A fond fatherly farewell

This will be my last parenting column for the Observer, and it has me feeling wistful. Wistful enough that I found myself pondering the height chart by my children’s bunk beds last night. It takes the form of a dinosaur, whose long, spiky neck is marked like a ruler. My kids know fine well that it’s a dinosaur, but they call it a giraffe because… I can’t quite remember why. I’ve come to realise a lot of familial customs are like this; phrases and rituals that started as in-jokes, but for which the scaffolding has long since fallen away, leaving us calling a dinosaur a giraffe, or mandatorily making air-horn noises any time we acknowledge it’s the weekend, or exclusively saying, “Oh my Gord” when surprised, without any clear memory of why we started doing any of these things, nor any desire to ever stop.

The dinosaur-giraffe is, I must admit, only intermittently updated. I forget about it for years at a time and, when I do rediscover it, I fudge a couple of earlier notches by just eyeballing where they might have been six months ago. I don’t know why I do this. I suppose I could claim that a greater sense of continuum, however artificial, will be nice for the kids to look back on some day. It’s more likely, however, that I feel guilty I’ve not been sufficiently engaged in this time-honoured Parent In A Family Sitcom behaviour, and this inscrutable fraud is merely a craven attempt to falsify the record. When I confessed to my wife that I do this, she laughed and told me she does the same. It is now, therefore, an almost entirely fictitious record of heights our children have likely never quite had, on erroneous dates, peppered with three or four fully-accurate tabulations, and little to no way of telling which is which.

As a record of my children’s lives, my camera roll hardly fares much better. Beyond the 10,000 pictures and videos I took of my son in the first six weeks of his life, most are made up of birthdays and Christmases and sports days and park trips. Endless sunny meanderings. A forest of holdings-on-laps-of-grandparents. An occasional first step, a first word, a first meal. These capture life’s most headline-grabbing peaks, and I’m glad to have them, but they elide so much of the everyday trials and triumphs, the glorious mess, that happens every other minute of the year.

Thankfully, for seven and a half years now, I’ve had an entirely different record of their thoroughly normal, thoroughly miraculous lives. A weekly column in which I had space, and a looming deadline, to chart the minutiae of their childhood, and each uneasy, wobbling step I took along parenthood itself. It became a scrapbook, a diary, and – if you ask 12,000 Online Misogynists – an occasional soap box, but mostly a platform from which I could engage in my favourite genre of writing: remembering things and adding jokes.

With a hubris that has become my trademark, I started a parenting column before I’d ever parented. My first piece was a longer feature about my own dad, and the trepidation I felt at the prospect of becoming one myself. It was commissioned by Eva Wiseman, who I regard as a near-perfect genius for reading a Twitter thread about taking ketamine in the company of Mary McAleese, and deciding its author would be just the guy to write about fatherhood. I gladly accepted the commission on the understanding, from the Observer team, that it would be for 26 weeks, and from me that there was a market for a column about fatherhood that didn’t treat dads as either concussed orcs or Hallmark-Channel paragons. And 398 weeks later, I feel somewhat vindicated.

Sadly, the time has come for me to do something else, and even though I don’t yet know how I’ll live without it, I’m grateful I have so many new things to do in its place. (In May, for example, I have an excellent novel coming out called Prestige Drama, and a new thing you could try doing is “buying several copies of it”.) It has been one of the great joys of my life that so many people have enjoyed this column, and brightened my sometimes arduous time as a parent with tens of thousands of comments, replies and stories of their own. That they have found it entertaining, diverting or even useful is a continuing marvel, and a tremendous source of pride.

Not that I haven’t found it useful myself, mind. When my daughter was born, I re-read articles about my son to remind myself how the last baby worked. Still, today, I find myself searching old entries to remember where I was or what I was doing at some distant part of their short lives. I haven’t needed a notch on a dinosaur’s neck or 200,000 photos to keep track of any of it. I’ve had this, always this. And I’ll miss it greatly.