The Wisdom of Derek
What My Father Taught Me In Ten Convenient Points
I AM A LUCKY MAN that my only Daddy Issue is that I don’t have Daddy Issues. By that, I mean, the “father wound” I carry was through no overt fault of my father’s… he died when I was seventeen, just as we were forming a mature relationship. For years I was pissed as hell that he had shortened his life with a four-pack-a-day smoking habit, until I understood it was his chosen defence against the anxiety that had plagued him since infancy. Twentieth-century South African men who went to see psychiatrists were either labeled weak or mad, barbiturates were reserved for Marilyn Monroe, and he lacked any active genes for anger. Perhaps it all began with his own father. Restless after the horror of the Great War which saw him wounded at the Battle of the Somme, “Oupa” had barely finished impregnating my grandmother when he raced off to the join the British Mesopotamian Campaign with none other than Lawrence of fucking Arabia, it was whispered.
Imagine the fear when you have never seen an adult male for the first 24 months of your life. Apparently Dad freaked out when Oupa picked him up for the first time, not knowing how to react to the burly, military man of the world who was now a minor hero of the Empire. It was the beginning of a personality clash that, sadly, was never resolved. My father only spoke about it once, musing that the fallout really started when Oupa took him as a little boy to a military parade in India. On cue, Dad had a full-on panic attack when the guns and drums came too close. Oupa’s Victorian visions of a Nietzschean Übermensch for a first-born were dashed. Instead, Vernon Derek Ernst spent his life in love with music, literature, and (unfortunately) all those packets of Peter Stuyvesant.
I came late into his life, being born when he was 55. Many people who walked by our house must have supposed the quiet, bespectacled man who only came out of the house at twilight to check the pH of the swimming pool was my grandfather. Born as one of the earliest members of the so-called Silent Generation, the twentieth century must have taken a considerable existential toll on him— true to his generation’s moniker, he never complained.
If the traditional rubric for gauging a successful father-son relationship comprises rugby, roughhousing and emotional repression, we had failed miserably at it. Emphysema and time had robbed me of so many opportunities, but I realise now, cautiously contemplating fatherhood myself, my father handed me a roadmap of emotional wisdom almost unconsciously. Having teased it out over the past couple of months I am astonished how appropriate his wisdom applies to my cohort of fraught Xennial white males, struggling to swim in the current shitstorm of deflected guilt and socio-political blitzkrieg which (ahem, Mr Trump) really can be said to come from both sides, now.
It would be an injustice to summarise my father’s world view in ten points, cheekily updated with 21st century jargon he would have found amusing at first but then nodded furiously at. But if his life philosophy can give you the consolation it lately gives me, I have to take him at his word and share it, for he was a Communist as far as his wish to have peace of mind a universal human right.
(1) Realise you’re privileged. In so many ways. You were born into all this and benefited from it. In education. In work. In securing all your Maslow’s hierarchical needs. This is a caveat, not a judgement.
(2) Also realise feeling pathologically guilty about it only makes you miserable and potentially bitter, and thus *unable* or *unwilling* to help. Your privilege can paralyse you or empower you to help others. And helping does not mean bowing to a patronising “saviour” complex. It means being aware, open-minded, and considered.
(3) Understand that when a woman speaks about men behaving badly she’s not necessarily referring to you. And countering with “not all men are like that” doesn’t help; it takes the focus away from the issue at hand. There is —as far as I’m aware —no global misandrist feminist cabal intent on emasculating you. Listen rather. You won’t be judged for not being able to solve the problem at once— ditch the hero complex.
(4) Chivalry is not dead, but be chuffed and grateful when she picks up the tab to treat you.
(5) Understand that the capacity to love and be loved is not determined by chromosomes, gender, colour, creed, sexuality, or where you fall in the DC vs Marvel camp.
(6) You can be conservative or liberal. Neither viewpoint makes you a fascist or a communist. Just don’t be a douche about it.
(7) Feeling your feelings or crying or wanting a hug or admitting to being afraid does not make you less of a man. It makes you more of a human.
(8) Of all the animals, humans are the most binary in their approach to fatherhood. You can be a lion who ignores his cubs, or you can be an Emperor penguin who cherishes the egg from the moment it is laid.
(9) You will fail. You will be judged. Just as everybody else is.
(10) If everything else implodes, there’s always Star Wars.
Thus endeth the lesson.
