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Why I’ve Written This Book
It’s a Saturday. I’m standing in Foyles bookshop, and I find three walls of parenting manuals. There’s one – two hundred pages long! - called Everything You Need To Know (in the first month’s of a child’s life). I’m thinking: is there that much I should have known? I have, twice, lived through a child’s first month. I could boil my experience down to three sentences of advice:
- Don’t be reading two hundred page books. Try to sleep.
- Don’t let them suck too long, or mum’s nips will really hurt.
- Get out the way when they puke.
I find several glossy volumes, which originated on TV, so they do what TV does best: concentrate on the freaks. I open the first book. It plunges me into a world of chaos and fear. I’m smelling the sick stuck to the seatbelt. The next one features photos of SuperNanny, who’s clearly been styled by a whole team of Style Experts, so she looks strict but sexy - like a dirty Mary Poppins, who’d wipe your surfaces, then give you a spanking. I want to push SuperNanny in a big muddy puddle. The childcare guides are making me feel depressed, and angry, and inadequate. I leave.
I go home, and find Liv in the park with the girls. She goes home to make lunch. People say kids bring parents together. They do, for about 60 seconds - the length of the average handover. At the playground, all the parents seem to have been reading the same books I have. The mums are mainly looking furious. Their body language is screaming: “If ANYONE else asks me to do something, I will start screaming, and I won’t stop.” The dads are worse. They are trying to make phonecalls, and are getting tetchy cos they’re losing the connection. Or they’re following their kids saying “careful Molly!” with that silly, soppy expression on their faces, like they want to play, but they are embarrassed.
I feel really depressed. I’m thinking: What’s the point of life? What’s the point of kids? They shout at night, they drain all your money, and then they leave and blame you for everything that goes wrong with their lives.
At this point Cassady arrives. My second daughter. She’s nearly three and a half. She’s wearing blue pants on her head. She’s pulling the rope of this brilliant go-kart we’ve got. My humming grandad made it fifty years ago out of wooden orange crates and two pram wheels. Cassady says: “Daddy, we need to get to our castle. You are a magic horse and you are called Barry The Magic Horse and you’ve got BIG BLACK HAIRY HOOVES!!” My daughter is very forceful. It’s like dealing with Paul McKenna, disguised as a small girl. I immediately start to feel quite horsey.
The other daughter arrives. Grace. The lanky, cautious one. She’s 5. She steps gingerly into the go-kart. They both shout “Giddy-up, Daddy! Giddy-up!” I grab that go-kart, and I canter off at some speed. As I leave the playground, I do a neiiiigggggghhh of pleasure. They cheer. I gallop off down the woodland path. I’m seized by a moment of horsey pleasure. I leap over a tree trunk, for the sheer joy of it.
Then I realise I’m out of breath. I walk. I think: “How did those little witches get me to pull them home?” I turn and look at them. They’re doing clip-clop noises, and singing that mad song they learned at school, the one where they chant: “Brush your teeth with bubble-gum! Belly flop in a Piz-za!” They are happy. Children complain that ketchup is touching their peas; they never complain that life is pointless. It occurs to me: life never had any meaning, because it’s not a maths puzzle, which can be solved. The secret of life is to play.
The problem with parenting manuals, I reckon, is that they tell you about the rules you impose on your children: Share, Wash Your Hands, Do Not Post Toast In The DVD player. This is useful, but it doesn’t make you eager about hanging out with your offspring. Which is bad, because kids copy their parents’ moods, and their outlook on life. So it doesn’t really matter what you feed them, or how early you start teaching them French. What matters is that you’re actually happy yourself. My parents taught me a lot about how to read; they taught very little about how to be happy. I had to learn it, from my daughters.
So that’s what this book is about. I tell you the rules I’ve learned about parenting, by telling you the stories where I learned them. I hope you’ll pick up a few tips. Example: if you’re really tired, take your top off, and invite your children to paint your back. You’ll feel like you’re being massaged by fairies. I’ll tell you how we’ve coped with the big issues: sibling rivalry, choosing a school, getting them to eat something that’s not a fish finger. I’ll also tell you how I’ve coped with the big fears: Will I ever see my friends? Will I turn into my dad? Will we ever have sex again? So I hope you’ll find that, in its own mad way, this book is curiously complete: it covers almost everything a modern parent might think about.
But most of all, I hope the book does justice to the two small girls who inspired it. I hope that, like them, it’s short, playful, and shockingly intimate. I hope it makes you laugh. I hope it makes you cry. I hope it sprinkles glittery fairy dust on your life.
Topics:
Why do you hate SuperNanny? Or do you love her? Is there anyone worse?
What is the most annoying thing kids do?
What is the meaning of life?
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