What We’re Teaching Our Sons - Owen Booth

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      We hope they can look at us with kinder eyes.

      We crouch low in the water like middle-aged crocodiles, stealing glances at the sleek sea-otter mothers, and our sons put their arms around our necks and refuse to let go.

      In the changing rooms we hold on to our sons’ tiny, fragile bodies; feel the terrible responsibility of lost socks, and impending colds, and the effects of chlorine on skin and lungs. We wrap our sons in towels, blow dry their hair, try not to consider the future and all the upcoming catastrophes that we can’t protect them from.

      We promise ourselves that next week we’ll get it right.

       Heartbreak

      We’re teaching our sons about heartbreak.

      Its inevitability. Its survivability. Its necessity. That sort of thing.

      We take our sons to meet the heartbroken men. We have to show our credentials at the gate. We have a letter of introduction.

      Our jeeps bounce across the rolling scrubland under huge blackening skies. As we approach the compound a group of men in camouflage gear watch us carefully. They all have beer bellies and assault rifles.

      The heartbroken men are heartbroken on account of the breakdown of their marriages, and the fact that they never see their children, and the fact that they’re earning less than they expected to be at this point in their lives, and the fact that no one takes them seriously any more. In their darkest moments the heartbroken men suspect that no one took them seriously before, either. The fathers of the heartbroken men loom large. Their hard-drinking, angry fathers. And their fathers and their fathers and their fathers before them.

      The heartbroken men like to dress up as soldiers and superheroes. It’s embarrassing. How are we supposed to respond?

      We don’t like the look of those skies.

      ‘We have a manifesto,’ the heartbroken men tell our sons. They want our sons to take their message back to the people. Their spokesmen step forward. There’s a banner too. They’re planning to hang it off a bridge or some other famous landmark.

      ‘Are those real guns?’ our sons ask.

      ‘We –’

      ‘Can we have a go on the guns?’ our sons ask.

      ‘No, you can’t have a go on the guns,’ we tell our sons. ‘Don’t let them have a go on the guns,’ we tell the heartbroken men, ‘what were you even thinking?’

      The heartbroken men go quiet. They look at their feet.

      ‘Well?’

      ‘Fathers are superheroes,’ the heartbroken men say, quietly.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Superheroes,’ say the heartbroken men, starting to cry. Tears roll down their cheeks and fall upon the barren, scrubby ground.

      This is turning into a disaster.

      We should never have come.

       Philosophy

      We’re teaching our sons about philosophy.

      We’re discussing logic, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. We’re covering philosophical methods of inquiry, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind. We’re asking our sons to consider ‘if there is something that it is like to be a particular thing’.

      We’re on a boat trip up a Norwegian fjord and our sons are gathered on deck to listen to our lecture series. The spectacular mountains slide by as we talk about the sublime. The steel deck is wet from the recent rain.

      Our sons are doing their best to feign interest, we have to give them that. They’re disappointed that there are no whales or polar bears to look at.

      We’re trying to remember which famous philosopher lived in a hut up a Norwegian fjord.

      Not all the children on deck are our sons. The boat is full of beautiful, strapping Norwegian teens on a school trip. They’re all six foot tall with no sense of personal space. They make our sons look stunted and reserved. They keep asking our sons if they have any crisps. This has been going on for five days and everyone is getting sick of it.

      ‘Why are we here?’ our sons ask us.

      ‘Yes!’ we say, pointing to our sons with the chalk, like we’ve seen lecturers do in films. ‘That’s exactly the crux of it!’

      ‘No,’ our sons say. ‘Why are we here, on a boat, halfway up Norway? When we could be exactly just about anywhere else?’

      We have no answer to that one.

      In the evenings everyone eats together in the dining hall and then the older sons sneak off to try to get a glimpse of the beautiful Norwegian teen girls and boys who gather at the back of the boat singing folk songs and playing acoustic guitars. We put the younger sons to bed and tell them about Descartes and Spinoza, try to pretend we don’t wish we were still teenagers.

      Then we sit up long into the night nursing our glasses of aquavit and listening to the distant music and laughter.

      We came to Norway in the hope of seeing the aurora borealis, but it’s summer and the sun never sets.

       Work

      We’re teaching our sons about work.

      We’re taking them to the office, the factory, the school, the hospital. They’re coming with us on film shoots, on home visits, on our window-cleaning rounds. They’re helping us to study the births and deaths of volcanic islands, to collect unpaid gambling debts, to project-manage billion-pound IT infrastructure transformation programmes.

      Other children, we remind our sons, would be excited to see where their fathers work, what they do for a living.

      We’re teaching our sons that it’s important to have a vocation. And that even if you don’t have a vocation you still have to turn up every day and pretend you care. We’re teaching our sons about compromise. We’re teaching them how to skive, how to slack off, how to take credit for other people’s work. We’re teaching them how to negotiate pay rises and how to have office affairs.

      We tell our sons the stories of our many office affairs, back in the good old, bad old days.

      We tell them about our affair with beautiful Stephanie from reception, and the magnificent sunset in Paris, and the helicopter ride, and the horrible accident. We tell them about our affair with Cathy the kickboxing champion, and how it ended with a spectacular roundhouse kick to our head. The gay dads tell the stories of their affairs with Steve and Mark and Sunny and John and David and Disco Clive and the two Andrews. The mothers of our sons, overhearing, start to tell stories of their own wild workplace affairs, their own crazy and dangerous pasts, which makes us all a bit nervous.

      We go on for a while, until our sons start to wander off.

      They’re convinced they’re going to be film stars and astronauts and famous comic book artists. They’re not interested in all the ways we managed to screw up our stupid lives.

       Whales

      We’re teaching our sons about whales.

      Their habits and habitats, their evolutionary history, their cultural and economic relevance, the many stories told about them.

      An

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