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    Dadventures - Diary of a Full Time Dad
    Dadventures - Diary of a Full Time Dad
    Dadventures - Diary of a Full Time Dad
    Ebook130 pages2 hours

    Dadventures - Diary of a Full Time Dad

    By Peet See

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    About this ebook

    We all have to give ourselves to something. 

    This is a book about the adventure of fatherhood - the Dadventure. It is for men who are willing to give themselves to their children, or who would like to know what that might mean.

    In it I invite you to learn from my mistakes through the medium of laughter. You can also pick up important skills, like how to improvise a modesty flap from hospital towels, or where to buy trousers that do not expose your hindcrack to disgusted mummies.

    If you are thinking about having children and would like to know what it is like to have no job, no money and no stable hairstyle, then do I have a Dadventure to sell you.

    No dignity required - you won't be needing that where you are going. Trust me. I live there.


     

    35000 words

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeet See
    Release dateNov 16, 2019
    ISBN9781393794073
    Dadventures - Diary of a Full Time Dad

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      Book preview

      Dadventures - Diary of a Full Time Dad - Peet See

      Preface

      The Second Summer

      Watching my infant son walk in front of me in his tiny coat is an experience that shakes the kaleidoscope of the possible. Moments like this in the routine chaos of daily life are common. Some trivial image or remark seems to open up a vast library of significance and emotion. Today we are in the park, and the infant is digging at a bit of earth under a tree with a stick. I find myself following him and get lost in a moment of life that has become a stream of all the symbols that connect me to everything.

      He is in front of me, small and curious and is the future of course. I am happy to hand on the baton of life to him. It makes my own mortality lighter to bear, and what is more the absurdity of my own death is no longer absurd. I see the weak winter sun play in his golden curls and I know in a way that I never knew before that my last sunset is coming and I must be ready. Reluctant to leave him but ready to do so, knowing I have given him of myself what I can. It makes sense to pile things up and sort them in my head so that I have someone to gift the scrapbook of my experience. To use myself up in a way, so he might have a better way ahead. Simply to help him be happy today – find his way to the stream and not let him fall over as we walk in it, grateful for our wellies. One day I will have to let go of his hand forever.

      Children can give you a landmark in life like nothing else. Settling for cats is a byword for madness for a reason. The monument of a son or a daughter casts a shadow in both directions in time – depending on the height of the sun.

      When children are very small your world shrinks to them, and it is giddying. Time is golden in the heyday of a happy change, which is gone so fast. Equally intense is the misery of a crying fit that never ends. Your mind eventually unravels and it is best to just let it unspool as you ignore the throb of your ruined feet. You are drooling and have not changed your loungewear in days. Yet you do the only things you think will help: plod about humming with the howler at your shoulder, patting away, hoping they crash out first, begging for silence.

      Then they sleep and by God do they look divine.

      Pictures help, because memory isn’t at its best when you sleep for an hour or two at a time.  I have found to expect anything from effortless conversation to humiliating gibberish when I open my mouth nowadays. No one warned me I would find speech such a high risk affair. There are times when a word like ‘blueberry’ or ‘van’ will simply vanish and I will have to stop, mid sentence, and groan. The groaning helps to commemorate the death of my dignity, which did not survive the first week of my infant son’s life.

      There has been no greater joy or unifying principle in resolving a durable sense of purpose in my life than having children. It has remade my life and I now find I have an automatic reason to be: in the general, existential sense and also to be present at the moment I am needed.

      To be needed to kiss a stubbed toe or open a curtain is important in a way that a bucket list mentality can never grasp. It will help to remove the need for petty ambition – that shrinking of the soul that leaves people leading lives sandwiched around gap years. The experience you are seeking is one to fill up a hole. Bungee jumps, exotic selfies, street food in some hellhole noteworthy for the fact you have not (yet) been murdered in it – the preposterous lengths to which we go to satisfy the appetite for distraction are innovatively exceeded each year.

      The adventure that is parenthood does not end with a weary flight home. It is not a gap year or a career break – it is the transmission of the gift of life. There is nothing more meaningful than learning to lead that little person through the early seasons of their life. It is presence in the joy of a new life you have made. It is bright and full of promise, like the second summer of life.

      Chapter One 

      BC – Before Children

      LIKE ANY RIGHT-THINKING people we had decided the world had been doomed by idiots. There was no point thinking of the future because it had been cancelled. Of course, this had nothing to do with us – yet it was clearly down to people like us to do something about it.

