If anyone ever does make the mistake of asking me for parenting advice, I have two simple rules ready to give them: don’t get a puppy within a year of the due date, and don’t be a restaurant cook when the baby arrives. I know this from experience. But since the dog was my wife’s idea, I’ll elaborate only on the restaurant thing here today.
I couldn’t have been more excited about becoming a dad. I’d read the books, versed myself in the dangers of liquorice on the pregnant body, I had two separate apps telling me what size vegetable/French pastry/animal the foetus was as it grew from month one to nine for Christ’s sake. I was committed. But none of this changed the fact that, once Sam arrived, I would abandon him and my wife, Silja, to spend 16-hour days working in the sweaty dungeons of a restaurant kitchen. Silja was left parenting alone for what must have seemed days on end at times. Holding him, cleaning him, endlessly changing nappies. It’s no surprise that whenever I had a day off or “only” worked an 8 hour single shift, Sam was so terrified of the hairy stranger that smelled of fish and fry oil that he’d scream at him until his mother returned.
I dealt with the subsequent feelings of inferiority as a parent the same way I deal with all my failings as a human: humble acceptance and attempted mitigation by means of the easiest way possible. In this instance, it meant identifying (and growing ruthlessly protective over) the handful of parenting duties Silja had less aptitude for. One such duty in those early days was the slipping of baby paracetamol up his arsehole whenever he woke with a fever in the night.
She is a headstrong girl, my wife. Your classic, Finnish, no-nonsense sort who would absolutely hold her own if ever abandoned in the woods for the night. But she’s just not built for such mechanical invasion of another human being as the administration of suppositories demands.
I, however, am all over that shit. Having been a chef for so long, the gruesome, the handling of flesh to excessive limits, even the bloody has become second nature to me now. Gauging the eyes out of pigs’ heads and ripping the guts from countless Thumper-adjacent bunny rabbits will do that to a person. Popping a little tablet of Tic Tac-shaped painkiller up another human’s arsehole is no more daunting to me than shaking a hand or giving someone a peck on the cheek.
You may well not want to meet me in person now having learnt that.
Our son, Sam, was 18-months old when I needed to take him to the doctor for the first time without Silja. It was a routine checkup, but so far we’d taken real pleasure in doing those kinds of things together. They were couples’ events for us, just as watching his first steps had been or that time we inspected with awe his first solid bowel movement.
Treasured memories.
Since I was parenting solo for this appointment, I’d been conspicuous in my preparations. I’d researched the kinds of things they’d be testing for, and one developmental test that had particularly concerned me was what I refer to as “The Pea Test”. This consisted of having him pick up pea-sized wooden balls between thumb and forefinger to determine whether his fine motor skills were developing as they should be. Of course I hadn’t been so neurotic as to have ordered dried peas from Finland’s premier organic bean website and started practicing with Sam, that would have been excessive. Luckily I didn’t need to. I had recently come to realise, quite separately, how shameful it was, great cook that I am, that I so rarely used dried legumes in my cooking. I’d therefore ordered some dried peas of my own from Finland’s premier organic bean website. Whether Sam had taken the opportunity to play with them in the meantime is really not the concern of this story.
“Ray-dee-uh,” a porcelain blonde woman, the doctor I assumed, called toward the waiting area. I was used to my name being pronounced in the flamboyantly phonetic Finnish style by this point and I hurried over to her with Sam in my arms. She held the door open for me and said “English” with a question mark at the end of it. I said yes, please.
The appointment started with some questions, the probing nature of which put me on the defensive immediately.
“How is your home life?”
“Are you sleeping enough?”
“Are you getting enough time alone with your wife?”
Who had she been talking to? Was she trying to insinuate something? Maybe it was all an ambush and Silja was about to jump out from behind a curtain ready to detail my inadequacies as a lover. I tried to make out her computer screen to see if I had some kind of score being tallied up before remembering that the only things I knew how to read in Finnish were: “yes”, “one”, and “waterbirds”.
“Could you get Sam out of his clothes,” the doctor then said. “We can get him measured now.” Since she hadn’t called for the police or a social worker, I assumed that whatever score I’d achieved was at least a passing grade.
She gestured to a large, infant-sized scale at the back of the room, the shallow sides of which made it look like an enormous spoon without the handle. 18 months into our parenting journey, Silja and I had been through this routine many times before. We even had a game of it, each of us guessing how much more Sam would weigh each time. Being on my own, there were no such games on this occasion. I put him on the spoon with all the dexterity of a butcher weighing a lump of meat and stepped back. The doctor made a note of the number on a piece of paper before repeating it to me. I nodded in approval and realised Silja, being the good parent, is the one who always remembers how much he had weighed the last time. And in that moment I was taken back twenty years to a kitchen table in south-east England sitting next to my father. He is filling out some permission form for school or application for a football club or whatever the hell it was and I realise that, by stumbling at the part of the application that requires my personal details, he doesn’t know my birthday. I looked to Sam, and comforted myself that, for now at least, I knew his birthday.
