Especially over these ones:

That last one, in particular, got to me. I’ve noticed lately, particularly with Boy Z, this primal need for recognition from his Dad. We do swimming lessons on a Sunday morning. After the rush of pride over seeing him swim on his own for the first few times, it starts to get a bit redundant. Boy Z floundering through the water up the lane. Boy Z floundering down the lane. Sometimes, midway through the class, I reach for my iPod  for a quick game of solitaire to while the time away. But inevitably, Boy Z looks up with a smile whenever he passes me to make sure I’m watching. To make sure I’m bursting with paternal pride.

As you do.

Because apparently, for a nearly three year old boy, paternal recognition/pride is as important as three squares a day. And it isn’t just the near three year old. These days, Not Max makes sure to make eye contact with me before he pulls plates full of food off the table. I can see that this business of raising boys is just chock full of paternal responsibilities of which I never even conceived.

So there you go. Happy belated Fathers’ Day to all you Northern Hemisphere dads who have spent countless Sunday mornings bursting with paternal pride – genuine or adequately feigned. Especially to my Dad, who has photographic evidence of his presence in the bleachers.

Based on the relative position of ball and bat/glove in these photos, he must have gotten pretty good at feigning pride.

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Cannonball Adderley’s “Somethin’ Else” is available from .

*For the record, Father’s Day Down Under is September 5 if you want to plan your shopping.

Postcard images from PostSecret.

This week it was my turn. I headed out this morning, picked up by a right wing chatterbox from the car service who spent the entire drive to the airport blaming most of the country’s problems on ‘narrow-minded professorial types’. To his credit, the discovery that his passenger was a university lecturer didn’t alter the tone of his monologue or the target of his contempt.  An hour on a shimmying, shaking puddle jumper and we were skidding to a stop outside what appeared to be a modified cattle shed – Mt Gambier Airport.

If for anything, Mt. Gambier is famous for its volcanic lake(s). But I can’t tell you whether or not it/they are worthy of fame. A taxi whisked me from the airport, on the outskirts of town, to the university ‘campus’, also on the outskirts of town. The only site worth seeing on the way was the local weather station. Woo. Hoo. In fact, I came with kind of a bad attitude. I didn’t see the point of flying people around when we’ve got the technology to set up video links with the remote campuses.*

I’m waiting around in the optimistically christened ‘airport’ for the flight home watching a mother, her two tween girls and baby boy waiting anxiously for their husband/father to arrive. I remember that feeling of anticipation. My dad used to travel a lot for business. Long trips to exotic places – Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Grand Junction. I remember the excitement on the day he was scheduled to return. I was always a little bit proud of him, working under the assumption that only the really important people at the company would be sent to the Colorado mining country. Of course, I’m now faced with the reality – the really important people send the significantly less important people off on business travel. Especially a day trip from Adelaide to Mt. Gambier.

The husband/father has just turned up. It is a bit odd. The girls’ obvious glee and cries of “there he is Mum” as he came off the plane changed to a subdued nervousness as he came into the ‘terminal’. He’s a man’s man, with the sharp cut musculature of one who does physical labour. There’s a darkness in his eyes that I’ve noticed in a lot of working class Australia men. A taut and minacious look. He strides over to his family without cracking a smile. He acknowledges his wife with a nod, ignores his girls and takes his baby boy to him. The girls fade away in the glare of his neglect as he heads for the car park. He’s a man’s man and his only son is the only child worth his attention.

The tide of superior parenting receded rapidly however, with the realisation that despite my smug and vaguely classist sense of being a vastly better parent than this patriarchal neanderthal, I’m not any better. I’ve got an obvious and unapologetic preference for my older son. For Boy Z I have all the time and patience in the world. More than five minutes of whinging from Not Max brings a lightning bolt of fury and intolerance. In fact, if Dr. O’C, Not Max and Boy Z were meeting me at the Adelaide airport, the scene would be little different than the one I witnessed here. So, it’s my Mt. Gambier Resolution to rectify this inequity, to find, somewhere, a reserve of patience and time for my second son.

I know this has been a bit of faff and ramble, but what else would you expect from a man in a converted cow shed with a laptop on his lap?

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*This trip has changed my mind. The two dozen students in Mt. Gambier were keen, bright and engaging. And there’s absolutely a difference between watching a lecture on a TV screen and being in the classroom with a teacher. I’ve got the utmost respect for nursing students in general. They’re training to do what I reckon is one of the toughest jobs around. They’re not going to get paid much and they’re going to deal with a lot of shit. Literally. It’s one of those careers that requires a selflessness that I’ve never been able to summon up myself. The least we can give them is to show up once a week to help them along in their studies.

