I wrote a few weeks ago about Seamus Heaney’s proselytising of family life, and his focus on the beauty, sublimity and secret resonance of familial bonds in rural Northern Ireland. But what about the darker side? I found myself imagining someone with a more misanthropic perspective – Housman or Kingsley Amis – to counterbalance Heaney’s irrepressible optimism.
1. Babies. Bellowing, be-limbed, wriggling lumps of hyper-animated dough. Their chief recreational activities are preventing you sleeping, biting nipples, and dribbling rank-looking slop down their fronts. They close down your freedom quicker than Mao Zedong and will lead you, like any tyrant, into a state of perpetual war.
You will want to drink heavily to get through this phase. However, you cannot for fear you will not be able to look after them responsibly and that’s at a time when you really, really need to drink heavily because you live in perpetual fear – of ruining their lives through some ill-advised parental decision resulting in inadvertent operant conditioning that will harm them psychologically for the rest of their lives.
They are at their most unsettling when they start to crawl, thus gaining nuclear capability. From this moment, they require constant surveillance. However, this will not prevent them sooner or later doing themselves harm, thus adding to a parent’s growing psychic tumour of guilt and failure.
2. Children. Children, unlike babies, can usefully communicate via the agreed medium of words. However, with words come disagreement, and against all the facts, they think they know it all. If they say the moon is six feet away and made of digestive biscuits, don’t bother to disagree with them, because they know it’s true. The most important thing to know about children is that you should never, ever try to reason with them. It’s about as much use as trying to teach a jellyfish to play badminton.
At the same time as taking issue with everything you say, they rely on you totally, which, as you are inevitably flawed and inadequate, will lead to disappointment for all of you in the long run.
If there is more than one of them, they will fight with one another. All the time. Viciously and without quarter. And in the end, as if that wasn’t enough, they turn into teenagers.
3. Teenagers. Nothing can be written about teenagers. Because they will get angry. You really don’t want to make a teenager angry.
4. Wives, husbands and partners. The lovable, sexy, kind person you knew when you were both childless has now been replaced with a sexless, furious, food-plastered, exhausted wraith who you once – hilariously – believed would be brought closer to you as a result of procreation. You only speak to one another to discuss bills, your offspring or your respective flaws. You once thought that, for them, you were the most important person in the world. Now you’re rated somewhere between the people carrier and the toaster.
5. Family homes. House, flat or trailer home – it’s the same principle. Instead of talking about politics or philosophy for the next 20 years, you are going to be discussing repairs, decorations and improvements and where you are going to get the money for them.
6. Family finances. Once you have a family, you don’t have any money. It all goes on the kids, the house or the car. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, and have a discount voucher, you may be able to afford a luxury item for yourself – perhaps a cheese pasty from Greggs.
So, Seamus, those are the bits you missed out. Too late to got back and write them now. So I await the Philip Larkin of family poetry with some impatience. In the meantime, I thought I might give it a go:
“The stench of old detritus
Prowling ankle biters
Lovers turned prizefighters
Clueless, blind and flightless.”
TS Eliot prize here I come.
