Echoes of Fatherhood

The echoes of my father surround me, not intrusively and not permanently, but in the way I can tell a piece of silver which is Georgian with its simpler and elegant forms from an even simpler Queen Anne style. When I see an unfilleted trout I know how to gut and scale it, even better if I could smoke it over birch and serve it with chantrelles in butter as we did in the mountains in Norway. I have an enduring love for Iberian culture and can play a mean game of Scrabble. The writings of Steinbeck or Hemingway are nostalgic and connecting. All echoes. At the same time when my young son accidentally spills something or wipes chocolate on his t-shirt I can feel an inappropriate and disproportionate rage. When my daughters do the same thing it does not elicit the same feeling. Echoes. A kneejerk disdain for anyone who does not appreciate the history of pan European politics and alignments circa 1939. Echoes. I can indulge the positive ones. Most of the time I can suppress and act against the negative ones, but not always. There are also great big yawning chasms where there are just no reference points. I hug and kiss my son. I apologise to him and I tell him that I don’t know things which I don’t know. I tell him I love him and let him know he deserves my time and attention even if I don’t give those gifts to him as often or as well as he deserves. They will never hear a lewd comment about a woman escape my mouth and I will not be unfaithful to their mother. These are not echoes but rather me filling in the gaps and making things up on the fly.

The importance of fathers has never felt quite as pronounced as it does today and yet the role of the man has never felt so conflicted nor uncertain. Thank God that we have been moving away from the gender inequalities of the past centuries and of course we have a long way to go before that parity exists. We have missed something though. Something important. I remember the phrase “girls run the world” ringing out in our house