My Job

Of all the lovely messages I received following the birth of my third daughter, Bonnie, one – from Jeremy Massey, a mate and fellow writer – especially struck a chord.

"The golden dad whose wings fold three. If you were ever doubtful of your role or duty, now it’s writ large. Congratulations. Love and love and love. Bloom. X"
Role. Duty. Job. I had plenty of crap ones in my late teens and twenties. Leaflet distributor. Factory worker. Door-to-door sales. Fruit picker. Data entry. Customer service. Accounts clerk. Credit controller.
The other job I had while floating through this procession of gigs that were each as meaningless as they sound – looking after myself – I failed dismally at.
An editing job coupled with regular freelance writing offers more purpose now, but the lack of creative output and a modest income finds me continually questioning my work ethic, direction, and ability to provide.
It's the age-old internal dilemma for any writer-type: desperately wanting to fulfil creative ambition versus desperately needing to be realistic.
There's that, and the fact I’ve always been one to find something to worry about.
But while Jeremy’s message brought clarity as to what my most important ‘role’ is, a recent brief bedtime chat with Edie – my eldest and not yet four – really banged it home.
I’d been home a week or so following Bonnie's birth, and I mentioned to Edie, in between bedtime stories, that I was due back at work the next day.
"I don’t want you to go back to work," she said with a slight whimper.
"Why not?" I asked.
Where I expected a response akin to "because I’ll miss you", I instead copped an earnest and all-too-grown-up: "Because you need to stay home and help Mummy look after three girls".
It stopped me in my tracks. I smiled, grimaced. Felt proud of – and sorry for – myself (and for Edie, and partner Tash) all at once.
Here sat my eldest child looking out for her two little sisters.
Here sat an angelic being who, courtesy of a few cute, cutting words, put me in my place.
Far beyond worrying about myself, I now had three – nay, four – girls who needed me. All beautiful. All healthy. All wild. All female. Jaysus.
Responsibility is scary. There is no way in God's green Earth I could've, half a decade back, pictured this scene. Edie’s pregnancy caught us by surprise so that path wasn’t planned. It became a case of: Decision made. Done. Get on with it. I was thrust headlong into a boiler room that has become increasingly hotter with the arrival of Avie last year, and now with Bonnie – whose pending, oh-so-unexpected arrival I spent nine months battling to get my head around.
But this boiler room is a safe one. Snug.
Jeremy is right. My purpose is as obvious as the nose on my face.
This is my lot. My world. My job.
It’s monotonous, yet no two days are the same.
It's chaotic. Exhilarating. Tiring.
It’s unglamorous. As boring as bat shit.
It’s glorious. Golden.
It’s love. And love. And love.  

Parenting Curveball #1,526: Jealousy

It pains me to muse on my psychological shortcomings, even now as a life-worn 36-year-old father-of-two, but the fact is I still suffer an infliction that I’m now trying to discipline my three-year-old daughter for: jealousy. 

That’s right. Good old-fashioned, soul-sapping, stress-inducing jealousy.

It’s always been a problem – and the context has never mattered. 

At primary school, my two best subjects were sport and English, and, even though I was above average in both, there was always the kid – or kids – who could spell and write better, and run and jump faster. I'd always eye them off with awe; trying to bridge the gap, unable to understand why I couldn't be the numero uno – or at least be exceedingly above average – for my age-group in something. 

In high school I envied the guy with the masculine broken voice; the other guy with the cooler undercut; the cool cats in $200 sneakers (my $30 Trax Idahos from Kmart never stood a chance against their leg-hugging Nike Air Jordans and Reebok Pumps); and the ones who, despite zit-littered faces, garnered most of the eye-fluttering female attention.

