A lot of the time I get an easy ride.
“You made a cottage pie? Wow, that’s incredible.”
And I’ll smile and nod and take the accolades, my skin red raw from the queue of people giving me pats on the back.
But I’m a single father with two daughters who need to eat, and filling their stomachs with what has all the ingredients of a cottage pie but the aesthetic look of a rudimentary attempt by an eleven-year-old child is one of the basics of parenting. I know I do it alone, but I never truly think that what happens in my house, between me and my now teenage daughters is anything more than a middle-aged dad making the best stab he can at bringing up the little humans he loves. As for my cottage pies, no one saw the results, they hear I have bothered to cook, not bought a Dirty MacDs, so I am their newly appointed king of the world.
The story is a long one, and difficult at times, but an accumulation of stories I have told a million times in the firmly held belief that through repetition the events become increasingly meaningless. It works, I think. But it takes others to judge, and see and then maybe express an opinion. If I disagree, I tell them I made a lovely Chicken Tikka Masala that my eldest just simply loved.
My two daughters were born into a married couple. Two young people who knew nothing about being adults, let alone parents. Their mother Italian, myself English, our kids dual nationality. We lived together, as a family, in Italy. A few years passed, things went bad, we divorced, I got full custody and eventually we moved back to England. But not to my home town of friends and family and support - although we drifted through - but North, to a city I didn’t know existed, to be with someone who had promised to be someone, and I had made my promises in return. Neither of us was ever able to live up to any of them. This left my daughters in a new town, in a new country with a new language. There was me, having fallen to bits years before and running on empty, alone in a city where my daughters had quickly made roots and friends and memories. I had just simply made mistakes. Again and again. Many of them the same ones I had made in previous relationships.
From that moment on, we lived alone, the three of us, as we still do, a family group. Two young girls who had seen so much, and experienced more than most, in a two-up, two-down house on an ex- military base on the outskirts of a beautiful old city. And I heard them laugh all the time. Sometimes I helped that along.
Back before, in Italy, we had moved from the only home they had known into the countryside. In the place of their birth, we found a small ground floor apartment, with a garden so big it was a park, a wood with a river on the other side. We woke up and saw deer playing statues on the grass. It was bliss. Until, one day when the river burst its banks and our house flooded. We lost pretty much everything we had struggled to bring with us. Yet when we look back, we speak and laugh about it, how much fun the clean-up was, how many times we threw mud and found Lego miles away from our home, how many times we complained about the smell, and how heavy mattresses full of water become. It was tough, I had, in a moment of peace, looked up to the sky and asked a God I had never spoken to before,
“What have I done?”
He didn’t answer, I wasn’t expecting one. The tears were mine, the laughter, however, was all my daughters’.
My dad says to me, “I could never have done what you have, son.” And while I think that means something positive, that I have done, and continue to do things I believe fathers should do, he sees my actions and life and choices as beyond the norm, beyond even him. I never say, “So you’d have abandoned me, if the same had happened to you?”
I don’t think he would, not entirely, but I think he may have found someone female double-quick to help out. I know I did, briefly. But it didn’t work, not for me, not for her, but more importantly, not for them. The best, as I saw it, was for me to be the parents, and for them to grow up in happiness and safety. A base that would not change, a foundation that would remain the same until they were old enough in age to be free and go and see the world too if they wanted.
It is the safety, the openness, the set by example, I try to follow. All those quirky little sayings, the grandmother’s wise words, the homily you hear and nod and say, yeah, that’s cool. The only one I ever took in, and meant anything to me, was this:
Be the person you want your children to be.
That one meant something to me. It made sense. If they ever find themselves in the situations of discomfort and fear and hurt that I have, I hope they would leave quickly, I hope they would ask for the help they need, the help I would be willing to give. It seems they do, because we talk. Some conversations I would never imagine having. My eldest has talked about drinking to me. The last time I drank alcohol was on my eldest’s tenth Birthday. She is now nearly seventeen. I gave up because I don’t want them to rely on drink like I did. I buy my eldest wine when we are out, we talk and laugh at the rowdy drunks, we talk and smile with the nice drunks. We talk about a lot. Maybe not everything, maybe there are things for which I am just not the person to talk to. But we cover a lot, and maybe not every teenage girl confides everything to their mothers either.
