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On Fatherhood

I cry more now.

When people ask how life has changed since we found out that Liv was pregnant, I normally shrug my shoulders and tell them it hasn’t – not yet, not really. And that’s true, up to a point. Liv’s more tired, and she can’t really drink when we go to a nice restaurant or have friends over for a BBQ, but we can still do those things. We can sleep in, stay out late, and spend lazy Saturdays on the sofa in our dressing gowns. The daily cadence of life itself – all the routines and practicalities that usher us from one day to the next – will remain comfortable and familiar for a little while longer.

And that’s great. But we have changed. I have changed.

I cry more now.

~

I first started thinking about this in April, after we went to see a film called ‘Love, Simon’ at our local Picturehouse, and came back round to it two weeks ago, as we walked out of a Somerset House screening of ‘Call Me By Your Name’. Two very different movies, they’re linked by a shared focus on teenage male sexuality, and the relationship between kids and their parents. Both made me cry, and I realised pretty quickly that those tears were directly related to how I feel about becoming a father myself.

Somewhere between rom-com and coming-of-age drama, ‘Love, Simon’ tells the story of a gay teenager who faces the prospect of being outed to his high-school classmates, after an online correspondence with another gay student falls into the wrong hands. I won’t ruin the whole plot, but towards the end of the movie Simon’s parents each speak to him about his sexuality and his decision to hide it from them. They make it clear in their own ways that they love him, that they accept him for who he is, and that they will give him all the support he needs. Most gut-wrenchingly of all, Simon’s dad expresses a mix of guilt and incredulity at his failure to realise what was going on in his son’s life.

As a teenager, I almost never cried. I don’t mean that I didn’t cry at movies, or sad scenes in books, or terrible things I saw on the news – I just didn’t cry full stop. I processed difficult emotions in other ways, many of which weren’t all that healthy. Avoiding overt displays of grief, sadness, loneliness, pain or anger enabled me to bottle up those feelings, rather than forcing them out into the open; that made it very hard for other people to know when I was suffering, or to offer help.

So in that sense, I could really relate to Simon. I found his father’s incredulity heartbreaking because it was caused to some extent by the same behaviours I’ve disliked in myself at various points. Simon lied, he treated his friends badly, he withdrew from people who would have offered unconditional love and support…and I get it. I’ve been there.

I’ve been the sad, confused teenager who skipped orthodontist appointments because I didn’t want to be bullied for wearing braces and had no idea how to say that to my parents. I’ve shut down conversations about my love life, hidden bad news – even when I knew that doing so would make the impact of that news far worse – and left emails or texts unread when I didn’t feel able to confront their contents. If I’m militant now about loving my body – and getting naked at the drop of a hat – it’s because I’ve also spent years absolutely hating it; I’ve refused to take off my t-shirt at the beach with my family in 30-degree heat, and covered bathroom mirrors with a towel when showering, so I didn’t accidentally glimpse my acne-scarred back or chest.

Small examples, maybe, but definitely part of a broader pattern. At that point in my life, and for years afterwards, I consciously and systematically shut other people out. I’d say I didn’t really stop doing so till well into my 20s, and even then there have been occasional relapses at times of stress. I’ve always known that hiding my problems and insecurities wouldn’t make them go away, but when you’re stubborn and scared enough to ignore that calm, rational voice, bad things tend to happen.

Inevitably my emotional reticence affected the relationship I had with my parents, as it did for Simon. In my case though, I can see quite clearly that it was also a product of that relationship – and of how I’ve always seen my father.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen my dad cry. I doubt that’s uncommon among people of my age: our parents’ generation grew up in a world where stoicism was still seen as a distinctly masculine virtue, after all. In my dad’s case I’ve always imagined that was compounded by several unhappy years at a private boys’ school, and by the relatively formal home environment in which he was raised. He’s a wonderful man, we’ve always had a good relationship, and I love him both unconditionally and without reservation, but for all the many important lessons he taught me as a kid, the value of expressing emotion in an open and healthy way was never going to be something I learned from him. Not by example, anyway.

Childhood memories are inherently imperfect and incomplete, so I’m wary of saying too much about that. I’ve no way of knowing how much of it was him and how much was me, so it would be unfair to try. Either way, by the time I entered adolescence it simply didn’t occur to me to go to him with my problems. I didn’t know how those conversations would even work, and from where I was sitting at least, it felt like he didn’t either. It’s not that there was distance between us – we just lacked the shared language required to turn our easy, affable closeness into something more actively nurturing.

Of course it’s easy to romanticise these things. Movies do an excellent job of making us feel like our own relationships aren’t quite good enough – that they lack a bit of stardust – and by their very nature the big and difficult conversations in life rarely unfold with the craft and polish of a Hollywood script. Nevertheless, I was struck by the way that scene in ‘Love, Simon’ tugged at me – how it triggered this insistent, instinctive emotional response. The same was true (perhaps to even more devastating effect) of the closing 15 minutes of ‘Call Me By Your Name’ a few months later.

A worthy nominee for this year’s Best Picture Oscar, ‘Call Me By Your Name’ made an instant star of its lead actor, Timothée Chalamet. He plays a 17-year-old boy, Elio, who starts an intense sexual and romantic relationship with a 24-year-old grad student, Oliver (played by Armie Hammer), who comes out to Italy to spend the summer working for his father. Their time together culminates in a three-day trip to Bergamo, after which Oliver goes back to the US and Elio returns heartbroken to his parents. Seeing his son’s sadness, Oliver’s father (Michael Stahlberg, in a performance eerily reminiscent of Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting) joins him on the sofa one evening and offers some advice.

