JEREMY VINE on the day his daughters stopped finding him funny: ‘I was crushed. I want to be their idol again'
The luggage carousel moved. I said to my daughter: 'Now – watch for the mud stains.'
And then, a minute later, the suitcase appeared. I pointed excitedly as it nosed through the black plastic flaps. 'See? That's mud from when it fell off the back of a Jeep in Uganda.'
Feeling proud that my blue Samsonite case is still red-brown with the road dirt it fell into when I covered a story in 1999, I turned to Anna, 18, for affirmation. She pulled off her headphones.
'Sorry?'
'I'm just saying, that dried mud on my case is–'
'Dad, you've told me that five times before.'
When you have teenagers, you have to communicate against headphones, in soundbites, often through a closed bedroom door. I worried that I was seeing a living example of the recent Financial Times report on teens – less ability to concentrate than ever, less use of the eyes to see beyond the phone at the end of their arm. But then I thought, calm down, this is not her problem. It's your problem for telling the same boring story six times.
The experience seems universal. I was staggered when my own parents offered me advice of any kind. What could I learn from people who thought the Sex Pistols should be disbanded? But advice-rejection still comes as such a painful shock when your child turns into a teenager. I asked Anna: 'Can you tell me what good advice I've given you?'
It was the same morning as the carousel incident, so I accept I might have exhausted her. Off came the headphones. 'Sorry, what?'
'Advice. What have I told you that's helped?'
'Er – I dunno. Can I have more time?'
This is hard to take, because in the early years your little ones worship you. Daughters, dare I say, worship dads especially.
When my girls were four and six, I was given a brilliant book called Great Lies To Tell Small Kids by Andy Riley. I happily trotted them out: 'Batteries get their power because they have tiny pedalling mice inside.' 'See my mug saying World's Greatest Dad? There are no more than three in existence, because they are only awarded once every hundred years.' They believed my every word.
During a street party for the Queen's 60 years on the throne, Martha, now 21, then eight, was walking alongside the trestle tables hand-in-hand with me. She was holding five helium balloons, and I said, 'Just watch you don't let anyone hand you more than two extra balloons. Children with seven helium balloons sometimes float into the sky.'
We walked a bit further, and then a neighbour gave Martha another balloon – number six. She took it, but her grip on my hand tightened, and I loved that feeling.
But then something changed.
One day I walked into the kitchen with a pair of Y-fronts on my head. 'Right,' I said authoritatively. 'Who's been throwing pants?'
The joke had worked before, with socks. On this occasion, instead of the heart-melting, 'Not us Dad, we promise!' my eldest, Martha, now at the grand old age of nine, said firmly: 'Dad, you keeping doing the same thing.'
I was crushed. The mystique was gone. No longer was I being listened to just because I was their father.
The BBC used to have a generation of old blokes who positively boasted about having missed their children growing up. Their attitude shocked me. I resolved not to be the same absentee dad. And I wasn't, but it only makes the pack-it-in-Dad moments harder. Your heart breaks, not just for the children you have lost, but for the rose-tinted glasses they saw you through. Can't I just be someone's idol again? I really enjoyed my hero years.
As Martha and Anna reached their teens, I realised I could no longer be chief clown; they wanted more serious commentary. When Anna asked, 'Dad, was it Bowie or Nirvana who wrote The Man Who Sold The World?', I realised there was more credit to be had from knowing Bowie's back catalogue than from placing my underpants on my head. I had to up my game.
What I worked out is that there are two principles of parental advice. First, it needs to be illustrated in real life or it just doesn't land. 'Don't tilt a strimmer sideways to cut your hedges' is great, learned the hard way in my case, but only really works if the kids have to visit you in A&E. I lucked out when I went over the handlebars of a penny farthing – knocked out, brain-addled for two hours, it really taught Martha and Anna about the dangers of riding too high.
The second principle is that the apertures are so narrow for offering emotional advice, you have to make sure not a word is wasted. What do I really want my daughters to know? I want them to know their own self-worth; never to feel they get their value from another person. I don't want them to end up with someone who makes them unhappy. So, I take all the advice and all the clowning and every single thing I've ever heard or experienced, and I've boiled it all down to a single sentence: never be with someone who makes you feel bad about yourself.
Eleven words. Now I just need a moment to unload them.