Then came early adulthood and the real world – and the myriad peers with better jobs (or, at the least, occupations they weren’t ashamed of). Oh, the dread of meeting someone, waiting for the question: “So, what do you do?” Being confronted with this simple, polite, stock-standard line of inquiry delivered a heart-sinking reminder of just how unhappy I was in my default field of credit control and dead-beat finance. Work didn’t (and still doesn’t, despite finally landing somewhere near my desired field as a writer and would-be media professional) define me, but it didn't make me feel any less ostracised when pressed by those with 'better' jobs – or those whose ‘careers’ ruled their worlds. 

While I'm now more at ease explaining to well-meaning sorts about what I 'do', the flame of jealousy, now that I'm living the all-engulfing life of a parent, is more alive than ever. Everyone else, it seems, has a better handle on the gig – as if having children is merely a small bump easily navigated in the road of life. While Tash bemoans the milestone-bragging of rookie-mum peers on Facebook (“Another one whose baby is sleeping through! Why do they have to tell the world?”), I've observed other dads thriving in their career or in extra-curricular interests, achieving great things while juggling parenthood with perceived ease. It’s as if there’s some sort of undercurrent of competition among parents out there: Who can look the busiest? Who can juggle the most balls?

On the celebrity scale there’s a whole bunch of people for whom parenthood hasn't hampered their 'busy people make time' ethos. There's Jamie Oliver, a gallivanting, globally-sought celebrity chef and savvy businessman who has four kids and wants more. If anything, his career has thrived since adopting the Dad hat. In my beloved world of AFL there’s former player Shane Crawford, who has four young boys while staying on top of numerous media and business opportunities. And what about Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer returning to work within weeks of pregnancy? It's like she's saying to the rest of us saggy-eyed, time-poor mortals: Labour, schmabour. Newborn, schmewborn. 

And while fatherhood – and the necessary evil of full-time work – has stagnated my progression as a writer, my struggles extend also to the other extra-curricular activity at the core of my universe: running. Pounding the pavement has become an intrinsic part of my weekly routine; I can’t get through two days without feeling its pull. It’s a mixture of vanity (and being able to eat and drink as much as I like), ego and escapism. In 2011 I completed my first half marathon. Last year I planned to replicate that feat in a quicker time, with a view to a marathon. It didn’t happen that way; life got in the way. Training for a marathon, therefore, seems an impossible dream for now. The hours the average training program eats up seems akin to that of a part-time job. And it’s for this reason that I’m bewildered at how the likes of Olympic marathon runner Marty Dent – who has three young children and a newborn – combines a full-time job as a public servant with a chequered running career that peaked last year with a top 30 finish in London. He obviously has a very understanding wife – and possesses an uncanny ability to make every minute count. 

Yes, I know Dent is an extreme case in point, given he's an elite athlete, but on the other hand he's tied to the office chair just like the thousands of less talented ‘weekend warriors’ across the nation who, too, manage to fit it all in.

But back to my writing. While I bang out odds and ends and reviews for a culture supplement of a national paper, creative work rarely moves past the infancy-of-idea-and-rough-note stage. And yet, I see evidence around me of people still churning out a decent amount of work; none more so than a work colleague. This bloke works full-time. Does comedy shows. Writes for a national rag and for various websites. Maintains a widely-read blog. And had his fourth book published last year. Oh, and he has three small kids, including twins. He says he fits things in because he has to; that he always gets there in the end. By his own admission, he's also somehow found a way of enduring the perpetual-jet-lag feeling of minimal sleep  – something I'm not great at managing.

It’s human nature, apparently, to want what we haven't got – and I'm certainly no exception. Why do I beat myself up about what I’m not doing, or what I don’t have? Why can’t I just bottle up the simple beauty in playing a vital part in raising two beautiful girls and run with that for a few years? Why can't I be content that I’m on a good wicket – that these hard times won’t be forever – that I’ll eventually have my 'me-time' back again? 

As a hard-living single mate pointed out recently, I have a life that many others would envy. He might have even said he was jealous.

