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A good author can write characters of any gender, ethnicity, religious creed and sexuality. But can a man write about the experience of motherhood, one existence he cannot possibly ever experience for himself? And if a male writer does write about motherhood, as I have, it lays him open to Feminist criticism of usurpation of the female. I wholly understand this argument, though it seems to me to be one of scale; men are absolutely encouraged to share the workload of child-rearing under Feminist rationale, but we are absolutely not meant to claim the function of the maternal and dispossess women accordingly.
I was the main child-rearer for our twins. I worked part- and flexitime to ensure that my boys never came home to an empty house, or were palmed off on some virtual stranger to look after. I accompanied them to and from school every day until they were 15 and requested that they dispense with my services, since it was now plainly embarrassing for them to be seen with their old man on the bus. Oh, did I not mention, we did the whole childhood thing without a car? Hauling a double buggy on the bus or the London Underground, I developed some muscles I never had when playing sports. I nursed them when sick and took them to hospital for the stitches. I supported their reading and learning to write. I coached their youth soccer team, we never won a competition, but we did win the “Fair Play” award for all age groups. And so on and so forth until this September, when I was able to release both of them into the wild as they started their university courses.
So now I look back on my role as father-mother and consider the whole experience. I’ve written a work of fiction exploring the big questions that arise from becoming a parent and bringing children up. The first is that perennially difficult balance between protecting and shielding your children, set against giving them the space to develop independently and garner their own experiences. You can support the latter, helping your child discover what they enjoy and what they might have a real talent for, yet you somehow also have to stay outside of that and not project your own dreams and ambitions on them. They have to find their own way, not retread the footsteps of yours. So often on the soccer field I saw parents eagerly living out their own frustrated sports’ careers, or looking around to see if a professional team scout was in attendance with a juicy contract to sign up the next superstar in the making, dreaming of the money.
As the main child-rearer, I did experience many of the same things a mother performing the bulk of the work bringing up children does.
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As the main child-rearer, I did experience many of the same things a mother performing the bulk of the work bringing up children does. Being around children all day, how you yearn for some grown-up contact to stop you going mad or regressing back to a child yourself. The exasperation of watching your child trying to master some alien task such as feeding themselves or learning to paint without splattering the walls, just wishing they would hurry up and grasp it. The snap decision to dress them yourself, just so you can get out the door and not be late for that appointment or playdate, which risked laying down a lifetime of them expecting to be waited on hand and foot in spheres they should be doing for themselves. It was me largely charged with re-entering the world of the child’s imagination when playing with them and their toys. I had to strip back my sporting ability to match more their level to make it an even and encouraging game. (I know some competitive fathers struggle to rein themselves in with this, mothers far less so). I had to think about the moral dilemmas around prohibiting them from fizzy drinks and junk food, set against them having them at every child’s party and in similar fashion, holding out against getting a games console, only for them to feel ostracised by their peers because such entertainment wasn’t on offer in our home. (I folded and bought one, and then had to decide what age could they have a game marked 15 and then those marked 18). So yes, I would venture that I was maternal.
Then there’s the question of how much of personality and abilities is genetic Nature and how much acquired through nurture. I had a ready made ‘laboratory’, in that I was bringing up non-identical twins. One clearly inherited many of my features, the other mostly those of my wife. But then we were also very careful to distinguish them as individuals and not treat them as the same, so they not only got our genes, they also received our undiluted parenting. Therefore how can you determine what is biological and what is learned behavioural? In my book I take this false dichotomy one stage further, in a difficult environment such as sectarian divided Northern Ireland where your loyalties and allegiances are determined by which of the two religious communities you’re born into, there is no effective difference between Nature and Nurture, since your inheritance is almost hard wired by accident of birth. For all the advances in our understanding through decoding the human genome, I’m still not convinced that we can usefully differentiate between Nature and Nurture; the two are as inextricably intertwined as DNA’s double helix itself. No amount of knowledge of genetics is going to unravel human consciousness and that is where parenting is key. As the mother character says in my book, “the love is unconditional, but the surrender ought not to be”. That mother is me.
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Marc Nash’s novel “Three Keys In The Dream Of G” is available from Dead Ink Books.
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