      One thing we certainly weren’t going to do was have kids.

      We bought doom books – about the climate, about terrorism, about antibiotic resistance and the grey goo menace of nanotechnology. It was a duty to be up to date on the latest fashion in armageddon. It wasn’t a question of if, but when. Soon was the answer to that. The only real issue was how?

      We all have our favourite reasons for thinking we are better than everyone else, and ours was that we presumed to know more about the end of the world than anyone else.

      A small and inoffensive car  - more of a motorised mackerel can – was purchased. We moved to the country and refused (for a while) to have a fridge. Of course we had a wood burning stove to heat the place, which was tiny. That was all right because it was old-fashioned and no one we knew in London had one. There was no heating otherwise and the milk was kept in the coal cellar.

      I was pleased to announce to anyone unable to escape my company that the reason we did not have a fridge was because we were better than them. Despite being attuned to devastating news of the apocalyptic sort, I was unable to receive the less than encouraging feedback on this position for some months. I had a kind of awakening one day when I lost my slipper in the dark and nearly fell to my death, trying to retrieve a half curdled pint of milk from the soot-greased stone steps of the cellar. It was not the insanity of my gesture but the stubborn kindling of the will to live which changed my mind in that case.

      We got a second hand one and never looked back.

      The sad void under the kitchen counter was now filled. Instead of an empty space suggesting the misery of absence we had a humming box of delights. We spoke no more of the luxury of a silent kitchen, which people who notice such things would prize, and now laughed (how we laughed!) at the utter tomfoolery which had possessed us. Then my wife got a dog.

      In preparation, perhaps, for the purgatory that awaits all modern parents, we had been to IKEA. Swearing frugality and allegiance to everything second hand, we considered ourselves immune to the temptations and fripperies of the Swedish Cavern. Two grand later and I had gone all high-concept.

      This new derangement showed how deeply (and quickly) does the perfidy of the flatpack permeate the most resilient of minds. I had gone to sneer at everyone else, of course, the pathetic fools. Perhaps I might go for a sink tidy. Or a doormat. Those rugs look nice...

      They get you in with the bookcase and they sell you a dream. I leapt aboard the magic bus and found myself starry eyed in the good-time city of stripped-down living. I bought everything we could fit into the house. Mats, rugs, bath things, kitchen bits, desk, chair, wavy light rope, dressing room light fittings, the inevitable bookcase and...

      THE BED

      Hewn from solid pine and measuring mere centimetres less than the width of our room, THE BED was a mighty addition. A life changer. It was no mere piece of furniture. It was my Versailles – the seat of my future power and the emobodiment of my vision.

      THE BED was no ordinary pit. It was ten feet tall and was a double bunk bed. This was the key to its brilliance. You could have both THE BED and the room beneath it! It was ingenious. Once again I had triumphed over the folly of convention. I was a pioneer of space.

      I can still see myself selling the concept to my wife, who by now had developed a fatalistic sense of the inevitable about the matter of inspiration and bore the news like Wilfred Owen hearing his six thousandth artillery barrage. She was graceful if expressionless, and wisely left me to the three days of swearing that ensued.

      I did not see much of her until the end of the week. Previous to the arrival of THE BED we had been sleeping on an incontinent camping mattress. I looked forward to a time when I did not have to resuscitate a wheezing airbed before crawling carefully on to it, trying not to offend it with my weight. I knew it would repay my efforts by farting itself to uselessness by five o’clock, and had come to hate it. Perhaps it was the depressing fact of being so close to the floor for so long which had propelled my thoughts toward the ceiling. I was about to find out precisely how far.

      I had the thing up in a jiffy (it was still light outside) and started to assemble the ladder when I realised a horrible mistake. Darkness began to fall as I fought back the hot tears of rage.

      The room was shaped like a shoebox. At one long end, in the corner, was the door. At the far end of the shoebox was the tiny window, set deep into the two-foot thick stone walls. THE BED (mercifully) slotted into the room quite snugly, leaving only a hand’s width between itself and the walls. It would have been a perfect fit, but for the fact that I had spent ten hours building it with the ladder end up against the window wall.

      We slept downstairs, conversation suspended for the time being, beside the fire. The next day I spent in taking THE BED to bits, and the day after that in carefully reassembling it the right way round.

      I was so exasperated by THE BED at this point that I welcomed the prospect of sleep.

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