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Telegraph
16 hours ago
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‘My dad walked out of my life when I was 10 – then I did the same to him four decades later'
To date, I've enjoyed 19 Father's Days. So far so good, I hope. I get nice cards from my daughters and the hugs seem sincere. Now that both of them are on the brink of adulthood (my youngest is 17), I can increasingly allow myself the conviction that I did okay in the role. The relief is enormous. I always feared I'd fail at fatherhood, largely because I thought my own father had. He was never much around, rarely home, and left for good by the time I was 10. In his stead came no strong male presence, my mother never remarrying, so how on earth would I make a good father myself without that formative role model? Family strife I didn't see my dad again until I turned 40, by which time I was a father myself. I'd previously been adamant that I'd never have children, convinced that, as in the films of Mike Leigh, families only led to strife. I didn't want any more strife. I'd remained very close to my mother until her death from cancer 25 years ago, at the age of 55, and she'd been a lovely, if complicated person: strong, independent, staunchly feminist, a vegetarian big into alternative health; also chronically depressed, with periods of bulimia and anorexia we were never allowed to discuss. In the absence of a husband, she promoted me to co-parent of my younger brother, and to suggest that my brother didn't much appreciate this is an understatement: it drove a wedge between us that exists to this day. To me, growing up felt like living in a perpetual minefield: at any time, one of them could blow, both, it seemed, reliant upon me to maintain an even-ish keel. Why me? When I moved out at 19, the sense of escape was vertiginous. Free at last! When would I settle down? Hopefully never. Fatherhood did eventually find me, as it does to so many of us. But because this was no longer the Seventies, I entered into it willingly and with self-awareness. Nevertheless, I still panicked throughout the pregnancy, then again during the first few months of parenthood (oh boy, did I), then, steered by my wife's surprising patience and wise counsel, I came to realise that history need not repeat itself. So, yes: big relief. Back in contact I found myself contacting my father a few months before we had our second child. I'd barely thought of him in the previous 30 years, and the few remaining memories I held were not particularly encouraging ones: a pint perpetually on the go, brooding bad moods, a fondness for Dad's Army. But I was curious now. Who was he? Why did he leave? Were there regrets? I found his address online. He lived just three miles from the family home he'd left all those years previously. He responded to my letter immediately, sounding happy, surprised, eager. 'Lunch? I'll pay, the least I can do.' We met at a train station, and I wouldn't have recognised him, this whiskery 65-year-old in an overcoat and flat cap. An hour later, I'd realised I was very much my mother's son. We had nothing in common, few shared interests, held differing world views. No missing piece of the jigsaw fell pleasingly into place. That said, he was unfailingly polite, and, I sensed, afraid in any way to offend. There was diplomacy at work here. During the meal, I became increasingly aware that while he diligently answered all the questions I posed, he asked none of his own. The second time we met, this time for coffee, we ran out of conversational steam alarmingly quickly – and I can talk to anyone. An absence of 30 years, and he'd nothing to say. While I was planning my exit, he suddenly suggested that our families meet, perhaps in pursuit of mitigating our mutual awkwardness with the presence of his wife who, he relayed fondly, 'can talk a lot'. I could meet his adult daughter, and he could meet my girls. A tepid meeting In truth, I wasn't keen. The dramatist in me thought that this might be an occasion for recrimination and revelation (Mike Leigh again), but I agreed largely because I didn't want to offend. Also, my wife, by now, was intrigued. She comes from a large, sprawling family, and could never understand my lack of interest in mine. In the event, there was no drama at all, just a lamb roast, two veg and room-temperature wine at their small terraced house. His wife really was very chatty indeed, and perfectly pleasant. She made small talk last for an awfully long time, and gave us some leftover dessert in a Tupperware dish 'for the drive back'. Early the next morning, he emailed to suggest another date 'soon', and so, over the next few years, we submitted to occasional Sunday lunches, just like normal people. At first, these occurred every few months, but then, at my delay, with much longer gaps in between. Consistently, I turned down their Christmas invitations until the hint was taken. It's not that I had any (or, perhaps more accurately, much) lingering anger towards him – I knew that their marriage had been a difficult one, and that both were responsible for the way it ended – but my mother had stayed, while he, irrespective of the reason, had fled. If I'd ever needed a father, it was back then. Now, I had no idea what to do with him. Walking out of his life My daughters were similarly mystified. Because I'd only ever called him by his name, and never 'Dad', they did likewise. Over the years, they wondered why these particular friends of ours were 'so old'. When I explained the bloodline, and its significance – something I had to do more than once in their young lives – their eyes widened. 'Does this mean we'll get presents?' About a decade after that initial contact, I ended things. I was polite but firm. That early awkwardness between us had never eased; I still had no idea what to say to him whenever we met, and he never seemed to say very much to me, either. I couldn't quite work out where he fitted into my busy life, or, indeed, why he should. His wife was furious, and wrote to tell me. No, she confirmed, she did not see things from my perspective. When he died last year, she emailed my wife, not me. There was no invite to the funeral. I was sorry, genuinely, for her loss, but I cannot say I regretted my decision. The deeper into fatherhood I got, the more I found it impossible to comprehend how someone might walk out on his children quite so emphatically. I couldn't imagine doing that myself, and found it increasingly discomfiting to be around someone who did. But I'm glad I'd sought him out, and happy that he found familial happiness the second time around. His absence in my life has made me a much more conscientious father, and, for that, I'm grateful.
