In a few short weeks my time I’ll be returning to my job as a fulltime high school teacher, after three years of spending most of my time being a father to my twin boys. This will represent the first time in the short lives of the lads that I have been in full time paid employment. I went part time for the first two years so that I Clare and I could share the parenting load, and a writer’s residency allowed me to extend the arrangement.
And one thing I’m sure I’ll be asked when I go back to school, in that well-meaning, filling-the-conversation-gap way that we all have, is “how are you coping with returning to full time work?” It’s not at entirely outrageous question, the people asking it will mostly be full time teachers themselves, with one eye on the slow approaching avalanche of duties and expectations, The polite response, I guess, will be to look somewhat harried and mumble, “you know, getting there”. It will perhaps for a moment make them feel better about their own sense of slowly drowning.
The trouble is, it would also be slightly dishonest. The fact is, until I had children, I had absolutely no idea what hard work was. Sure, I done a lot of things that I’d considered difficult. I’ve juggled full time teaching and writing careers, worked twenty hour days on film shoots, climbed mountains, cycled a hundred miles fully laden with touring gear in the rain, that sort of thing. But that, it turns out, is all easy stuff. You grit your teeth, put your head down, get the hell on with it and then, before too long, you get a break. You reach a hut, or a holiday break, or a completion deadline, you get to sleep.
Parenting though, is an entirely different game. I write this not to complain, the past three years have been the most satisfying of my life, but rather to voice my surprise that I didn’t know any of this in advance. Somehow, the sheer scale of the sacrifice parents everywhere make in the name of their children had eluded me.
When we see an athlete standing on the podium, immediately we understand how hard they have worked to achieve their goal. We understand this because we are told it again and again, their story is made heroic, and woven into our collective narrative.
And yet, just as every Olympic medal speaks of remarkable character and fortitude, so too does every happy and secure child walking through the gates for their first day of school speak of a tale of extraordinary courage and sacrifice. The tale of the parent. Only, I deliberately misused the word extraordinary. The role of the parent, and more often than not here we speak of mothers, is so ordinary, so everyday, that we instinctively resist the opportunity to acknowledge how special it is. Everybody has parents, most people become parents, therefore parenting can’t be all that hard, right? This is the very strong bias we carry towards overvaluing the unusual, and so undervaluing the everyday.
And so I salute parents and say without a hint of irony, that this year I return to full time teaching for a well earned rest.
Bernard Beckett
