By This is quite possibly the most middle-class thing that anyone could ever admit – apart from ‘I always buy Ribena even though there’s plenty of own-brand squash right there’ – but a loft conversion recently managed to destroy my entire parenting strategy.
It wasn’t even an actual loft conversion. It was a discussion about a hypothetical loft conversion. The shortest possible backstory is this: we had a baby and moved into a house that was exactly big enough for two adults and a child. Then, two months later, my wife told me that she was pregnant. So now there are two adults and two children living in a house that is ever so slightly too small for everyone. As a result, we briefly entertained the notion of converting our loft into a new bedroom.
The conversion never happened. And, while I tell myself that we decided against it because the room would either be too small or too hot or too blisteringly expensive, the sad truth is that it was because we couldn’t even decide what we wanted the room to be.
My idea was to convert it into a quiet, sparse, minimalistic haven that was constantly kept in perfect order – like an art gallery or the hull of an especially tasteful spaceship – and slam a giant fuck-off lock on the door so the kids could never get in. A normal adult’s bedroom, basically.
Meanwhile, my wife envisioned a formless mass of wall-to-wall mattresses and loosely-strewn duvets that the entire family could flop onto and sleep however they wanted. Which is less of a bedroom and more of a drug den, really.
The weird thing is that we never expected to have different ideas. Even though she wanted the bedroom to be the interior design equivalent of a literal Victorian slum, my wife assumed that I had also always wanted to spend all night rammed up against three bodies snoring and thrashing and kicking me awake. And I’d always assumed that she wanted an oasis of kid-free calm in the house, because I am a normal person with realistic expectations. The fact that we didn’t instinctively share the exact same strategy came as a bit of a shock.
Because we should instinctively share the exact same strategy, right? That’s how parenting works. You find someone who holds all the same ideas and opinions that you do, then you get them pregnant and wordlessly go about inflicting your perfectly unified worldview on your offspring all the way to adulthood. That’s how my parents did it, after all.
Except of course they didn’t. The only reason why I wasn’t battered by two conflicting parenting ideals as a kid is because I grew up in the 1980s when mothers were expected to do everything. I thought both my parents knew how to raise me. They didn’t. My mum did, and my dad just sort of followed along.
Things work differently now. Neither my wife or I have the dominant childcare role, because we both share it all out and pitch in wherever we’re needed. And this means that we both get a valid say in how our children are raised. Which would be nice, except it turns out that we can’t actually agree on anything.
There are other, smaller, examples of this. We were out for breakfast last weekend, when my son shouted “I JUST FARTED TWICE”. My wife’s instinct was to gently remind him that strangers generally don’t like to hear infants discussing the hot blasts of shit-stinking air that they’ve just pushed out of their arse. My instinct was to lean in for a high-five.
Shouldn’t this be the kind of thing that you discuss in advance? Shouldn’t we have put our heads down early in the game and decided as one how heroically proud our kids should be of their own farts? If we had, we could have worked together and focused our energy to better mould our children into the sort of people that we want them to be.
But we didn’t. Nor did barely any of the parents I know. Like us, they all sort of just muddle through, crashing into each other and constantly working out wobbly compromises whenever they don’t align on something. And, actually, I think this is probably the best way. One of the great joys of getting older is noticing all the little ways that your parents diverged as people, and I’d hate to think that we were depriving our children of that because we’d been too busy trying to present ourselves as a single faceless parenting entity.
So keep muddling through, parents, so long as you know which battles to pick. Because it doesn’t really matter whether or not my son thinks farts are funny, does it? What really matters is that my children are never, ever allowed to set a single foot inside my bedroom ever again.
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