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The Midlife Crisis Beard

When I left school I grew my hair. It was long and luscious and exactly the kind of thing my son will laugh at loudly when he sees the pictures. It was the 90s and everyone I knew left their schools and immediately started trying to look like they were homeless. I however did not. My first year at university was spent clean cut, with the same short style I had during my school years. This was intentional. I didn’t want people thinking I was going with the crowd, when in fact I very much wanted to go with the crowd. Toward the end of first year the excitement became too much and I started letting my hair grow out. The point was that it has always been important to me that I not fall into the trap of becoming a stereotype. Turning 39 and at the same time realising I am undergoing a midlife crisis has therefore been extremely annoying.

I know I am going through a midlife crisis, because I have started to think about growing a beard for the first time in my life. I don’t mean one of those neatly trimmed, and oiled hipster beards, but rather a kind of untamed jungle beard.  I want a shaggy monstrosity that I occasionally take a kitchen knife to and hack back like a wild vine. Or rather I don’t want one, because that is what’s expected of me at 39, shortly after a divorce, and I will be damned if I meet society’s expectations.

Knowing I am probably undergoing some kind of mid-life crisis is very enlightening however. It means I can choose the direction I want to take it in. I don’t necessarily have to grow a beard. Rather than unknowingly plunging myself into an extra-marital affair, taking up drugs or purchasing a stupidly expensive motorbike, I could be looking at this as an opportunity to position my life well for the next 39 years. Last night I made a mental note to buy more Weet-bix for the fibre. I am also considering studying something, and taking up the piano again.

On the other hand, there is always the beard. As far as I see it growing a beard now has many benefits and only one con. If I grow a Hagrid beard strangers will probably assume I am either a murderer or belong to a cult. People I don’t even know would likely fear me, or go out of their way to avoid me. It would be wonderful. Other benefits include not being able to see my face accurately in the mirror, and having an excuse for why no one wants to sleep with me. The con is of course that my toddler son may no longer recognise me, but I am sure he will understand when I tell him the “hedge who is his dad” is saving literally tens of Rands on shaving stuff each month.

By this time next year we will all know which path I took. Will I be on the path to self-fulfilment, riches and happiness, or will I have a beard. Who knows? I live in exciting times.

 

 

 

 

 

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How To Judge A Parent

There is a new saying, that one should never judge another parent. The idea is that anyone with a small child, no matter how attentive, is likely to experience melt downs and moments of almost monumental shame for no reason while raising their young one. I say this is bullshit. Judge away. If my child is lying on the floor of a store thrashing his legs and arms, you would be only be right to judge me. If I don’t hear hear you whisper about what a bad parent I am, then at the very least I know you and I have nothing in common, cause that’s what I would be doing.

Probably the worst side-effect of being a parent is that one is forced into contact with other people’s children. My toddler and I like to go down to the park – he to run and climb, and me to be told to run and climb by him, like I am on boot camp and the drill sergeant calls me “daddy”.  Having a job done in odd hours, I often get to take him on week days when the park is silent, but when it isn’t I find we are often confronted with the worst specimens of childlike humanity. And on those days judgement comes in handy.

The other day a boy, who I was assured was five, but who looked as if his beard was coming through,  backed my son into a corner on a jungle gym to tell him a story. The tale went as follows, “And then the people died, and do you know what happened next?” he said. My kid, being 20 months old, polite, and having never heard a story of this kind before dutifully answered, “no” thereby encouraging young Shakespeare to continue.

“Blood came pouring out of their heads and they turned into bats, and do you know what happened next?” he asked, the gripping cliffhanger dangling in the air.

“No,” my son said again, not yet having learnt from his previous error. “They were made into stone, before exploding, and guts went everywhere. Do you know what happened next?” the elocutionist enquired, while I stood starring at him like shit smeared on a new rug.

At this stage the child’s mother must have finally noticed what was going on as she bustled over and told her young thought-leader that he probably shouldn’t be terrifying the baby. He drooled on his chin, screamed something nonsensical and dived head first down the slide. My son turned to me, shrugged and demanded I run to the swings.

I judged that mother that day. Her inattentiveness lead to a really awkward situation. What was I supposed to do? Remind her son he was speaking to a baby? Shout at him? Wade in and toe punt the hobbit over a swing set? Socially we are not allowed to do those things anymore, and so I judge. Giving some sense of shame to the parent is our last defence in the face of a badly behaved child, and if this bothers you, if you are worried that one day it could be you on the end of my glowering silence remember, “you will never experience a public tantrum if you just keep them locked in a cupboard at home.”

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Toddler’s Ruin Your Youtube

As the father of a toddler my Youtube channel has now been shot to hell. Whereas once I was recommended episodes of TV panel shows from the UK, the latest music videos by my favourite bands and hilarious John Oliver clips, I am now directed towards various nursery rhyme sites, singalong songs, and rather bizarrely, highlights from Ru Paul’s Drag Race – what are other parents doing with their toddlers?

This is not strictly my fault. The algorithms on these sites are quick to latch onto any new behaviour, and my son just happens to be entirely fascinated with any object that might contain a game, TV show, or photo of himself. If he is around, I find it impossible to hold my phone anywhere in the house without triggering some kind of instant, exhaustive battle for ownership that makes WWE look like kittens snuggling. The second my phone is out my pocket, even to take a call, my son rushes me like I’m the ball carrier, and he is Francois Pienaar off the side of a scrum. All my photos are of him moving toward the camera to see what I am taking a photo of.