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Image credits:

Mt. Gambier

Regional Express

Capital Airlines

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This live version of The White Stripes’ “The Nurse” comes from the performance at Glastonbury 2005. The original is from the brilliant “Get Behind Me Satan”, available from .

One of my favourite sources for kids’ music is Cover Lay Down’s Kidfolk series. Not too long ago, one of Boyhowdy’s featured tracks was a version of “Puff the Magic Dragon” by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary fame. “Puff” is a song that I remember fondly from my own childhood, one that my Dad used to sing to me. Hearing it again after a couple of decades, I was struck by how sad a song it is – little boy grows up and leaves his childhood behind. Nonetheless, it has made it into my boys’ bedtime regime. In fact, it has become Boy Z’s “favourite”.

But after a couple of nights, I jettisoned the new version featured on Cover Lay Down for the Peter, Paul and Mary original from the early sixties. Over  two little words in the second verse.

The original…

“Dragons live forever,
But not so little boys…”

Yarrow’s modified version…

“Dragons live forever
But not so little girls and boys…”

It’s Yarrow’s song, so I guess if he wants to bugger up the meter he’s well within his rights.  But the awkward meter, as you probably guessed, isn’t my main problem. No, the problem is that this is a song about a little boy. In my experience, in fact, it’s a song for little boys and their fathers. Why can’t it remain so? That relationship is an important one and, in many cases, an unfortunately uncommon one. In the ongoing quest for gender equality, does everything have to become ‘gender neutral’?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as much of a feminist as the next guy. Actually more of a feminist than most next guys. Especially in Australia. I believe firmly in gender equality at every level of society. But while I believe that men and women, boys and girls, are equal I do not believe they are the same. Anyone who does is misguided, if not delusional. We’re biologically different, we’re genetically different, we’re psychologically different, we have different life experiences and develop differently as children. That being the case, what’s wrong with having songs for boys and songs for girls? And songs for both? Why do we have to pretend that the experience of growing up as a boy is the same as the experience of growing up as a girl?

Maybe I’m a chauvinist, but for me “Puff” is a boy’s song and when I sing it, I sing the original.

I’ve been thinking a lot about masculinity lately. I had coffee with a new friend last week who’s working on his second book – a memoir about men and their relationships with one another.  And that conversation spurred me to think about my relationships with men, which have traditionally been pretty poor. Most of my good friends in the last twenty years or so have been women. I’ve never been particularly comfortable in the company of men; always felt like I was on the outside looking in. That’s changed in the last few years and these days I’m a lot more at ease around blokes. (The secret? Talk about sports.*) Now I’ve got boy children and I want those boys to be able to move effortlessly into the fraternity of men if that is their wish. It will make adolescence much, much easier.

And those boys, especially the older one, are looking to me as a model of masculinity.  Boy Z idolises me, and it’s a slightly disconcerting feeling for me. I’ve thought of myself as a lot of things in my life, but a role model has never been one of them. For the next several years, I’m likely to be the predominant male role model in my boys lives. I’ve only recently worked out how to be a man. Poor bastards.

And I think “Puff the Magic Dragon” offers one of those lessons. It is OK to have things for boys. It is OK to have things for girls. This doesn’t mean that boys are better than girls or that girls are better than boys. It means that boys and girls are different. Writing that down makes it seem retrograde and reactionary. ‘Different but equal’ sounds a little bit like ’separate but equal’. Maybe I’m setting back gender relations in my own small way. But I think we’d be silly to pretend that raising boys and raising girls is the same process. I know it’s just a kid’s song, a folly, but for me “Puff” will always be a song for little boys.

And I’m glad to have it.

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Peter, Paul and Mary’s original version of “Puff the Magic Dragon” is one of many great tracks on “The Very Best of Peter, Paul and Mary”, available from .

Broken Social Scene’s dreamy cover is available on a compilation called “See You On the Moon! – Songs for Kids of All Ages” also available from .

* And ladies.

Whatever, I’ll take it. There’s nothing better than a long weekend and the resulting short work week.

Even when it rains.

It rained Saturday when Boy Z and I went to WOMADelaide.

But a bit of rain didn’t stop us. Calexico was as great as I remembered them and Boy Z got right into it, entertaining our neighbours nearly as much as the band did. You’ve got to love a child’s complete lack of inhibition.

We also dug Melbourne’s The Public Opinion Afro Orchestra, though we were both too waterlogged for dancing by then and Boy Z was awestruck by Compagnie Transe Express’s aerial drummers.  Despite the rain and lack of company, we had a great time and I’m really glad we did it. With 20,000 plus in attendance, I was petrified that I was going to lose the boy, so I wrote his name and my mobile phone number in ‘permanent’ marker on his arm.

