“Of course, I’d love to do that. But it’s complicated. We’ll have to get in touch with the shop on Monday.”
“Dada!” This comes out as a scream.
“Darling, I know you must be disappointed, but—”
“It’s your fault!”
Tears start to flow, and a moment later William attempts to kick the incompetent pilot in the shins. The boy’s behavior is appalling, of course, and a little surprising—Dada meant so well!—but on this occasion as on more than a few others, it also stands as a perverse sort of tribute to Rabih as a father. A person has to feel rather safe around someone else in order to be this difficult. Before a child can throw a tantrum, the background atmosphere needs to be profoundly benevolent. Rabih himself wasn’t anything like this tricky with his own father when he was young, but then again, neither did he ever feel quite so loved by him. All the assurances he and Kirsten have offered over the years—“I will always be on your side”; “You can tell us whatever you’re feeling”—have paid off brilliantly: they have encouraged William and his sister to direct their frustrations and disappointments powerfully towards the two loving adults who have signaled that they can, and will, take the heat.
Witnessing their children’s rages, Rabih and Kirsten have a chance to note how much restraint and patience they themselves have, without fully realizing it, developed over the years. Their somewhat more equable temperaments are the legacy of decades of minor and more major disappointments; the patient courses of their thought processes have been carved out, like canyons by the flow of water, by all the many things that have gone wrong for them. Rabih doesn’t throw a tantrum when he makes a stray mark on a sheet of paper he’s writing on—because, among other things, he has in the past lost his job and seen his mother die.
The role of being a good parent brings with it one large and very tricky requirement: to be the constant bearer of deeply unfortunate news. The good parent must be the defender of a range of the child’s long-term interests, which are by nature entirely impossible for him or her to envisage, let alone assent to cheerfully. Out of love, parents must gird themselves to speak of clean teeth, homework, tidy rooms, bedtimes, generosity, and limits to computer usage. Out of love, they must adopt the guise of bores with a hateful and maddening habit of bringing up unwelcome facts about existence just when the fun is really starting. And, as a result of these subterranean loving acts, good parents must, if things have gone well, end up as the special targets of intense resentment and indignation.
However difficult the messages may be, Rabih and Kirsten begin with a commitment to imparting them gently: “Just five more minutes of playtime and then the game is over, OK?”; “Time for Princess E.’s bath now”; “That must have been annoying for you, but we don’t hit people who disagree with us, remember?”
They want to coax and wheedle and, most importantly, never impose a conclusion through force or the use of basic psychological weapons, such as reminders about who is the older, bigger, and wealthier party and, ergo, who is in charge of the remote control and the laptop.
“Because I am your mother”; “Because your father said so”: there was a time when these relational titles alone commanded obedience. But the meaning of such words has been transformed by our era of kindness. A mother and father are now merely “people who will make it nice for me” or “people whose suggestions I may go along with if—and only if—I see the point of what they’re saying.”
Unhappily, there are situations in which coaxing won’t work anymore—for example, on the occasion when Esther starts to tease William about his body, and a gentle maternal caution goes unheard. His penis is an “ugly sausage,” Esther yells repeatedly at home, and then, even less kindly, she whispers the same metaphor to a band of her girlfriends at school.
Her parents try tactfully to explain that her taunting him now to the point of humiliation might make it harder for him to relate to women when he gets older. But this of course sounds weird to his sister. She replies that they don’t understand anything, that William really has got an ugly sausage between his legs, and that this is why everyone is laughing at school.
It isn’t their daughter’s fault that, at nine years old, she can’t begin to appreciate the nature of her parents’ alarm (and, offstage, a little laughter, too). But it’s still galling when Esther, having been told firmly to stop it, accuses them of interfering in her life and writes the words Fun Spoilers on little pieces of paper that she leaves like a trail of bread crumbs around the house.
The dispute ends in a shouting match between Rabih and this incensed small person who is, somewhere in her brain, simply lacking in the particular neuronal connections which would allow her to grasp what is at stake here.
“Because I say so,” says Rabih. “Because you are nine, and I am considerably older and know a few things you don’t—and I’m not going to stand here all day and have an argument with you about it.”
“That’s so unfair! Then I’m just going to shout and shout,” threatens Esther.
“You’ll do no such thing, young lady. You’ll go up to your room and stay there until you’re ready to come down again and rejoin the family for dinner and behave in a civilized way and show me you’ve got some manners.”
It’s a strange thing indeed for Rabih, congenitally intent as he is on avoiding confrontation of any sort, to have to deliver such an apparently unloving message to someone he loves beyond measure.
The dream is to save the child time; to pass on in one go insights that required arduous and lengthy experience to accumulate. But the progress of the human race is at every turn stymied by an ingrained resistance to being rushed to conclusions. We are held back by an inherent interest in reexploring entire chapters in the back catalogue of our species’ idiocies—and to wasting a good part of life finding out for ourselves what has already been extensively and painfully charted by others.
Romanticism has traditionally been suspicious of rules in child rearing, regarding them as a fake hypocritical bunting unnecessarily draped over children’s endearing natural goodness. However, after closer acquaintance with a few flesh-and-blood youngsters, we might gradually change our minds and come to the view that manners are in truth an incontrovertible defense against an ever-present danger of something close to barbarism. Manners don’t have to be an instrument of coldness and sadism, just a way of teaching us to keep the beast-like bit locked up inside, so that the evening meal does not invariably have to descend into anarchy.
Rabih wonders sometimes where all the immensely hard parental work is really leading them—what the hours they have spent picking up the children from school, talking to them and coaxing and reasoning with them, have been for. He began by hoping, naively and selfishly, that he and Kirsten were raising better versions of themselves. It’s taken him a while to realize that he has instead helped to put on earth two people with an in-built mission to challenge him, individuals who will inflict upon him repeated frustrations, frequent bewilderment, and a forced, unsettling, and occasionally beautiful expansion of his interests—far beyond anything he could ever have imagined—into hitherto alien realms of ice-skating, TV sitcoms, pink dresses, space exploration, and the Hearts’ standing in the Scottish football league.
At the children’s school, a well-meaning small establishment nearby, watching from some remove as the other parents drop off their precious charges, Rabih reflects that life can never reward on a large enough scale all the hopes which one generation places on the narrow shoulders of another. There aren’t sufficient glorious destinies to hand, and the traps are too many and too easy to fall into, even if a golden star and an ovation may be in the offing for a well-delivered reading, in assembly, of a poem about ravens.