Thanks to Youtube I am already aware that parents who once watched the nursery rhymes I am watching with him were soon onto Paw Patrol (somehow I find I already know the theme tune), Jake and the Neverland Pirates, and episodes of In the Night Garden, a show set in a horror park, filled with sentient balloon people, a group of men who never wear trousers, a woman who lifts her skirts for anyone whose looking, and a man whose desperate loneliness leads to him going to bed each night with a stone. It’s a show adults universally describe as being, “Bizarre” and/or “Creepy”.

The prevalence with which this show is mentioned online makes my initiation into the cult seem inevitable. Am I really one day going to allow my child to become totally absorbed by poor miserable Makka Pakka, depressively stacking and washing stones, just so I can get five crucial minutes to take a shit? The answer is yes, and the reason is that I think what we had as kids was, if not worse, then at least just as inspired by hallucinogens.

Lets starts with the obvious. Bob is a sponge that lives in the sea. In a pineapple. The Flintstones have a Martian friend named “The Great Gazoo” and the main enemy of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a brain who lived in the stomach of a nightclub bouncer.

The Teletubbies were amorphous blobs with TVs in their stomachs, who lived on custard and toast and talked to a baby sun. They also look like the last faces you’ll see before you’re strangled to death by bath salt addicts at a funfair. The only female smurf was constructed in a lab by an evildoer intent on leading the good Smurfs astray, Pokemon is about kids who keep magical animals in tiny cages, and then force them to fight each other, and The Carebears was about a gang of mystical cloud beings, who watched every single child, 24/7 looking for signs of unhappiness and then shot rainbows out of their stomachs to alter people’s moods. Henry the train gets bricked up alive into a tunnel in Thomas the Tank Engine, Johnny Bravo and Pepe Le Pew are sexual predators and Donald Duck frequently had roast birds for lunch.

Keeping it local Pumpkin Patch had a dancing dog, fruit that sang, and two puppet cousins so nightmarish they made you wish humans didn’t have hands, while Sarel Seemonster, Karel Kraai, Bennie Boekwurm and the other characters from Wielie Wielie Walie are proof that the Apartheid government wanted English kids to suffer too. No one knew what was happening in Liewe Heksie, Mina Moo was a talking cow who was trying to get you to drink her udder juices, and if Zet had ever come burbling into my room I likely would have kicked him down the stairs.

The truth is that children’s TV has always been weird. We don’t pay artists enough, and children’s entertainers even less. As a result it’s only shaggy drug addicts with no talent, and a penchant for child abuse, who dress up like wizards and prowl the grounds of Arts Festival. It is there they are promptly picked up to develop TV shows. This has worked for generations, not because the peyote gives these criminals any additional insight into a child’s mind, but because children are new. The whole world is a wonder to them. They can spend hours just hiding in a bush or throwing rocks at other rocks. The reason we remember the shows from our youth with nostalgia is that we saw them with a child’s brain. These shows appeared no more wonderful, or strange, than the rest of the world and it’s the memory of this feeling that triggers our nostalgia. Either that or the Xanax.

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Potty Training and The ANC

Waiting for the ANC to make a decision regarding Jacob Zuma is much like potty-training a toddler. You spend ages patiently watching a process you are mildly disgusted by, while the object of your attention vacillates wildly between whether or not he will just go. At least I think it is. My son is 19 months old now, and unlike Jacob Zuma, looking ever more like he wants to take charge of his own exits.

Judging by the TV adverts for Pampers in which a teenager can be seen toddling off into the garden in his own, “New, stretchier big boy nappies for kids between the ages of 12 and 15”, the nappy companies would like nothing more than for me to put these thoughts of potty-training out of my mind. Increasingly parents are being encouraged to leave teaching their kids about toilets until they have graduated, but I am not so sure I want that.

Reports suggest that in this modern, bustling world, the essential art of taking a poo, not in your pants, is being left more, and more, to nursery school teachers, and this is a mistake. Nursery schools are rarely anything other than a normal backyard, if it was painted by a disgruntled clown and dotted with instruments of toddler death, watched over by four ladies who have made a few terrible life choices. Expecting these already harassed individuals to take care of your child’s rear-end education is putting horror cream on an already overly-sweet anxiety cake. There is absolutely no way these people can be expected to have the necessary patience to guide your infant through one of the phases Freud suggested was most likely to leave a psychological stain.

Recently I met a woman at a party who does not have children. She very wittily suggested that toddlers must be dumber than dogs cause you can potty train a dog in just a few days. Sure Marion*, but the toddler would probably learn a lot quicker too if you were allowed to literally rub their noses in their mistakes. Marion is a nursery school teacher.

And with that we are back to Zuma, the toddler, who is unwilling to realise that people are sick and tired of his shitting all over the place. Jacob, if you wanted to exit without humiliation you would have done it a lot sooner. Now we have to hand you over to the nursery school teachers and they may just rub your nose in it.

 

*Not her name. I can’t remember her real name. I didn’t care to.