A safety measure that promptly washed away in the rain. Fortunately it wasn’t necessary. I lost sight of him a couple of times, for mere moments. But those moments – there’s no bigger pit than the one I briefly felt in my stomach. It’s such a fine line to tread. I don’t want to be one of those smothering parents that puts his kid on a leash and never lets him outside. Similarly, though, I don’t want to be one of those parents that ends up on the six o’clock news as a cautionary tale.

That time, six hours or so on an autumn Saturday, was priceless. Irreplaceable. I didn’t want it to end, nor did the boy. But as the rain progressed from sporadic to steady to driving I had to make the responsible parenting decision to pull out. Despite cries of “I don’t want to go. I want more music” and the twanging of my own heart strings, I led us home.

It rained Sunday when we helped clean up Australia. But despite the rain, we spent an hour picking up trash as a family. I’m glad we did it, as citizenship is one of those values I want to instill in my boys and I doubt we’ve got many years that we can pass off picking up rubbish as a fun activity. What I learned on Sunday is that the bulk of roadside trash is cigarette packets and McDonalds wrappers. I’ve got to give Mickey D’s credit, though, they were one of the corporate sponsors. Fair enough since it was their trash we were picking up.

It rained Monday. And we danced. Nonetheless. And Boy Z split his lip and bled all over the place. And I felt physically sick for an hour or so afterward. I’ve seen enough of my son’s blood. More than enough. I’ve had it crusted all over my chest while I’ve cradled him in the emergency room. In the impossible event that he never bleeds again, I would be a happy man. But that isn’t going to happen. Because this parenting thing is rife with danger. You can lose them in a crowd of thousands of hippies, you can watch them get attacked by your dog and, even cosseted away in the house, you can stand by powerless as they bash their face into the computer desk. Again. And every one of these near misses just rips you from the inside. You play the tape over and over in your head. Because they’re a part of you – biologically and emotionally – and when they hurt, you hurt.

And my tenses are all buggered up and I have a tendency to write run on sentences and start them with coordinating conjunctions and I never know where to put a damn comma. And it is still raining.

But despite all the pain that’s inherent in this thing, despite the fear and the sorrow and the things that just break your heart on a daily basis, I didn’t really know what live and love were all about until I had kids. And watching my older son twirl like a dervish in the rain to Calexico makes up for it all.

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This track has nothing to do with anything except that it’s a great song for dancing with little boys. The late, great Warren Zevon’s “A Quiet Normal Life – The Best of Warren Zevon” is available from .

Today is also the first day of Autumn in Australia and appropriately the first day of a new semester. I spent a good part of the summer herding failing nursing students through their first and second year subjects and most of the one week break between semesters listening to twice-failed nursing students beg for mercy. The new semester is going to be a bear. A grizzly. A kodiak. I’m involved in teaching six different courses. Those of you who teach secondary school will have little sympathy for me, but for a delicate university lecturer this is a crippling load. I’m also taking a couple of courses for my back up plan.

I recently started working toward a back up plan B, which involves me keeping the job I’m in by doing what the university wants me to do – produce research and research money. I’ve started tinkering around in an immunology lab, hoping to pull some quick publications out of my…hat. I’m not an immunologist. But I’m also not a pathologist and that hasn’t stopped me teaching pathology, nor has the fact that I’m not an anatomist stopped me teaching anatomy. Etc. My real enemy is the time, or lack therof, in the day to fit in all these back up plans as well as doing the job for which I was hired. I fear that things are going to start to suffer. Like this blog.

What the hell? This was supposed to be about Not Max and here I am blathering on about me. Shut up, Chris.

Happy un-birthday, boy #2, the neglected one, laughing boy. Keep working at it and you’re bound to get you father’s attention over the next six months.

Finally,  I couldn’t resist this photo of Boy Z. He’s learned to trust his cape.

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This is the second track from R.E.M.’s 2001 album “Reveal”. I’ve never thought of it a a great R.E.M. album, but it’s sounded pretty good this summer. As an aside, one of my students told me that R.E.M. was “old people’s music” last week, to which I responded with a suggestion that she could kiss my backside.  R.E.M.’s “Reveal” is available from .

It’s not that I don’t like the boy, it’s just that he doesn’t do much.

Dr. O’C has recently, and rightly, begun to point out the inherent unfairness of this situation. Whenever I enter a room, Not Max turns to me and sprouts a big baby smile. One which typically gets ignored in favor of whatever Boy Z is doing at the time. On an academic level I know that it isn’t a good idea to play favorites. But on a practical level, I have a limited amount of time on the ground at home and figure that I should dispense it where it is most valued.

