I sat alone on a bench against a wall in the milky London winter sun and watched my two-and-a-half year-old son throw toy cars and blocks around the sandpit.
He kept trying to strip to his undies because that’s what he instinctively did in the Australian summer, which is where he wanted to be. I’d re-dress him. He’d do it again. I wasn’t very patient.
The young women nannies at the playgroup in south-west London surveyed me warily. Why wasn’t I at work? Was I there to pick up? Well, I tried to explain, I’d given up my job to care for our kid and now my wife was working in Davos and I was trying to assemble flatpack furniture and soothe a child whose world had been upended.
So, this is what the equal marriage I’d committed to actually looked like.
I was going mad so I contacted a support group for trailing male spouses in London. The apologetic reply, when it came, boded badly: the group had disbanded because a couple of the guys had had marriage bust-ups and its originator had suffered a “come apart”.
Lonely, socially isolated, utterly adrift without the career that had defined me for so long, I tried to move on and do the writing I’d convinced myself I wanted to do. I was in my mid-thirties, we had no money worries, I was living in one of the world’s best cities on someone else’s coin. This was a golden opportunity.
But I blew it. In my first London winter of self-doubt and discontent, I remained fixated on the person I’d been. I could not easily redefine myself as a father and husband first, and as a former highly successful careerist second.
Every time I tried to take joy in being a primary caregiver, in supporting my wife’s ambition, to think outside the rather limiting intellectual and creative confines of my former job, indeed, to act in any way that was not merely about my professional advancement, I hit rewind and lamented what I thought I’d surrendered forever.
Before you rush down to comments to judge my first-world, middle-class dilemma (I’ve got to write about the life I know!), I acknowledge that by birth and fortune my family and I have economic and lifestyle choices that aren’t anywhere near open to many others in Australia or elsewhere. They certainly weren’t open to my mother and so many women of her generation.
My mother, born in the mid-1920s, spent her life in the service of (mostly male) others – her brothers, her mother, my father, her church, me. In mid-life, despite the protestations of my father, she returned to the study of several HSC subjects. She got As. She wanted to go on to university. I don’t know why she didn’t.
Certainly my father, a kind, gentle and very old-fashioned Labor and union man who was absent for most of my waking childhood, wouldn’t have encouraged her. And neither would he have dreamed of working less or flexibly so that she might have time to enrich herself.
Her regret at not having done so simmered until the end of her life and occasionally boiled over into resentment at the education my sister and I had received at her apparent expense.
Her unhappiness left its mark on me. It’s partly why I had no trouble committing, hypothetically, to an equal partnership (it was also a prerequisite for marriage to the woman I love). But it was the pointy end of it all, beginning with those nannies of south-west London, that proved to be the real challenge.
Long story cut short: I found a balance between some meaningful work in Europe and my primary parenting responsibilities. We’ve lived back in Australia for 12 years, and in four of which I’ve been conventionally employed. (Today I work full-time – yes, 40 to 50 hours – with maximum flexibility, across various time zones, writing.) Indeed, after returning to full-time salaried employment in Australia, I began to lament the loss of family time.
A lucrative redundancy (yes, another first-world dilemma) saw me good on that.
Yes, I still rankle at the comments – “How lovely for you to be able to dabble in your writing when you’re not looking after the children”; “I’d’ve invited you but figured you’d be babysitting again” – I get from new (usually short-lived) and old professional acquaintances who don’t disguise their views that I’ve somehow been subjugated and given it all up for her.
Yes, finding enough work time is a constant – often tense - marital negotiation. Sick kids, needy dogs, busted domestic stuff, can add to frustration and distraction. I say all of this without sanctimony or judgment. Our wheels fall off constantly. The Von Trapps we are not. Balance in life is as hard to find as sound parenthood and equality in marriage.
These days, thankfully, I’m one of many, many men at the school pick-up. I still can’t do my youngest daughter’s high ponytails as required; some weeks (depending on what I’m writing) I never leave the house and I yearn for adult company.
That last bit – loneliness – was such a defining factor of domestic life for my mother and women of her generation who, unlike me, too often had no genuine intellectual or professional occupation to escape into.
And it’s not only women of Mum’s generation. Far more women then men of my generation take leave for six months or a year after childbirth, then end up following and permanently supporting their husband’s careers, rather than the other way around.
The truth is, I’d go mad if all I had was home. And sometimes, when I’ve got too much home, too much kid stuff, not enough time to do my work, I do. And I wrestle with the associated guilt.
The boy in the sandpit is now 17 – a man really, negotiating his own relationships and wrestling with what it means to be an Australian male, an Australian mate, and potentially one day an Australian husband.
There’s plenty of woeful examples for him on the footy oval and on the tennis court. There’s even more in the media where the (tragically pervasive) conversation about the scourge of adult males who murder the women closest to them is imbued with an acceptance of female victimhood rather than the urgent need for men to force change upon their own and each other’s behaviour.
Equality is about choice and respect. It should be fundamental to the adult relationships that we want for our children.
My two daughters have been raised to expect no less. I’m proud to see one of them living the expectation already.
My son, meanwhile, has grown up witnessing that which we call “the juggle”. It’s been an imperfect example, woefully executed high ponytails and all, of how it can all kind of work.
