It was a warm night in June, or perhaps July. I was very conscious of the time, because you were late. We had asked you to come home by a certain time, but your curfew-hour had passed, and you were still out. I left the house and walked around aimlessly, for fifteen to twenty minutes, up and down the local streets. I knew that the chances of meeting you were low; negligible; greater than zero, but not by much. What else could I do? Sitting at home waiting for you was a torment. By walking, at least I could slowly impose upon myself a diminution of my anger. I would almost certainly not find you, but I would be kinder to you when you eventually came home from wherever you had been hiding.
You had a phone; a very nice phone; a BlackBerry to be precise. In those days, when Nokia and Erikson had fallen behind, and before Apple and Samsung were ubiquitous, BlackBerry was the phone of choice for teenage girls in Hackney. Forget the efficiency with which they delivered email, which made them beloved of employees of the financial services industry, for you it was only about the free-to-use messaging service: BlackBerry Messenger allowed you and your friends to communicate endlessly and pointlessly – securely too, although you cared less about that – without incurring any cost.
Tonight, my smart daughter had her smart phone turned-off. Or you were just ignoring my messages, pretending that, despite being a member of the most “connected” generation in history, somehow you were unavailable to take my call, enquiring why you were not home at the agreed time. You were on the grid but pretending not to be.
You were late, very late, and I was furious. This was not the first time: it felt as if it was every time. You asked if you could go out and we agreed a time by which you must be home. You invariably came home an hour or more later than we had agreed and then played hurt and aggrieved when we chided you for tardiness. You were at fault, but your body language quickly made us feel ourselves to be the problem: frowning mouth, eyes rolling upwards, tension in your shoulders and fists.
One of my worst experiences of fatherhood was catching myself while offering you some form of admonition or cautionary advice, realising half way through that I was starting to sound exactly like my parents addressing me when I was your age. And I remembered – immediately and urgently – how little regard I had for what they said to me when I was in your shoes. I didn’t want to repeat that mistake but, mid-sentence it was hard to re-phrase my nugget of parental guidance in a way that might be of some beneficial use to you.
The repetition of fool’s wisdom, from one generation to the next – and the next and the next, onwards unto perpetuity – was not my idea of responsible parenting. Just stop talking, I told myself, before you say something even more stupid.
When I was a teenager, I thought school uniform was an authoritarian imposition, and wholly pointless; I thought it not unreasonable that I should go out with my friends without being obliged to return home at some arbitrarily agreed hour; and I thought that the formal rituals of family life – eating together, taking an interest in the day-to-day worries of kith and kin, showing respect to each other’s values and property – were insubstantial and should be subordinated to the genuine demands of peer friendship. Mostly, I still think these things.
How I struggled to make the case for the other side of those arguments, when you told me, with exasperation, exactly what I had tried to explain to my parents a generation previously. I could have said, “yes, of course, you are right”, but I doubted that it would be helpful for you, as you matured into adulthood, and was certain that it would not be helpful for me, as I clung on, reluctantly, to my paternal role as enforcer of household law.
Looking back, I realise that there is a modicum of truth in the wisdom of parents. There is virtue in shared daily routines, of demonstrating solidarity with the joys and tears of other family members, in learning to be diplomatic, in respecting agreements and trying to meet expectations that have been collective agreed. An important part of growing up is learning how to modulate the desire for sincerity – for authenticity, as we existentialists like to say – with the social value of compromise and peace. Some things, albeit true, do not need to be said; some hypocrisies do not need to be called out; some family traditions, rules, mores, do not need to be transgressed, just for the sake of demonstrating the ego’s autonomy.
That said, an equally important part of growing up is knowing when civility is demeaning, when home-truths demand to be told, when double-standards exposed, when tradition should be abandoned and when innovation embraced. I am even now learning how best to judge the appropriateness of these actions; back then I found myself trying to teach you what I had yet to master. Parenting is error-strewn; learning by doing badly; being unable to find the right balance; laying paving in the wrong direction but with good intentions.
What did you need from me during those difficult teenage years – from fourteen to seventeen – when you felt the need to rebel against me and my values, to challenge my authority, to overturn the order of the home, just as I had felt that need when I was your age? But – I wanted to say to you – but don’t you see that the order I have imposed is reasonable? I have not established my authority upon unjustified and unaccountable power. I am not an unthinking dictator. Each request I make, each limit I set, each boundary I draw for you is based on a thoughtful and sincere assessment of your right to independence, blended with our right for the integrity of our family life to be respected.
Of course, you needed to rebel. When you are a teenager, the specific character of authority is not the point. It is not the details but the essence of authority that needs to be challenged. Thereby, you forced me to realise that my own rebellion, a generation earlier, was less to do with the righteousness of my case than my need to have a case – any case – to sustain my emergent sense of independence. The James Dean film is right: being a rebel is what matters, the precise nature of the cause a minor detail.
If the essence of adolescence is rebellion, then the burden of parenthood is the erosion of fraudulent authority. I longed for my part in this drama to be over quickly, but that making it too easy – for me as well as you – would have been a great disservice to us both. You needed to learn that you have to fight to be free; which meant that I, your father, had to resist, to try to keep you imprisoned in your childhood cocoon, despite my not wanting to.
And then – mirabile dictu –some evenings you would come home from school and talk about a lesson you had found interesting, a piece of work that you had enjoyed doing, a problem with a friend to which you had discovered a solution, a challenging incident in the playground or the street that you had responded to with maturity, an item on the news that had awoken your curiosity, an inappropriate remark or insult to one of your classmates that you had challenged. From time to time, hope springs.
I’m guessing that a frictionless path from childhood to maturity makes for a weak person in later life. The battles of my teenage years have surely held me in good stead during adulthood. I hope that I made your adolescence hard enough for you to nurture your strength. But I am so very happy that time is now in our shared past. Truly: the sign of failed parenting is not that your children break the house rules; it’s when they don’t.
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