“He’s going to spend his whole life trying to get your approval, Chris”, I’ve been chastised on more than one recent occasion.

Well, as someone who spent a fair bit of my teenage and young adult years in a quest for paternal approval, I could relate to that. Therefore, I’ve been trying to improve the quality of my interaction with young Not Max. It’s getting a bit easier as the boy has added rolling over and laughter to his repertoire.

But he still hasn’t featured much in the space. So, in the interest of reducing future therapy bills, I wanted to give Not Max a blog post in which he featured as a main character. On the rare occasions that the boy gets hot and bothered and it isn’t about food or sleep, the best way I’ve found to make him happy is music. Preferably loud and preferably with paternal vocal accompaniment. Recently we introduced the tried and true door frame bouncer, which offers an extension of our musical appreciation from listening to active participation.

Ah, let me just show you.

Without further ado, here’s your Not Max in his first starring (or at least co-starring) roll:

I would just like to point out that I didn’t choose “Copacabana”, it just came up randomly on my iPod. Truly.

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If you must, Barry Manilow’s “Ultimate Manilow” is available from .

I loved Lego as a kid and was the proud owner of garbage pail full of thousands of bits and pieces. I don’t know how many hours I spent on the living room floor constructing imaginary empires of small plastic Danish blocks. The first time I heard the distinctive Lego sound in my own house, happy memories of those long gone hours came flooding back. We had bought Boy Z a box full of used Duplo for his second birthday on eBay. Used because, well have you seen the price of that stuff new?

He didn’t get into the Lego much straightaway, but in the last few weeks he’s been pulling it out on a daily basis. That crashing cascade of Lego is almost always followed by a hopeful request to help him build houses. And I am overjoyed to serve as an assistant contractor. I don’t like to shill for any product, but Lego is a springboard for an active imagination. I love to watch him starting to put together elaborate scenarios as we build more and more intricate houses, towers and castles. This is the stuff that makes all those 2 a.m. wakeup calls worthwhile.

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I’m thinking that A Free Man has reached its sell-by date. Posts have been sparse around here of late. That isn’t because I’m suffering from writer’s block or that I’ve run out of things to write about, it’s because I’ve run out of things that I’m comfortable about writing in this forum. Despite it’s apparent anonymity, too many people know who I am – family, high school acquaintances, annoyingly determined students (shouldn’t you guys be studying for that exam?). Apparently you can type my first name, my city of residence and my job into Google and this is the first hit.

I’ve been struggling with this for some time and I think I’ve finally come up with a solution – a new blog. A secret little box for all the things I can’t write here. I know, I know. I can barely get a post a week up over here, but I’d like to think that with a mask I’ll be able to be a bit more prolific. I guess we’ll see.

I’m not shutting this site down, I’m just going to keep it as what it was originally intended to be. An innocuous Daddy Blog. I’m not going to link to or publicise the new site, that would rather defeat the purpose. You can ask for the new address, but don’t be offended if I don’t give it to you. That likely means that I know you in real life or like you too much to let you in on the darker corners of my mind.

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I have no idea where I got this Decemberists cover of Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes”, but it featured on the opening credits of the wonderful “Weeds” – a show to which Dr. O’C and I have become addicted.

I’m not sure that I’m glad we did. It’s not that it is a bad movie, it was very nicely done. Directed by Scott Hicks (”Shine“), and set in South Australia, it is the story of a single father (Clive Owen) suddenly thrust into full-time parenthood after the death of his wife. The scenery is stunning and the acting very good. It is a compelling story and despite a fairly depressing and demoralizing first hour, comes together happily at the end.

I like a happy ending.

But it got my mind working, racing in circles. The conflict in the film is the Clive Owen character’s development from virtual absentee father to single Dad. What made it so poignant for me was watching how badly he screws it up through the first three quarters of the film. He just doesn’t get it and does virtually everything wrong. I cringed at several obviously stupid parenting decisions and shook my head knowingly with the inevitable results.

One of the continual sources of stress for me is I am that Clive Owen Character. That I’m constantly screwing up while  some celestial moviegoer shakes their head knowingly as I get it massively wrong? There is so much more to this fatherhood gig than I ever thought – the daily

On a daily basis, I think I do OK. We get through without much permanent injury. But when I look beyond the day, there are so many big questions, big issues that I just don’t know how to handle – from potty training to driver’s training. And when I think about the big issues, I start to get a little panicked. What’s the right way to teach them to read? Am I pushing them too hard or not hard enough? How do you deal with unacceptable behavior?

