** Extract from my rookie-dad memoir X Years, Nine Months; circa November 2009 **
My mother, in her most wistful moments, talks of me as a little boy. I was her "little man", blessed with sufficient nous to keep a necklace bought from a primary school fete hidden away until Mothers’ Day; imaginative enough to pretend I was America’s Greatest Hero every Tuesday night in the early 1980s, flying around the house in the Ralph Hinkley costume she designed.
While the necklace gave her a rash and the blood-red Hinkley costume induced more than a few bumps and bruises, I didn’t give her – or dad – much trouble. In fact, I’m told I was a little too good at times during my earliest years, if the hours I spent cross-legged on the lounge room floor reading dictionaries – instead of playing matchbox cars or riding training-wheeled BMX bikes like the rest of my peers – were anything to go by.
But when pressed for memories of me as a baby, Mum’s stories are less vivid. She says the first years of each of her four babies were all a bit of a blur, particularly with her first three, my two sisters and I, who were all born within four years – and especially with me, her eldest.
The three decades that have passed since may have further clouded any recollections, but my status as a soon-to-be parent has me wondering how my parents – 23 and 21 when I came kicking and screaming into the world – coped. It must have been a crazy, bewildering time: next to no money; their high school days not long behind them; their peak years spent in a selfless daze.
I think of my old man becoming a father at 23, and then I think about myself at the same age: living in Ireland, pissing and, sometimes, puking away my pay on to the cobbled steps of Dublin’s Temple Bar, or into the muck water of the river Liffey, with nary a care in the world aside from my girlfriend – whom I met while backpacking two years before and was blindly, inexorably, in love with – and where my next pint of Guinness was coming from.
Of course, the early-adulthood whirlwind of marriage and children was as normal back then as the people of today partying away their twenties and living by the ‘30 is the new 20’ adage. As my folks and many of their peers (including Tash’s parents, who were even younger than mine when they started out, and they had three children in two years) point out, the youth of their era had significantly fewer options. There was no easy credit at banks. People just didn’t jet off travelling for years at a time. A job for life was something to be treasured. My old man didn’t miss out on living the high life in his twenties – he didn’t know any different. As far as he was concerned he’d done the responsible thing, the noble thing. The right thing.
At 32, almost 33, I’ll be almost a decade older than Dad was when he became a father. I wonder if my baby’s childhood will be different because of this. Dad was always running around with us; a fit young man, even with the smoking. I want to be able to keep up with my child, too. So I’ve begun exercising more, and intend cutting down my drinking while wiping out the final stage of my affliction to cigarettes: social smoking. To be short of breath while chasing my son or daughter around the park in a few years’ time won’t be cool. Neither is the possibility of leaving him or her early.
The years of bingeing may have imparted an ever-lingering yearning for self-destruction in my head, but I’ve become stronger, harder. I’m about to become a daddy with daddy responsibilities and daddy decisions to make. My old man, 10 years my junior as a rookie father, gave us a great childhood. I want my child to look up to me proudly like I did my dad. I want to bring home footy cards to my son, or a doll to my daughter. When I was five or six we lived in Mildura and Dad would take me, most Sunday evenings, to the nearby market for cashews. It was our time. I want my child to rely on me for these little excursions, the ones that only I – and not even their mother – can take them on.
And in a few years, once I’ve lived it, I want to be able to say to other soon-to-be dads that "you’ll be fine; if I can do it, anyone can."
I know I have the next few weeks to worry about first, but I can’t help thinking ahead. I’ve changed, man. Earlier in the year, during the self-denial-plagued first few months of pending parenthood, I wished that time would slow down and take a chill pill; now I’m looking ahead like a motherfucker. I’m like a late-blooming flower, gloriously opening up to the world.
Calm down, boy.
