‘This cargo of hours together is a bonus’
This Father’s Day, as the country comes slowly out of lockdown, five writers reflect on how coronavirus has changed fatherhood
I’m writing this on my elder daughter’s birthday. She’s opening cards at the kitchen table while her younger sister bakes celebratory brownies in the kitchen and my wife adjusts the candles on the cake. It is a happy scene, one repeated many times while the girls were growing up.
There are two unusual things about it, though: one is that this is not a celebration of teenhood, but Lucy’s 23rd, and the other is that the four of us have been living – laughing, occasionally shouting and often cooking – under the same roof for nearly four months.
Lockdown started on another birthday, that of my wife, Ingrid, so this is our second lockdown cake and will – we hope – be our last.
We are all, to greater or lesser extents, craving freedom, but we will all look back on this time with justified nostalgia.
Because the past few weeks have been strangely marvellous. Not belittling for a moment the pain and grief suffered by so many, my immediate nuclear family has enjoyed an unexpected – and most likely, a final – period of extended togetherness. And yes, “enjoyed” is the right word.
When the doors slammed shut as a nation, the four of us had become used to shifting permutations of separation. Lucy had spent the past few years studying and travelling, emerging, keen for permanent employment, with a master’s in forensic psychology and a number of interesting tattoos. Emily, 21, had been getting into the swing of student life at the Royal Veterinary College, in the first year of a BSc in animal behaviour, welfare and ethics.
Ingrid and I were just back from holiday, one of the first we had taken without our daughters. And none of us, in common with families all over the nation, was expecting to spend a great deal of time together again.
By the time our stage of life is reached, with chicks if not entirely flown then fully equipped with wings and revving up on the runway, family time – all-the-family-time – has become sporadic and haphazard, with the occasional exception of short, carefully scheduled breaks.
So this great cargo of hours together has been – for me, at least – a bonus. I have cherished reminders of the girls’ early childhood as I watched them huddle together over YouTube clips of their favourite cartoons from the 1990s, or as all four of us squabbled over the Monopoly board.
And I have been invigorated – and often flattened – by their learning and intellectual energy in our full and frank discussions over pizza or dim sum on Takeaway Fridays.
Most of the time (in common, I suspect, with many fathers) my opinions have carried no more weight than theirs. When no one really knows what is going on, there has been no point in pretending to paternal wisdom.
Only once or twice have I had to step up as a father rather than a housemate, getting Emily to and from A&E when she fell off a ladder and gashed a leg deeply, and (with Ingrid) offering counsel as Lucy navigated the minefield of her future accommodation options.
Because we know that this time is coming to an end. Lucy is getting ready to start her first full-time job and hopes soon to be sharing a flat with a friend rather than a house with her family. Emily will get back to university IRL (in real life) rather than on a group video on her laptop.
And Ingrid and I will, once again, have to start to get used to spending more time with each other (and the dog) than with our children. That will be great, of course. But we’ll miss them.