The Best a Man Can Get by John O'Farrell

Author:John O'Farrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2000-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

chapter seven

the mark of a man

‘It is not possible to maintain your dignity in a ball pit. Once you are lying on your back in the krazy quicksand of brightly coloured plastic balls you must resign yourself to looking like a lumbering, graceless buffoon, a sweaty injured walrus of a grown-up who, just by dint of being there, invites being bombarded by a hail of primary-coloured plastic cannon balls. There is a special fun smile you must wear, even when the little boy with the bullet haircut who you don’t know has just got you right in the face with a ball he has squashed to make it hurt more when he throws it. This is just one aspect of the general loss of dignity that is part of the modern paternal contract. You cannot appear aloof and indifferent when your two-year-old is vomiting his chocolate ice cream all over the floor of a designer menswear shop. There is no sophisticated, tasteful way to wipe the shit off your baby’s bottom. Don’t ever believe those adverts that tell you having kids will make you look cool, because it won’t. There is no Action Man double buggy with pull-out baby-changing mat. The mark of a man is no longer splashing on Old Spice and surfing to the chorus of the Carmina Burana; it is swallowing your pride and grubbing about on the floor and rolling around in ball pits. It’s humiliating, but it’s part of the deal.’

The crowd of fathers-to-be listened to me in shocked silence. Despite this pregnancy being Catherine’s third, I found myself being dragged back to antenatal classes and, on this particular evening, all the men had been sent into a separate room to discuss the ways in which we expected our lives to change after our babies were born.

‘Another thing they don’t warn you about,’ I continued, like an irate caller on a late-night radio phone-in, ‘is what it does to your marriage. Suddenly you niggle at each other and score points and try to make out you’ve had a much worse time than your partner. Catherine will say to me, “Have you sterilized the bottles,” when she can see the dirty bottles piled up in the sink. She knows the answer to the question, but by asking it knows she will force me into a guilty admission of failure. But all that does is make me exaggerate how difficult Alfie was while she was out. No, not exaggerate, lie! I will claim that I haven’t had a minute spare, and then Catherine will be forced to pretend she had a far worse time with Millie at the supermarket. It’s martyr’s poker – I’ll see your tantrum-at-the-checkout story and raise it with my account of diarrhoea in mid nappy-change.’

They were as eager to hear about my experiences as I was to recount them. No other man in the room had yet become a parent and they looked to me as the war-scarred veteran, back from battle, full of horrific tales from the front line of fatherhood.

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