Seeing Things from My Folks' Perspective

** 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. 

Letter to Edie for her third birthday

My darling Edith,
It’s true, time flies when you’re having fun. Despite all the challenges you’ve presented – the tantrums; the sleep deprivation; the monotony of routine; the pumpkin-milk-pasta-and-corn-plastered floor; the hypnotic sounds of your favourite shows In the Night Garden, Play School and Peppa Pig; and who could forget ‘Stickergate’? – the past three years have been a blast. I look at you now and feel amazed by how quickly you’re growing up.
As your beautiful curly hair (that your mother, it seems, will never let a hairdresser near) becomes crazier and cuter, so, too, has your face transformed from angelic baby and toddler and into the sweet little girl that we adore today. I feel like an old man saying this but I feel like you’re three going on 13. (I’m a father now, I’m allowed clichés as well as dads jokes.)
Increasingly I see your mother in you, especially when asleep (like your mum you have this semi-distressed but zonked look going on when in the land of the nod), and there’s no doubt you’re going to be as beautiful as her. It’s always been the way – right from your purple-and-red-faced first few hours, when, beyond the jaundice and the battle scars of labour, your natural beauty shone through. And from that uncertain, distressing introduction to the world to this very moment, you’ve always been at the forefront of my brain; you’re my purpose and my heart. I utterly dread the thought of any harm coming to you.

Here’s an extract from X Years, Nine Months, a memoir I self-published detailing the nine-month build-up to your arrival. It’s the morning after your ‘head-wetting’ at a pub in North Melbourne:
"I’ve got Edith in my arms, slowly rocking and shoo-shooing (away from her, so to not subject her to my alcohol fumes). After a few minutes of red-faced protest she settles into my rhythms and I think: I can do this! My head’s heavy but it doesn’t cloud the love I’m feeling for my daughter. Her eyes slowly close and her lips droop. Tiny white pimples dot her face. I caress the side of her bruised head and ponder what’s in store for the three of us. I’ve made a point of watching the habits of new parents in recent times and I know it’s all ahead of me. But looking down at Edith – my beautiful, god-sent Edie – I’m looking forward to the journey. The next journey. Thank you, I whisper to my daughter, for being that barrier to my bullshit. For being my purpose. For being the best mistake I’ll ever make..."

Now it’s time to thank you in the present tense.
Thank you for the continuing joy you bring your mother and I.
Thank you for your being the inquisitive, energetic, creative (“Be a CUSTOMER at my COFFEE SHOP!”) and caring soul that you are; your mother and I certainly won’t be lacking in default conversation material when we eventually return to a life that includes going out for dinner!
Thank you for being so open and giving to our friends (to quote Stevo: “I have a lot of love for one of your daughters... I will get to work on the other once she is old enough…”) and even to strangers; you can’t possibly know how much your smiles at cafes and parks brighten others’ days.
And, finally, but perhaps most importantly, thank you for being such a great big sister. Avie is so lucky to have you. The way she looks at you with such unadulterated love in her eyes – it’s like she can foresee how good you’re going to be to her in life.
Thank you for adapting this year – your mummy and I know how difficult it’s been for you, but you’ve come through in flying colours… and it feels like we’ve all come out the other side.
Happy third birthday, my beautiful girl.
Love, Dadda.