Daily Mail
21 hours ago
- Daily Mail
JEREMY VINE on the day his daughters stopped finding him funny: ‘I was crushed. I want to be their idol again'
The luggage carousel moved. I said to my daughter: 'Now – watch for the mud stains.' And then, a minute later, the suitcase appeared. I pointed excitedly as it nosed through the black plastic flaps. 'See? That's mud from when it fell off the back of a Jeep in Uganda.' Feeling proud that my blue Samsonite case is still red-brown with the road dirt it fell into when I covered a story in 1999, I turned to Anna, 18, for affirmation. She pulled off her headphones. 'Sorry?' 'I'm just saying, that dried mud on my case is–' 'Dad, you've told me that five times before.' When you have teenagers, you have to communicate against headphones, in soundbites, often through a closed bedroom door. I worried that I was seeing a living example of the recent Financial Times report on teens – less ability to concentrate than ever, less use of the eyes to see beyond the phone at the end of their arm. But then I thought, calm down, this is not her problem. It's your problem for telling the same boring story six times. The experience seems universal. I was staggered when my own parents offered me advice of any kind. What could I learn from people who thought the Sex Pistols should be disbanded? But advice-rejection still comes as such a painful shock when your child turns into a teenager. I asked Anna: 'Can you tell me what good advice I've given you?' It was the same morning as the carousel incident, so I accept I might have exhausted her. Off came the headphones. 'Sorry, what?' 'Advice. What have I told you that's helped?' 'Er – I dunno. Can I have more time?' This is hard to take, because in the early years your little ones worship you. Daughters, dare I say, worship dads especially. When my girls were four and six, I was given a brilliant book called Great Lies To Tell Small Kids by Andy Riley. I happily trotted them out: 'Batteries get their power because they have tiny pedalling mice inside.' 'See my mug saying World's Greatest Dad? There are no more than three in existence, because they are only awarded once every hundred years.' They believed my every word. During a street party for the Queen's 60 years on the throne, Martha, now 21, then eight, was walking alongside the trestle tables hand-in-hand with me. She was holding five helium balloons, and I said, 'Just watch you don't let anyone hand you more than two extra balloons. Children with seven helium balloons sometimes float into the sky.' We walked a bit further, and then a neighbour gave Martha another balloon – number six. She took it, but her grip on my hand tightened, and I loved that feeling. But then something changed. One day I walked into the kitchen with a pair of Y-fronts on my head. 'Right,' I said authoritatively. 'Who's been throwing pants?' The joke had worked before, with socks. On this occasion, instead of the heart-melting, 'Not us Dad, we promise!' my eldest, Martha, now at the grand old age of nine, said firmly: 'Dad, you keeping doing the same thing.' I was crushed. The mystique was gone. No longer was I being listened to just because I was their father. The BBC used to have a generation of old blokes who positively boasted about having missed their children growing up. Their attitude shocked me. I resolved not to be the same absentee dad. And I wasn't, but it only makes the pack-it-in-Dad moments harder. Your heart breaks, not just for the children you have lost, but for the rose-tinted glasses they saw you through. Can't I just be someone's idol again? I really enjoyed my hero years. As Martha and Anna reached their teens, I realised I could no longer be chief clown; they wanted more serious commentary. When Anna asked, 'Dad, was it Bowie or Nirvana who wrote The Man Who Sold The World?', I realised there was more credit to be had from knowing Bowie's back catalogue than from placing my underpants on my head. I had to up my game. What I worked out is that there are two principles of parental advice. First, it needs to be illustrated in real life or it just doesn't land. 'Don't tilt a strimmer sideways to cut your hedges' is great, learned the hard way in my case, but only really works if the kids have to visit you in A&E. I lucked out when I went over the handlebars of a penny farthing – knocked out, brain-addled for two hours, it really taught Martha and Anna about the dangers of riding too high. The second principle is that the apertures are so narrow for offering emotional advice, you have to make sure not a word is wasted. What do I really want my daughters to know? I want them to know their own self-worth; never to feel they get their value from another person. I don't want them to end up with someone who makes them unhappy. So, I take all the advice and all the clowning and every single thing I've ever heard or experienced, and I've boiled it all down to a single sentence: never be with someone who makes you feel bad about yourself. Eleven words. Now I just need a moment to unload them.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