And that’s what got me thinking about spanking. Dr. O’C pointed out a recent well-publicized study from the U.S. claiming that children who are spanked may grow up to be happier, more  productive adults. I cringe when I hear this kind of thing on the news, because without even looking much further I just know that it is likely to be bogus.

This one is no exception. The ’study’ was a survey of adults and teens undertaken by Marjorie Gunnoe, a psychologist at a Christian college in Michigan. Not only is it unpublished and has not undergone peer review, but her work has been rejected by two professional journals. Gunnoe’s study is in direct contradiction to previous published studies that have found that spanking may have detrimental effects on behavior and mental development, makes children more aggressive and is associated with a lower IQ in children.

I don’t actually know how I feel about spanking kids. The idea of spanking my own sons makes me a little bit squeamish, but I’m not completely opposed to it in theory. I can see that it could be a quick and effective negative reinforcement for a child who is doing something dangerous. I think the risk, for me, is that it is a slippery slope. If I can justify spanking under extreme circumstances I might turn to it in anger. And if I start hitting my kids in anger, well, that’s a path I don’t want to go down.

I guess that kind of slippery slope is what worries me about the way that this study is being reported - that it may reinforce some negative parenting behavior. Gunnoe is careful to note that her study “is not a green light for parents to spank their children, but rather a red light for those groups who want corporal punishment banned.” But most people do not read beyond the headline. The headline of this particular story is that spanking is actually good for kids. It is easy to imagine that someone who is already heavy handed with their kids might take this to mean that they can carry on with the beatings or even escalate.

As is always the case with this kind of story, I reserve most of my disdain for the media who have picked up on an unpublished study by an obscure psychologist at an obscure religious college and published it as scientific gospel. I’m sure that the legion of toddlers who are getting spanked on the back of your stories will thank you, guys. Well done.

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Another thing I liked about “The Boys Are Back” was the soundtrack. Heavy presence by Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Rós, but the song that stuck with me was this one from Ray LaMontagne’s “Trouble”, available from .

Image credits:

The Boys are Back

Fleurieu Peninsula

The Boys are Back

“And when the boys are teenagers, I’m just going to send them to Florida for the school holidays. Let their grandparents deal with their hormonal butts”, I ribbed.

“That’s OK”, my Dad replied with disturbing solemnity, “I’ll be dead by then.”

Stunned silence. My Dad has a sense of humour so dry that it borders on Saharan, so I coughed a hesitant chuckle.

“No, seriously. I’m 63. My father died in his early 70’s, so did his brother. We [surname redacted] men don’t live very long. I’ll be gone before they’re teens.”

My Dad, always the life of the party.

That being said, it wasn’t a month earlier at a dinner party that I announced to my guests:

“Did y’all know that as of my birthday, I’ll be statistically halfway through my life? Truly middle aged?”

Stunned silence, followed by nervous laughter.

“That’s assuming that we’re talking about the American average life expectancy of 75.6 for men rather than the Australian average of 78.9. If I get the Australian bump then I’m another year away from half way.”

Apparently, a cavalier fatalism is an inherited trait.

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I’m not really a fan of Echo and the Bunnymen, nor any music of the 80’s. It’s all just too…synthetic. But, this is a perfect accompanying track. Their 1980 debut, “Crocodiles” is available from .

I’ve written about cricket before. I’m a convert. So much so that I prefer cricket to its American cousin, baseball. My current mission is to gently guide my sons toward this, the more genteel of the Australian sports. I am fully aware that they may not be sporty at all, neither of their parents were, and that’s just fine. But, if we’re going to spend weekends watching them play a sport, I’d rather set up a lawn chair beside a vivid green on a warm summer Saturday than huddle in a driving July rain to watch them get mauled (Aussie football) or drift into a torpor whilst watching them fruitlessly kick a ball back and forth for 90 minutes (soccer).

And to that end, I have constructed an elaborate, multi-point plan to ensure that I get to spend lots of time watching cricket with my boys in the coming years.

A morning at the lovely Adelaide Oval in the balmy summer sunshine was just phase one. I was a bit concerned that my plan was faulty when I took Boy Z down to field level whereupon he started shrieking, “I don’t like it! I don’t like it!”. But he began to calm down with the discovery that cricket also involved hot dogs, chips, ice cream, inflatable fingers and miniature bats.

Phase one of the master plan seems to be a success. When I got home from work last night, Boy Z took my hand, led me outside and asked “Wanna play cri-et, Bubba?”

Score one for the old man.

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There are surprisingly few songs about cricket, considering it’s popularity around the world. The Kinks have one of the few good ones on their 1973 album “Preservation Act 1″ available from .