It’s beautiful, bewitching and sometimes quite boring and, three years into fatherhood, John Summers is still learning how to be there.
The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.
Illustrations by Austin Milne.
I have been a father for a long time now. Driving station wagons, spending too long on the toilet, and often pondering, aloud, whether the lawn needs a mow. The only thing missing then were actual children and this we rectified three years ago when our first son was born. The second arrived last November. Why so late, it’s fair to ask, for someone who’d been in training for so long? There’s no good answer except the usual one: terror. The fear of discovering life drastically changed with no going back, and many of the things that seemed important suddenly of reach. No time to go to the movies or linger in bookshops. No time to drink beer and sleep late. All of which came true, but it turns out I really just don’t mind.
It’s as if those were the thoughts of another person, or from an age now long gone. I may as well bemoan missing tag or trading cards. This is a different life with different priorities and that is no bad thing. It’s also a life I had vowed not to write about. So much is written about parenthood, often about the extremes of love and emotion that make all the difficult things worthwhile. The risk it seemed to me would be to turn up and reheat these themes, saying what everyone else does. But here I am already on my third outing now on the subject. It has proven irresistible because, if I’m honest, I have very little else to say. My days are dominated by those two funny little men, their ways of seeing and speaking (“I can’t know,” my eldest says when I ask him a tricky question). I find myself brushing my teeth with Minions toothpaste. I hurry home from work to help with mealtime and bedtime, and then clean up their aftermath, scraping pumpkin out of the highchair, hurrying still so I might enjoy an hour or two of non-parenting time. Even the shape of this free time is their work too, its boundaries dictated by them. I understand now that the subject of parenthood is not an impulse but a necessity. Don’t talk to a sailor if you don’t want to hear about the sea.
And so, please indulge me for a moment while I tell you about my two boys. Glamorous figures to me, both of them, with their mother’s dark brown eyes. They are in the 95th percentile for eyebrows, and these brows give every expression an emphasis. They are exclamation marks they wear. Their smiles are children’s smiles, which is to say they radiate and involve every part of the face. Life is not all smiles of course. A while back I was talking to someone when the subject of parenthood came up and I told her I enjoyed it. “But it’s boring sometimes too,” she said more than once, intent that I admit it. I will admit it. It is boring pretty often actually. There are limits to the enjoyment I can take from Duplo or traipsing around Te Papa on a rainy day. And then there is the laundry, the endless laundry. We have a washhouse at the bottom of a steep flight of stairs, which we stomp up and down nightly, Sisyphus with a basket of undies.
Our days begin very early. Often, they start with a hoot. The current routine is that our three-year old lets us know he’s awake by pretending to be an owl. A soft “Hoo-hoo” comes from behind his door. I wake to this sound, and follow it down the hall. I stand outside and listen for a moment before stepping in to find him already dressed and hiding under the covers.
“I heard a little owl,” I say. “Did you hear it?”
“What did it say?”
“Hoo-hoo.”
He gives me one of those giant smiles, one that shows that, in the very same moment, he loves that I’ve been fooled and he knows that I’m not. It is a realm of understanding I cannot share. It belongs to children only. My luck though is to be there to witness it.
I’ve left something out there. The very first thing he says when I walk into the room is that he wants Mum, not Dad. I ignore it and we talk about the owl, but I know I’ll be asked again tomorrow. I don’t want to essentialise – this is just our story, but it is one where he crawls into his mother’s arms in a way he won’t with me. Competition is one reason for this. He has a little brother who gets a lot of his mum’s attention and so he is eager to even things out. Still it can be tricky, it adds to the many things I must figure out as I go. That picture of dadhood I begin with, the station wagon and lawn mowing, doesn’t really take me that far, and much of the day is spent responding to things, finding the words to share what I know while leaving space for them to discover the world themselves. I spent a morning drawing pipes in an attempt to explain what happens when you pull the plug out of the bath. I worry about passing on my own hang ups and anxieties, and I undoubtably will. Already, we’ve heard him using the phrase “too expensive”, and we both know it’s come from me, a chronic stinge.
The other day there was a brief break in a week of rain, and he and I pulled our gumboots on. We gathered up tools and headed into the garden. I dug a hole to plant a shrub, and he jabbed at it with his own tiny spade. When it came time to plant, he pushed dirt in, working quickly. My partner came to a window and waved to us both, and he waved back, but then quickly turned to his work. I started the next plant while he fussed around with some weeds. “Wait for me,” he said when he realised I had started. “Wait for me!” And he came running to help.
He loves this stuff, was my first thought. I’d told people this before and here was further proof. And then it dawned on me like a horror. I saw his eagerness to help, to do what I had declared I would do that morning, eager to be serious and important, a part of a thing he had seen me approach with seriousness and importance. He watches. When I tell a story, his face is as solemn as a chess grandmaster’s, the eyes intent, those brows tremble between a frown and laugh. I can change the ending simply by smiling. Three years now I have been living in Dadland. I am not the only one still learning the language.