There is no winning at motherhood – whatever you do, you still shoulder the blame
There is no winning at motherhood. A year ago I stood in my kitchen, feeling uncomfortable, while a female friend of my son raged at her mother for sending her to a top boarding school when she got divorced, yelling: 'You took the easy option and sent me away!' I had to intervene and explain that her mum had worked like a navvy to help her brilliant daughter get a scholarship and avoid family turmoil. But now many children talk darkly of having 'boarding school syndrome'. What all these dread parenting tags really tell you is no occupation on the planet is as fraught with anxiety, contrition and self-loathing as motherhood; whatever you do, you'll still shoulder the blame. Narcissism and gaslighting Our burden is made heavier by living in an age where our young are so proficient in therapy-lingo (psychology is the second-most-studied topic at A Level) that standard-issue mums, who fall short of perfection, are routinely accused of 'narcissistic personality disorder'. Counsellors often advise clients to cut ties with any member of family who might constitute negative emotional baggage. Meanwhile, any white lie you might have told a child to protect them from adult misbehaviour (as your grandmother once advised) is routinely categorised as 'gaslighting'. Although none of this is quite as bad as the period in the 1950s and 60s when US psychiatrist Leo Kanner blamed childhood autism on 'refrigerator' mothers, who lacked maternal warmth. Ever since I first contemplated parenthood, I've been aware there would be judgement from others. Even when small, I suspected I might become one of those 'bad mothers' you heard so much about in the 1970s: the women who worked, socialised and actively relished spending some time away from the fruits of their wombs. My little sister was born when I was 11 and, while my big sister cosseted her like a Norland nanny, I couldn't wait for this boring baby to become a person. Twenty-three years later my older sister would become one of the most devoted parents I've ever observed (much like our own mother). By contrast, when my own first son arrived, my maternal feelings were slow to emerge, not helped by the fact it had been an exceptionally traumatic birth. Two decades later I still feel riven by memories of watching my baby cry in the cot beside me and not reaching out to comfort him. Nor could I breastfeed, as he had an undiagnosed tongue-tie, which made the process agonising for both of us. I resumed work immediately and since one of my tasks was being a Booker Prize judge, I spent most of the year staring at novels, rather than my lovely boy's face. In desperation, I paid my nurturing big sis to do some childcare for me and watched, jealously, as she happily performed the acts of devotion that I found so hard. My husband also picked up a lot of the slack, wielding bottles and babygros like a pro. Feeling inadequate as a mother, I turned back to work as my tried-and-tested method of achieving self-worth. 'Of course, his mother is often away' In short, my household gradually evolved into one with a working mum who travelled a fair bit, while my husband reduced his professional hours and became a stay-at-home dad. When one of my boys was naughty at school, the class teacher said to my husband with elaborate emphasis: 'Of course, his mother is often away.' Although self-reproach was sharpest when my older boy went through a period of extreme anxiety, finding school such an ordeal that he simply stopped going. Everyone knew it must be my fault, because it is always the mother's fault. For years I walked around my Cambridge home issuing copious apologies for not being the ideal model of nurture. For all the self-recrimination, the worst has not happened. Neither my boys nor I are in an asylum, prison, hospital or the gutter. My sons are now 17 and 21 and appear to have survived an idiosyncratic, but not unhappy childhood. They are kind, funny young men, who have hinterland, passions and friends of both sexes. Neither shows any sign – yet – of ostracising me. Yesterday, I met my older son, a psychology undergraduate (of course he is) for a drink in London. When I asked him what he thought of my intense guilt, he laughed and said 'comes with the territory', reminding me that I'd sent him Philip Larkin's This Be the Verse ('They f--- you up, your mum and dad') when he was 14, just to get in there first. In the course of conversation it became clear that the main reason I feast on mummy misery lit is therapeutic. Whatever my maternal shortcomings, they're not even in the same demented ballpark as Crawford's or Jong's.