Measurements taken, I dressed Sam again and sat back down with him on my lap at the doctor’s desk. It was show time. To my delight the little wooden “peas” she placed in front of Sam looked even bigger than the ones I definitely hadn’t been forcing him to practice on.
And then he ignored them entirely. Of far more interest to him was the mole on my neck. He’d had a fascination with my and Silja’s freckles and moles since he was about 13 days old. He would poke them with his little finger and repeat “button… button” every time. He’d do it every chance he got and it was hard to snap him out of it.
“I don’t know why he’s doing that,” I told the doctor. “He never does that.”
His refusal to focus rendered me increasingly desperate for him to pick up that god damn pea. Desperate for him to show how perfectly “developed” he was. How that vital, life-changing milestone of picking up a wooden pea was being met. Perhaps in his joyous future there might be university, falling in love, marriage, one day he might even make me a grandfather. But before all of that, he needed to pick up The Pea.
“He does it at home all the time”, I told the doctor, as though playtime in the Reidie household extends only as far as picking up peas for hours. She didn’t react to this other than to say, somewhat unconvincingly, that “it is fine”.
“I saw him play with some other small blocks at the start,” she added. “If you are confident he can do it, then that is fine.”
Shit, I thought to myself, I’ve made a mistake. Letting this person gauge my precious boy’s development on something I, an untrustworthy idiot whose inadequacies were likely to blame for his stunted pea-handling abilities, had said was the last thing I wanted. I needed it proved to her. To myself. And the only way I could do so was if he picked up The Pea.
The doctor reached over to take the little balls away. But before she could take all of them, I picked one up, placed it in my flattened palm, and offered it to Sam. And he took it. The bastard took it, between forefinger and thumb, just the way he was supposed to by the age of 18 months.
No garland was given. No certificate or sticker awarded to Sam. But I did, briefly, let myself think I hadn’t ruined him already.
“I’m so sorry for my English,” she said, having just finished explaining the vaccine schedule and what each vaccine did in a standard of English that escapes me after no more than a spoonful of generously amaretto-ed tiramisu.
“And since this is 18-month appointment, Sam is needing his MPR. Is that correct? MPR?”
“I think we call it MMR,” I said
“I’m sorry. So sorry.”
With the needle in hand, she asked me to sit Sam on my lap so his legs were held tight between my thighs. It was at this point I started on my master plan. I took out a small bag of fruit puree from my pocket. Silja had made sure I didn’t forget it so I had something to distract him with post-jab. And here’s where it started to go wrong. Instead of waiting for the jab to be given and to then give him the sweet, delicious fruit, I let him start eating from it too early, a moment before the needle entered his doughy leg. And so, needle inserted and with a mouth full of mashed up banana, Sam breathed in ready to scream and choked, expelling beige gunk all over my hands, leg and, yes, the doctor’s face. Maybe Silja had anticipated such a cock up when she packed the baby bag with an ungodly supply of tissues and wet wipes. Luckily, the doctor reached for a tissue of her own before I had the chance to start awkwardly wiping the poor woman down myself in a panic.
Eventually Sam calmed and with a single tear descending each of his bulbous cheeks, he sucked contentedly on his baggy of puree.
“He may have some symptoms after this vaccine,” the doctor said.
“The normal ones?” I said in reply.
“Fever, swelling on leg. You can give him one of these if he has trouble sleeping.”
She handed me a blister pack of medication. It wasn’t a brand I recognised but the active ingredient I could make out: paracetamol. The same thing I’d been popping up his arse for 18 months whenever he got a fever. I may not remember his weight. I may choke him when he gets vaccines. But here, with the administering of suppositories, my moment had arrived.
“I don’t know this brand,” I said to her, “I suppose they all work the same though, right. Just pop it right up there?” I said, gesturing to the ceiling with my index finger.
She looked at me as though I’d started dribbling.
“Oh, oh no,” she said with a smile. “You don’t need to be doing that anymore. No, no. He is old enough for no more of that, I’m sure you’re happy to hear. This Sam can take by mouth.”
I smiled.
“Yes, yes, of course,” I said. “Who wouldn’t be happy to hear that?”
Sam will be 7 at his next birthday. Though it started that day with the end of suppositories, the list of things for which I’ve become obsolete has grown ever larger. Fetching glasses of water, dressing him, wiping his arse. He does it all himself now. There have been moments I wondered what it is I should hold on to, what duty I must protect that would mitigate such obsolescence as it inevitably grows as the years, once so far ahead of us, get ever further trampled under foot. I try not to think of that anymore. His future won’t ever depend on picking up a pea. That entire episode exists now only in so much as I remember it. And nor do I think his future will depend much on me either. Not really. But that’s the mistake I made, to have felt like I needed to make a difference, to do something important, to be a “good” father. What I like to think now, day by day, is that being there alone is enough.