It’s an extraordinary scene, the highlight of which is Stahlberg’s central monologue.

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste! Right now, there’s sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it – and with it the joy you felt.”

In his words and the way he looked at Elio, I saw a father’s love for his child laid bare. More than that: I saw the way parents suffer when their children are unhappy or confused – as mine undoubtedly did (and do), even during the times when I thought I’d hidden my pain from them. I saw the patience, kindness and wisdom of someone able to take the richness and sorrow of his own life and distil it down to the few words that would truly help his son.

And when I saw it, I cried. When I thought about it again later, I cried even more.

Maybe I’d have done that even if we weren’t three months away from meeting our daughter. Watching that kind of father-son dynamic play out on screen has always made me nostalgic for something I didn’t have, without bleeding through into the relationship I have with my dad now. It’s a perfect, greedy little hit of wish-fulfilment – self-contained and gone again as quickly as it arrives, leaving only a vague sense of yearning.

Now though, it’s impossible to watch movies like that without also thinking about the relationship I want to have with our children. At the time we saw ‘Love, Simon’ we didn’t know that we’re having a girl, so I spent a lot of time imagining how I might raise a son. The values I’d try to instil in him, and the way I hoped he might see me.

“I want him to know that he can cry,” was a thought I had more than once. As a society, we do a bad job of telling boys and young men that they can let pain, joy, sadness and love flow out of them in that way. That they don’t have to bottle it up and squash it deep down inside them – or, worse, alchemise it into rage and violence. Crying is still synonymous with weakness, and we all suffer as a result.

We may have a boy one day, and if we do, I’m sure I’ll revisit those thoughts. However, the impulse behind them applies equally to our daughter. Whenever I look forward to her arrival, and to watching her grow day by day, it’s like several layers of skin have been stripped from my body, leaving me raw and exposed.

I already feel more love for her than I can adequately put into words, and while I hope more than anything that her life is a happy one, I know that there will be times when that’s not the case. She will experience pain and heartbreak. She will doubt herself, hurt herself, and maybe even hate herself; she will probably hate us too at some point. She’ll have to figure out her own way in the world, even when the path doubles back on itself or reaches a dead end. And throughout it all, I’ll be here – because I’ll be her dad, and that’s what dads do.

It’s easy to say these things now, but I’m ok with that. It’s important to set the right course, even if you know that there are storms ahead. And no, I can’t say for certain what my own future will bring. Just today, I read about the death of Rachael Bland, a BBC Radio presenter who lived with cancer for two years before passing away last night at the age of 40. She left behind a three-year-old son, who would’ve been born at the same point in her life that I’ll become a father in mine. I’ve followed Rachael’s story over the last few months, via her blog and podcast, so I already knew how bravely she’d carried her illness with her, and how many people she’d inspired.

What really floored me today though was finding out that in her final weeks, she wrapped presents for her son to unwrap on each of his birthdays through to the age of 21. As an act of love, it’s hard to think of anything more thoughtful or selfless.

It also gave me the push I needed to finish this post. Pregnancy has changed me, and fatherhood will too. I don’t know how much of my daughter’s life I’ll see (a lot, I hope!) or which moments she’ll let me share. Will she love me as much as I already love her? Only time will tell. But I do know this.

I cry more now.

5 replies on “On Fatherhood”

Really touching and thoughtful, I shall have to investigate those films more.
I suspect my Dad is like yours but times 10 (given that he is from the WWII era!) so my brothers were encouraged to be stiff upper lip too! Not really helpful with all that we know now.
Yeah parenting really opens the floodgates to your emotions and it takes the blinkers off too – you start to see things you experienced when younger from ‘a parental’ viewpioint, one you probably could not have had before. It has certainly strengthened the bond I had/have with my parents.
You sound like your feet are firmly on track to being a good father, in my humble opinion. And be prepared to cry a lot more – children make you very proud too, so familiarise yourself with ‘happy tears’!

“In his words and the way he looked at Elio, I saw a father’s love for his child laid bare. More than that: I saw the way parents suffer when their children are unhappy or confused – as mine undoubtedly did (and do), even during the times when I thought I’d hidden my pain from them. I saw the patience, kindness and wisdom of someone able to take the richness and sorrow of his own life and distil it down to the few words that would truly help his son.”

“I already feel more love for her than I can adequately put into words, and while I hope more than anything that her life is a happy one, I know that there will be times when that’s not the case. She will experience pain and heartbreak. She will doubt herself, hurt herself, and maybe even hate herself; she will probably hate us too at some point. She’ll have to figure out her own way in the world, even when the path doubles back on itself or reaches a dead end. And throughout it all, I’ll be here – because I’ll be her dad, and that’s what dads do.”

It may be because, even over two decades into parenthood, this post resonates so strongly with me that I think it is my favourite thing you have ever written. That’s quite shocking if you realised how much I adore some of your stories and other posts. I cry more now than I ever did an a tough kid and teen. It is anything that taps that vein of fierce love, protection, fear, pride and awe of the relationship with these people who I would give my all for because I love them and I chose to bring them into this world.

I recently watched Call Me By Your Name as well and was also so touched by the ending (as I am by this post, which is beautifully written and moving!)… it’s such a relief to see a movie where a parent communicates with a queer child with love and good, solid relationship advice rather than inflicting trauma.

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