My eldest came home, Year Seven, and I came home a few minutes later. She told me, as she sat uncomfortably on the armchair, that her periods had started. I smiled, we had already got it all set up. A shelf in the bathroom with all the products she needed, all the paraphernalia in which she became expert and I remained a novice. We had already set up the routine, what would happen if I were there or not. I also quickly messaged a female friend, who came round in an hour and spoke, about what I don’t know, but she spoke and they were cool, everyone was happy and not too soon after, the fact she could now get pregnant was a conversation we started to have. We spoke, and have spoken again at length about not trusting boys. I was one, I know. I thought I knew when I was seventeen. But I didn’t, I knew nothing. The only thing that probably saved me from becoming a teenage father was that most teenage girls didn’t let me anywhere near them, and the ones that did had their heads screwed on and protection at the ready.
We talk, a lot, about nonsense mostly, about serious things when they come up. They see their mother, who remains in foreign lands. She has visited and stayed with us in our house. And while we don’t stay up late discussing the twists and turns of the latest thing on worldwide TV, we are friendly, we speak, we make an effort to laugh at each other’s jokes. It is for them, not us, an example of what two people should be like even when bad things have happened.
A single man, with two daughters, seems to be a weird concept for so many. Students have asked if their mother died, have asked, even if they know and like me, why are they with you? I’ll admit it is an unusual occurrence, not the norm, but it isn’t so weird as to be detrimental. People comment on how rounded and nice my daughters are. They shouldn’t be, I have been told. Their experiences, their movements, their lack of a mother figure should have resulted in damage and behaviour. But it hasn’t. I have, to the downfall of certain relationships, been there for them every time they need. They do come first, by a long way. They come way before me. I haven’t been out on town more than three times in years. I don’t really know what my weekends will be because they are decided at the last minute by them. That is the only thing that I can see that makes me different from co-parents. All my time is for them, because if it isn’t, they have no one to give them time. Time is the key, being there, putting them first, showing them they are the most important thing in my life, showing them how I think a good person acts, how adversity – a flood, moving country, losing childhood haunts – is an adventure not an end, not a definition of their lives.
If their mother were with us like a typical family unit, she could take the load. The silly chats, the girly talks that I try to have (and I am good at to a point), would be hers, and I could take the role of ‘Man’. But where would be the fun in that? I don’t want to be defined as a masculine male, drinking beer, watching sport, having my dinner ready, having a woman do the parenting, do the upbringing, do everything while I earn a slightly higher salary in the workplace and in return do nothing at home.
I am involved in every aspect, although as they grow my opinion is asked for less and less. I have as a young man been in fights, drunk till unconsciousness, played rugby with the alpha males, grown a beard when I really couldn’t and played cards for money. But I became a dad, a father to two girls, so I stopped because I was no longer that person, I was a person who needed to bring up two daughters alone. I learned to French plait, I learned a lot about make-up – although not nearly enough not to be embarrassed in conversation with a daughter in the expensive section of Boots.
Becoming a father changed me, not completely, I carried on with the male idiocy. Becoming a single father made me. It gave me reason, a purpose. Something I found I was good at, but only if I gave up on all those strange cultural notions of who and what a ‘Man’ should be. But I wouldn’t define me as a man as such, I’d define me as a dad to two great girls, a male at that, but someone who needs to help them be the most incredible version of themselves they can be. That doesn’t involve drinking, joking, being loud, being a man, and being the other half in a relationship I would be in only to provide the typically and classically female aspects of bringing up two girls.
Be the person they need you to be is always important and sometimes they just need me to be there. A lot of the time they need me to take them somewhere in my car, with next to no notice, sometimes in the week toward ten, they will say they actually need something for school the next day: tights, ingredients - once even mint tic-tacs was requested. And I’ll go, but they come too, and we walk the aisles of Tesco, talking about why they really need to give me more of a head’s up and more of a chance to do something other than abide to their every whim.
But they are great kids, and I try to be the person I want them to be. What they don’t realise is that I am the person I am because they have made me the person I needed to be, and someone I never ever thought I could be. And I’ll tell them directly one day, but right now I just tell them I love them, and continue to try and be as good a parent as I can, and show them how to be the best versions of themselves.
