Letters of fatherly advice

This collection of words of wisdom from Dads, via the lost art of a letter, is well worth a look. It's via the fantastic Brain Picker.

My favourites are F. Scott Fitzgerald to his 11-year-old daughter:

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about Cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Worry about…

 Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

 Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

…And this from Ronald Reagan to his 26-year-old son on the eve of his wedding, which - as the website notes - is thoughtful and strikingly honest, but perhaps suggests Reagan senior had his concerns about his son straying!

Dear Mike:
Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won’t.
You’ve heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the “unhappy marrieds” and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.
Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it. The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back to an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.
Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.
Love,
Dad
P.S. You’ll never get in trouble if you say “I love you” at least once a day.

The pain when children fly the nest

There's an interesting article from New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik over on the BBC website, about kids leaving home. He ponders:

'What I wonder about is why we love our children so asymmetrically, so entirely, knowing that the very best we can hope for is that they will feel about us as we feel about our own parents: that slightly aggrieved mixture of affection, pity, tolerance and forgiveness, with a final soupcon - if we live long enough - of sorrow for our falling away, stumbling and shattered, from the vigour that once was ours.'

Very familiar!

Why is this?

Parental love, I think, is infinite. I mean this in the most prosaic possible way. Not infinitely good, or infinitely ennobling, or infinitely beautiful. Just infinite. Often, infinitely boring. Occasionally, infinitely exasperating. To other people, always infinitely dull - unless, of course, it involves their own children, when it becomes infinitely necessary.
...
The parental emotion is as simple as a learning to count and as strange as discovering that the series of numbers, the counting, never ends. Our children seem, at least, to travel for light years. We think their suitcases contain the cosmos. Though our story is ending, their story, we choose to think - we can't think otherwise - will go on forever.

When we have children, we introduce infinities into all of our emotional equations. Nothing ever adds up quite the same again. 

It's a lovely and honest piece. I have a good few years left before my own pack their suitcases, and I think it will be the biggest adaptation I've had to make in my life… probably bigger than having children in the first place. But I wouldn't say I'm 100% dreading it… I imagine it won't be an end, it will just be a big change. I think I'll judge whether I've been a success as a Dad largely on whether the relationship with my boys survives and grows, e.g. still meeting up regularly for a pint and the football, much as Dads I admire tend to do. I also realise that's a big ask, as it relies not only on how they change, but how I change as well.

Some Comic Relief

As it's Red Nose Day here in the UK, I thought I'd point you to the two funniest things I've seen about fatherhood this year.

Firstly, Stewart Lee. The clip below isn't about fatherhood, but it's genius. It's taken from his 'Carpet remnant world', which is well worth getting hold of. In his usual style, he does a painfully extended but extremely funny routine about Scooby Doo style jungle canyon rope bridges, because all he does these days is watch Scooby Doo with his young son. 'I've got nothing,' he repeats apologetically. 'I look after my 4-year-old son, and I drive round the North Circular'.

Secondly, this from Phil Jupitus is just phenomenal. Not safe for work, but you just have to watch his account of his daughter's first 'sleepover' with her boyfriend at Phil's house. The final straw comes when beer (or, more accurately, 'dog lager') appears in Phil's fridge. 'BECAUSE I IMAGINE THAT HANGING OUT OF THE BACK OF MY FIRST BORN IS THIRSTY WORK!'

Sometimes I'm glad I don't have daughters.

Dad song #2 and #3

The great Richard Hawley played live at Maida Vale yesterday and included a couple of songs in the set that speak to the love between father and son. 

'I'm on nights' is, he says, 'about the love I was shown by my Dad'.

'Don't stare at the sun', his new single, is about him flying a kite with his youngest son. While high on LSD. 

Walking away

This poem, by Cecil Day-Lewis, first appeared in the collection The Gate and Other Poems, published in 1962. It is dedicated to Day-Lewis’s first son, Sean, and recalls a day when he was watching Sean go in to school. It has become one of his most enduring works and in 2001 was chosen by readers of the Radio Times as one of their top ten poems of childhood. Thanks to my Dad for pointing me to it.

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still.  Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

'Vivid memories of Dad'

How do you keep memories of your Dad alive for your own children? Developmental psychologist and author Charles Fernyhough considers fathers, children and the nature of memory in this 2009 article.

Charles has of course also written a captivating account of fatherhood and the first three years of his daughter Athena's life, 'The Baby in the Mirror'.

Dad song #1

Ian Broudie addresses his baby son Riley in this 1992 hit:

So here's your life,
we'll find our way,
we're sailing blind,
but it's certain nothing's certain.

I don't mind,
I get the feeling
you'll be fine,
I still believe
that in this World,
we've got to find the time...
for the Life of Riley.

From cradles and sleepless nights,
you breathe in life forever,
and stare at the World from deep under eiderdown.
Although this World is a crazy ride,
you just take your seat and hold on tight.

'That little creature is sitting there, behind the armour'

This is a letter from poet Ted Hughes to his 24-year-old son Nicholas, full of fatherly advice on the vulnerability of our inner child.

When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am. . . . But in many other ways obviously you are still childish — how could you not be, you alone among mankind? It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough time, and to end up making ‘no contact’. But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child. Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. 

'…the whole world of the person's childhood
is being carefully held like
a glass of water bulging at the brim'

And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool — for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful. So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its core, is what it always was. But since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner. And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line — unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive — even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources — not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.