For Father's Day, Greg Bruce gives himself the gift of reflecting on fatherhood.
My children are 4, 6 and 8.
I love that sentence. I could stare at it all day. I wish I could leave it there, untarnished by the 800 or so words that follow. The simplicity of it, the three even numbers, the perfectly regular spacing, all implying a well-planned, ordered and stable family life, with a steady developmental arc.
Here's a less fact-heavy but more accurate version of the same sentence: My children are oh no, oh God, please don't, oh dear.
When I first became a father, I had high hopes for myself and, in some ways, I still do but the more time passes and the more children we accumulate, the further downwards I have ratcheted the scale of hope. The first Father's Day after Tallulah was born, Zanna gave me a card reading, "You might be a new dad, but I'm pretty sure you're the best dad." At the time, I believed those words but now I laugh at the naivety of that narcissistic idiot, as I will no doubt laugh, in eight years' time, at the idiot writing this, and then, eight years thence, at the subsequent idiot, and so on unto death. The only thing I suspect will never change is my tendency to idiocy. It's a quality I hope my children don't share, but what chance do they have? Despite their youth, I already see in them many of my foibles and weaknesses and I can only hope the work done by their mother and other family, friends, societal structures and institutions, is counteracting me and shaping them into something other than me: something without my idiocy and, preferably, also my self-loathing.