Edie and the F-Bomb

When Robert Doyle’s public attacks on a FCUK billboard (“An insulting and gratuitous blot on our urban landscape,” raged our mayor’s Sunday Herald Sun article) followed the introduction of the Victorian government’s anti-swearing laws in July, I sided with those bemoaning our “nanny state” and its continued erosion of free speech.
Then I first heard my 21-month-old daughter, Edie, drop the f-bomb. It came seemingly from nowhere: as crisp as an elocution lecturer; as chunky as if delivered from Kevin 'Bloody' Wilson's bearded gob.
At first my partner and I stifled laughter under covered mouths. To hear her chirpily navigate many words with difficulty but execute the dreaded f-bomb like some sort of angelic Chucky doll seemed hilariously funny.
But then she started using it in context.
After dropping one of her dolls: “F**k”.
Having fallen over: “F**k”.
While standing up in the driver’s seat of our car and mimicking me behind the wheel: “F**k.”
“It's your fault,” my partner said. I disagreed, suggesting she was around her mother more than her father. My partner stood her ground. “I don’t swear around her."
As if to bring closure to the argument, Edie upped the ante, dropping the f-bomb upon seeing me when I walked in the door from work.
Me: “How’s my little girl?”
Edie: “F**k... f**k... f**k.”
F**k, indeed. Far from a squeal of “Daddy” as she ran towards me for a cuddle, my outstretched arms were instead met with a smiling, blue-eyed bombardment of f-bombs, each ending in a sharp, emphatic 'k' that felt like a jab to my gut.
I was to blame after all. With slumped shoulders I sat down in a quiet place and thought about swearing and, in particular, the ‘f-‘word. I blamed society; the word has become so embedded in the Australian psyche that many of us – including me, obviously – say it without thinking. Heck (sorry, 'f**k'), many of the nicknames we blokes bestow on each other contain the 'f-' or, worse, 'c-‘bomb. Even our TV networks, historically filter-friendly, have become more liberal in allowing certain words to air (especially after 8.30pm, and keeping the camera focused on AFL players' mouths for missed-goal reactions.
Then I got thinking about the filters we impose on ourselves. Was swearing a release for having to hold in our curses after spending most of our waking hours around soul-sapping bosses and dippy workmates? Why then, if my filter's on while at work, or while visiting my grandparents, or while writing a column (note my use of asterisks), is it off when I’m around my little girl?
Inexperience, I decided, was the major factor, but no amount of earnest resolve could quell the feeling of helplessness as the days rolled by and that word didn't go away.
My partner's parents, visiting recently when Edie unleashed one of her more savage Big Lebowski routines, told us to ignore her; they said she'll eventually forget the word. Oh, and to watch our swearing.
Funny, how certain situations as a first-time parent has led me to back to my own childhood. My dad is a straight-down-the-line, beer-drinking country fisherman who swears like a trooper with his mates, and yet, as kids, he'd order my sisters and I to bed if the video we’d hired had too many expletives. It only took two or three bad words and we’d be on way (we lasted around two minutes after sitting down to Platoon). Now I understand his motives.
Since then I've uttered more f-bombs than I'll ever have dollars in my bank account, and it’s done me no good. Strange, really, how something that serves no purpose can be one of the staples of a whole cross-section of vocabularies.
So, I’ve decided to cease using the f-bomb. Even if I'm working alone at home and my computer has frozen, or if I'm in the car – especially if I'm in the car – I’m going to try my darnedest to not use it.
Sure, I'll have to change the way I converse with mates (particularly after a few drinks), and hum along to sections of some tunes (and stop recounting film dialogue, period), but the preservation of my little girl's childhood is worth it. She'll be bombarded soon enough.
Long live the nanny state!

Edited version on Mamamia: http://www.mamamia.com.au/parenting/guess-who-dropped-the-f-bomb-now/

LittleOne

Edie, the budding Entrepreneur

Daddy and Edie walk into the $2 shop in Newmarket Shopping Centre. Edie's holding a 50c coin in one hand and a 10c coin in the other.
Daddy finds the CD cases he was looking for, value $2.50, then, Edie in his arms, presents at the counter.
Asian store owner: "Two dollar fit-ty, peez."
Daddy digs into his back pocket, pulls out a $2 coin and $1 coin. He hands over the $2 coin, then, weighing up the balance, tries to get Edie to hand over her 50c coin while gesturing to the store owner. "Pay, Edie, pay."
Edie considers, shakes her head. "Edie," she says, holding the coin tightly in her little right hand while looking earnestly at the Asian woman. "Edie, Edie, Edie, Edie."
The store owner smiles, a little cheese wedged between her front teeth.
Daddy hands over the $1 coin instead, and then tries to pocket the 50c change.
But Edie has other ideas. "Edie," she says. "Edie, Edie, Edie."

Smart girl. She now has $1.10, rather than 10 cents, to her name.