What We’re Teaching Our Sons - Owen Booth

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sons nod at us, blankly. They’re not old enough for any of this. What were we thinking?

      Together with our sons we go on the run, hiding out in a series of anonymous motels. The receptionists accept our false names without asking any questions. At three in the morning we peer out through the blinds or the heavy curtains, look for the lights of police cars out in the rain while our sons sleep.

      ‘Who’s out there?’ our sons ask in their sleep. ‘What do they want?’

      We can’t remember the last time we slept in our own beds, cooked a meal in our own kitchens. The mothers of our sons have indulged this nonsense for far too long.

      Most importantly, we’re teaching our sons how to make money. We’re putting them to work as paper boys, as child actors, as tiny bodyguards. We’re turning them into musical prodigies, poets and prize-winning authors. We’re getting them to write memoirs of their troubled upbringings. We’re using them to make false insurance claims. We’re training them to throw themselves in front of cars and fake serious injuries.

      And the cash is rolling in. We’ve had to buy a job lot of counting machines.

      We sit up long into the night listening to the constant whirr of the counting machines as they sing the song of our growing fortune, and we watch the rise and fall of our beautiful sleeping sons’ chests.

       Geology

      We’re teaching our sons about geology.

      We’re teaching them about sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks, about plate tectonics, about continental drift. We’re teaching them about the history of the earth, and the fossil record, and deep time.

      It’s making us feel old.

      Our sons want to learn about volcanoes, so we book an out-of-season holiday to Iceland. We stand on the edge of the Holuhraun lava field, staring down into the recently re-awoken inferno. Swarms of separate eruptions throw magma across the blackened, stinking landscape. Dressed in their silver heatproof suits, our sons look like an army of miniature henchmen.

      We tell our sons about Eyjafjallajökull and Mount St Helens, about Krakatoa and Pompeii. We tell them how the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 led to a year without summer around the globe. We tell them about the supervolcano under Yellowstone park that may one day wipe out half the continental United States.

      The spectacularly beautiful Icelandic tour guides – who are called Hanna Gunnarsdóttir and Solveig Gudrunsdóttir and Sigrun Eiðsdóttir – explain to our sons about Iceland’s geothermal energy infrastructure, how a quarter of the country’s electricity is generated using heat that comes directly from the centre of the earth.

      Our sons try to get each other to run towards the lava flows, to see how close they can come before they burst into flames.

      We are gently admonished by the spectacularly beautiful Icelandic tour guides for the behaviour of our sons. We are all a little bit in love with the spectacularly beautiful Icelandic tour guides. The mothers of our sons, of course, instantly become best friends with them and invite them to have a drink with us in the thermal pools.

      In the thermal pools we drink incredibly expensive beers and watch the snow fall on our sons’ shoulders, settle on their hair. Our sons shiver in the brittle air, splash and jump on each other. They remind us of Japanese snow monkeys.

      Hanna Gunnarsdóttir and Solveig Gudrunsdóttir and Sigrun Eiðsdóttir explain to us about the geothermal systems that heat approximately eighty-five per cent of the country’s buildings. They remind us that, geologically, Iceland is a young country: like our sons it is still being formed, as the mid-Atlantic ridge that splits the island right down the middle slowly pushes the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates away from each other.

      We tell Hanna Gunnarsdóttir and Solveig Gudrunsdóttir and Sigrun Eiðsdóttir that we know how it must feel to be the western half of the country, helplessly watching the east speed towards the horizon at a rate of three centimetres a year. If only our sons were drifting away from us that slowly, we joke.

      But they’ve already stopped listening.

       Sport

      We’re teaching our sons about sport.

      We’re teaching them how to ride a bike, how to kick a ball, how to run at and go round and pick up and jump over stuff. We’re giving them suggestions on how to choose a team to support.

      Ideally we’d have outsourced a lot of this. It’s not an area we have much expertise in. We don’t tell our sons that.

      ‘Throw the ball!’ we shout at our sons, trying to get into the spirit of things. ‘Catch it! Pass it! Hit it with the racquet/bat/stick!’

      Our sons stand in the middle of the sports field, looking at their hands like they don’t know what they’re for. Our beautiful, brilliant sons.

      Our sons getting hit in the face. Our sons getting upended into the mud. Our sons getting trampled on. Our sons crashing their bikes into walls. Our sons falling off their skateboards. Our sons falling off trampolines and vaulting horses. Our sons missing catches, in slow motion. Our sons unable to climb ropes. Our sons with water up their noses, gasping for breath. Our sons slicing golf balls and swinging wildly at pitches and hooking penalties wide. Our sons tripping over their own feet. Our sons, gamely, getting back up again and again.

      Our brave and magnificent sons.

      We can’t take it any more. We sprint onto the field, knocking small children flying in all directions, and scoop our beautiful sons up in our arms. Wipe the mud out of their eyes, the snot from their bashed-up noses.

      And then, carrying our glorious, broken sons, we run.

       Emotional Literacy

      We’re teaching our sons about emotional literacy.

      We’re teaching them about the importance of understanding and sharing their feelings, of not being stoic and trying to keep things bottled up.

      Because we are aware of the concept of toxic masculinity, we’re trying to make sure our sons grow into confident, well-balanced and emotionally open young men.

      We’ve come to the park to ride on the miniature steam railway. The miniature steam railway is operated by a group of local enthusiasts who hate having to let children ride on their trains. The enthusiasts are all men.

      ‘How are you feeling?’ we shout to our sons, repeatedly, as we clatter around the track on the back of 1/8th scale trains. ‘What’s really going on with you? You can tell us. We’re listening.’

      Our sons pretend they haven’t heard, try to ignore us. We don’t blame them. We can’t imagine talking about our feelings with other men either. The idea is horrifying. That’s why we all have hobbies.

      We explain to our sons about our hobbies. About constructing and collecting and quantifying things, about putting stuff in order. Classic albums. Sightings of migratory birds. Handmade Italian bicycles. Like our fathers and their fathers and their fathers before them.

      All those unknowable, infinitely quantifiable fathers.

      Two of the steam enthusiasts are arguing with a customer who keeps letting his children stand up while the train is moving. Nobody wants to give ground. Eventually the customer leaves the park with his kids. He’s coming back, though, he tells us all. He’s going to sort this out.

      We imagine the stand-off between the gang of ageing steam enthusiasts and the angry posse that the dissatisfied

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