The Course of Love (14 page)

Even William's and Esther's fears are sweet, because they are so easy to calm, and so unrelated to what there is truly to be frightened of in the world. They're about wolves and monsters, malaria and sharks. The children are, of course, correct to be scared; they just don't have the right targets in mind—yet. They aren't informed about the real horrors waiting for them in adulthood: exploitation, deceit, career disaster, envy, abandonment, and mortality. The childrens' anxieties are unconscious apprehensions of the true midlife terrors, except that when these finally have to be confronted, the world won't find their owners quite so endearing or such fitting targets for reassurance and a cuddle.

Esther regularly comes into Rabih and Kirsten's bedroom at around two a.m. carrying Dobbie with her and complaining of some bad dreams about a dragon. She lies between them, one hand allotted to each parent, her thin legs touching theirs. Her helplessness makes them feel strong. The comfort she needs is entirely within their power to provide. They will kill the daft dragon if he dares to turn up around here.

They watch her fall back to sleep, her eyelids trembling a little, Dobbie tucked under her chin. They stay awake awhile, moved because they know their little girl will have to grow up, leave them, suffer, be rejected, and have her heart broken. She will be out in the world, will long for reassurance, but will be out of their reach. There will, eventually, be some real dragons, and Mama and Dada will be quite unable to dispatch them.

It's not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are—beneath the bluster—intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, pitiful, and in search of consolation and forgiveness.

We're well versed at seeing the sweet and the fragile in children and offering them help and comfort accordingly. Around them, we know how to put aside the worst of our compulsions, vindictiveness, and fury. We can recalibrate our expectations and demand a little less than we normally do; we're slower to anger and a bit more aware of unrealized potential. We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers.

It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.

Rabih and Kirsten's first priority with Esther and William—it is ranked infinitely higher than any other—is to be kind, because everywhere around them they see examples of what happens, they believe, when love is in short supply: breakdowns and resentments, shame and addiction, chronic failures of self-confidence and inabilities to form sound relationships. In Rabih and Kirsten's eyes, when there is insufficient nurture—when parents are remote and domineering, unreliable and frightening—life can never feel complete. No one can hope to be strong enough to negotiate the thick tangles of existence, they maintain, without having once enjoyed a sense of mattering limitlessly and inordinately to one or two adults.

This is why they strive to answer every question with tenderness and sensitivity, punctuate the days with cuddles, read long stories in the evenings, get up to play at dawn, go easy on the children when they make mistakes, forgive their naughty moments, and allow their toys to remain strewn across the living room carpet overnight.

Their faith in the power of parental kindness reaches a pitch in
Esther and William's earliest years, particularly at those moments when they are finally asleep in their cots, defenseless before the world, their breaths coming light and steady and their finely formed fingers clenched around their favorite blankets.

But by the time each of them turns five, a more complicated and troubling reality comes into view: Rabih and Kirsten are, to their surprise, brought up against certain stubborn limits of kindness.

One rainy weekend in February, Rabih buys William an orange remote-controlled helicopter. Father and son spotted it on the Internet a few weeks before, and since then they have talked to each other of little else. Eventually Rabih caved in, even though there's no impending birthday or gratifying school mark to justify the gift. Still, it will surely provide them with hours of fun. But after only six minutes' use, as the toy is hovering over the dining table with Rabih at the controls, something goes wrong with the steering, the machine collides with the fridge, and the back rotor snaps into pieces. The fault lies squarely with the manufacturers but, sadly, they are not present in the kitchen—so, at once and not for the first time, it is Rabih who becomes the target of his child's acute disappointment.

“
What have you done?
” shrieks William, whose sweetness is now very much in abeyance.

“Nothing,” replies Rabih. “The thing just went berserk.”

“It didn't. You did something. You have to fix it now!”

“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.

At times the protective veil of paternal sentimentality slips, and Rabih sees that he has given over a very substantial share of the best days of his life to a pair of human beings who, if they weren't his own children, would almost surely strike him as being fundamentally unremarkable—so much so, in fact, that were he to meet them in a pub in thirty years' time, he might prefer not even to talk to them. The insight is unendurable.

Whatever modest denials parents may offer—however much they may downplay their ambitions in front of strangers—to have a child is, at the outset, at least, to make an assault on perfection, to attempt to create not just another average human being but an exemplar of distinctive perfection. Mediocrity, albeit the statistical norm, can never be the initial goal; the sacrifices required to get a child to adulthood are simply too great.

It's a Saturday afternoon, and William is out playing football with a friend. Esther has stayed at home to put together the electronic circuit board she got for her birthday a few months back. She has enlisted Rabih's help, and together they're going through the instruction manual, wiring up bulbs and little motors and delighting in those moments when the whole system whirs into action. Rabih likes to tell his daughter that she would make a
great electrical engineer. He can't quite let go of his fantasy of her as an adult woman who will somehow manage to be at once entirely practical and yet also lyrically sensitive (a version of every woman he has loved). Esther adores the attention. She looks forward to the rare occasions when William is away and she has her dad all to herself. He calls her Besti; she sits on his lap and, when he hasn't shaved for a day, complains about how strange and rough his skin feels. He brushes her hair back and covers her forehead with kisses. Kirsten watches them from across the room. Once, when Esther was four, she said to both her parents, with great seriousness, “I wish Mummy would die so I could marry Daddy.” Kirsten understands. She herself might have liked to have a kindly and reliable father to cuddle and build circuits with, and no one else around to bother them. She can see what a bewitching and glamorous figure Rabih could seem to someone under ten. He's happy to get on the floor and play with Esther's dolls; he takes her rock climbing, buys her dresses, goes cycling with her and talks to her about the brilliant engineers who built Scotland's tunnels and bridges.