervating, rather than stimulating. By 5pm on Sunday, I am worn out, even on relatively good weekends, as this one mostly was (as you will see from the pictures at the bottom). In contrast to the popularly presented view, I often long for Monday morning, and then dread the next weekend to come. Strike one.
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| One might think they liked each other... |
Our family life is not high art, nor action movie. That’s to be expected, and comforting to a degree: I suppose I'd rather the pale banality of domestic soap opera than the cheap excitement of 24 Hours (I stopped watching after Series 1). What’s more surprising perhaps is that our life together rarely attains even the modest heights of fictional family stories. Over the last couple of weeks now, we have all been enchanted, and brilliantly distracted on longish car journeys, by back episodes of Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café radio podcasts. For the benefit of non-Canadians, Stuart McLean is a CBC broadcaster: each week on the Vinyl Café he hosts a programme from a different town or city across Canada, briefly relating the history of the region, introducing local musicians, then—the best part—telling a story of the mishaps and adventures of a possibly mythical, but very real seeming, family: parents Dave and Morley, children Sam and Stephanie (though daughter Stephanie features very little in these accounts, much less than Sam’s friend Murphy, for instance. Truth to tell, these are stories for boys, in the main). Every week there is a new story—each one a diverting treat—in which McLean recounts in beautifully measured prose stanzas some otherwise insignificant event in the life of these ordinary Canadians, in such a way that even Sean laughs out loud and Julian breaks off from needling his brother to repeat a phrase or two. These are not momentous or critical situations he's talking about—the time Sam and Murphy found an abandoned 1948 Studebaker in a field, the time that Dave dropped his neighbor’s keys down the sewer, the time Morley that forgot about the lunch boxes in her children’s school bags over the whole summer—yet through his story-telling Stuart McLean manages to make of each a perfect home adventure, a just demonstration of Yves Duteil’s assertion (‘Ce n’est pas ce qu’on fait qui compte, C’est l’histoire’).
Story and history are different words in contemporary English: in French, the ambiguity of the word histoire makes clearer that (most) ‘facts’—analytic truths aside—are really (hi)stories, constructs rather than objective reports of sense-data. So, while McLean’s stories bring us a richer warmer reality than any we could imagine ourselves, they also point up the inadequacy of our own family experience. If I were my children, I would surely be thinking: why can’t my Dad be more like Dave—more easy-going, more patient, more creative, more resourceful, more…fatherly? And, since I have no good answer to this other than to say that Dave is not real, I have to hope that this is true. Strike three, if I’m wrong.
Had I any respect for the baseball metaphor, I would be required to stop here. Since I don’t—I am as unmoved by the game as my American or Japanese counterpart is by cricket or snooker—many more strikes are allowed before I shuffle off the Good Parents’ field. Among them, just this weekend, would be the staggering hypocrisy of my yelling at Sean for not practising his ‘cello (‘If you don’t want to practise, we don’t need to pay for the lessons’) when I have not even practised five minutes between the first three—equally expensive—weekly singing lessons that were Ayumi's anniversary present to me. Or my impatience with Julian, who said he wanted to bring his bicycle to ride at the car-park near us—the only flat piece of ground for 4km—and would push it up the hill from the house himself, and then—predictably—didn’t. Or even my annoyance at the baby, for continuing to fuss even after milk, change and being carried, rather than sitting quietly in his buggy. Or—more generally—my knee-jerk “No” response to harmless requests for a drink from the (ubiquitous) vending machine, to change, or not to change the music, to rent a DVD when we drive down the hill, simply because my nose is streaming with a cold, a pinched nerve in my neck is squealing its dissatisfaction through the mask of unhealthy doses of ibuprofen, and I’m distracted by an itch that might have come from a mosquito (had all the mosquitos not been killed off by falling temperatures some weeks ago. One of the things we failed to get was a ‘fumigating bomb’ from the supermarket, which worked a treat last time we had this problem.) Dave doesn’t seem to get neck pain, colds and insect bites on the same day; or, if he does, it doesn’t get in the way of Happy Families. Could be because he's fictional. Could be, though, because he’s not a grumpy old man…Mea culpa.
Having thus relieved my conscience, I can now comment on the pictures below (omitting all the negatives):
‘We had a really great weekend. On Saturday morning, after tidying up the house, we all walked up to Kinenhidai so that Sean could practice on his new bike, and Julian could show us how much he has improved on his old one in just three trial sessions. They both did briliantly. Then we drove Ayumi down to Asagiri, so that she could get a haircut, and the boys could take their model cars to the boardwalk. Stunning views of the sunset beside Akashi-Kaiyoo bridge. On the way home, we stopped off in Suma for a wonderful supper at Torimitsu (a chicken restaurant). Got back late, children straight to bed. Next morning, drove down to football practice on Rokko Island. I completed the 5.1 km run around the island with two other fathers, in under 26 minutes, a personal best over the last five outings. Headed back for lunch. In the afternoon we were visited by a family we met, who have a ten year old girl with Down Syndrome. They loved our house, and the view, and are considering moving up here. Later in the afternoon, with Sean and Julian’s help, I changed the wheels on the car, replacing summer with winter tyres, before it starts to snow. A gorgeous clear evening before dinner. After dinner, we sat down together and had a 'movie night': watched Finding Nemo (Julian’s choice, this time). Another good one.’
Great stuff. What I can’t figure out, though, is why I can’t write for s***, or should that be toffee (?) about domestic bliss: the foregoing paragraph reads like the diary of a barely articulate six year-old. Perhaps it’s really true, as in those famous example sentences from Pollock’s (1989) paper on French and English syntax, that unhappiness and a sad childhood are the keys to good writing.
(1) a. Ne pas être heureux / n’être pas heureux …
ne not be happy ne be not happy
‘Being unhappy….’
b. Ne pas avoir eu d’enfance heureuse / n’avoir pas eu d’enfance heureuse….
ne not have had a childhood happy ne have not had a childhood happy
'Not to have had a happy childhood...'
…est une condition pour écrire des romans.
is a condition for write det novels
‘…is a pre-condition for writing novels.’
I presume Pollock means necessary, rather than sufficient, conditions. Even if this is the case, if the statements are true, then as a parent, I guess I'm doing something right...! ☺
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