The Weekend Marathon

June 14, 2016

A few weeks ago I went out on a Saturday night to pick up my daughter from a birthday party. I asked her what time to pick her up and she said, “the time on the invitation is 10.30 pm but that’s for parents who would be concerned if it was any later”. So the nod and the wink was that I was to turn up at a time more “mature” time.

The Saturday night pick up. As a father of three with the oldest aged 25, I can claim my own million miles club.

When we got there that night at the designated time and pick up venue I knew it was the right place, the outside light was on and cars were double parked on the street. As experienced parent drivers we parked the car away from the house and walked the short distance to the front door. We entered the open front door without knocking, full knowing that the resident parents would be multitasking, making sure parents arriving were met and engaged, moving the event to its conclusion, and that each child had the requisite amount of take away sugar (a generational shift from the lollies bag to the sweets buffet). We joined the ranks of the other parents who were there already standing and waiting, not wanting to appear too direct and insist on an immediate departure, but not wanting to appear to comfortable only to encourage the daughter to continue partying. This was a 16th birthday party!

I greeted the father who was talking to another man I remembered from the same event the year before. I even remembered that he was wearing the same polo top as last year. What engaged me their talk chronicling their weekend’s kilometre totals after running various children around for their schools sports and other social activities: suburbs were proffered, time on road and kilometres totalled. There was no bitterness, it wasn’t even a whinge it was just an expression of what is expected and being exchanged with people who understand the language, with a little bit of competition to boot. Ironically I went immediately to the Monty Python Four Yorshiremen skit only to see it is played out in the Sydney suburbs of the 2010s.

It is a language I also understood, twenty unbroken years of watching netball, 15 years of Sunday mornings at various pools for swimming lessons, band, orchestra and drama practice and performance, home games, away games. During one memorable period I travelled each Saturday between 4 to 6 activities; a half tank of petrol would be consumed and driver fatigue set in. I knew micro sleeps way before Karl Kruszelnicki gave them a name.

This is modern parenting. We are there for our children and we care, we helicopter, we worry, we work assiduously so they can’t one day claim that we weren’t there for them. Perhaps this is a tad to harsh, perhaps we are doing it because we can and we want to. I remember doing research in various ethnic groups on kids and their use of bicycle helmets only to find that for many the bikes never touched the roads, they were being transported to designated cycling areas and only used with full safety equipment.

I do contemplate whether there is a cost to all this which is not allowing our children to develop their own innate survival skills, to become resilient and to meet the requirements of various situations in their own right. Has the independence that we gained especially as second-generation migrant children to master the world that we came into been denied to our children because we don’t want them to experience the same struggles?

At the risk of sounding like the ageing stereotype of “in my day…” I do hark back, like many of my generation, to a time when there were far less rules, when you were allowed to fall and get up, dust yourself off and move on.

My own childhood was so different. Sport and social events were truly local and I was a child of the Inner West, St Peters, Newtown, Earlwood, Marrickville, Dulwich Hill. My means of transport were the 490, 423 and the 422 to Tempe Depot. In my younger years it was Mr Paul Ryan, the father of two kids I grew up with. He would take us to games playing for Earlwood Saints, our kit was the Red V on white of my NRL team. Our transport was his Rothmans delivery van in which we would travel in the back lying flat on the internal shelves that carried cartons of cigarettes during the week. The after game highlight was being delivered to the milk bar in the Earlwood shopping strip while he ducked into the Earlwood Hotel to drink with his mates. Memory is sensual and I can still taste those milkshakes, and when finishes hanging on the footpath outside the pub until Mr Ryan was done.

In high school I started playing for my school team CBHS Lewisham. Our games were at Tempe Recreational Reserve. I remember one Saturday I couldn’t organise a lift so I travelled with my dad to his workshop in St Peter’s and recklessly walked barefoot with my boots in my hands the distance between St Peter’s and the Oval. It was a 5.3 km distance along the Princes Highway, and I arrived with cut feet but the passion to play.

A passion which also saw me play a full year for the St Peter’s U/15s without my parents knowing. The cover story was that I was coaching a junior team so that I could get to games and training and the team manager would bring my kit to games and take it back to wash and be ready for the next week’s game. I thought I had gotten away with it including the broken nose suffered in a midweek game and covered up by spending many evenings in my room, but as I was leaving my house for the last game of the season my mother said “make sure you don’t get hurt today”.

My father was not a sports dad. It didn’t even enter into his head to offer to drive me to the football field, let alone stay to watch me play. In his mind and from his worldview his role was to provide for us as a family, Saturdays were a work day and there was very little that would draw him away from it. I do not think poorly of him for this; in fact it was a basis of my love for him. I didn’t compare him to other parents nor did I envy other children’s parents. He was my father, he was who he was, and I loved him dearly.

Over the years I’ve spoken to many parents who have felt guilty at not being able to do enough for their children especially those who are single parents. Their guilt was in feeling that they were denying opportunities and potentially not developing the innate skills of their children. If there is wisdom in this it is in the fact that children love their parents no matter what. It is not a competition of who is the best parent, it is the depth of the relationship and the love that is demonstrated. My father demonstrated it in his work, in his love of family and his strong expectation that we would make the most of our opportunities in Australia. His life would have been made easier if one of us had followed in his footsteps in the carpentry business, but he made no move towards this; rather he encouraged us to study and our social, academic and financial mobility where his rewards.

I reflect on this when I feel I haven’t done enough my own children, or missed another school activity, or parent teacher night. I have not been one of those parents who book the first or second row at every concert in fact I am lucky to get tickets for the back row.

How will they judge me? I hope it is through the passion I have shown in the things I’ve done, the love I have demonstrated to their mother, and my own commitment to family and to them, not to be there all the time but to be there when they need support most.

In delivering my father’s eulogy I related a story about an incident late in his life in which I went to see my parents in a state of distress brought on by financial issues around the completion of the home we were building. His response was poignant. Firstly he stated their strong belief in me and that I would overcome any adversity; secondly and perhaps more profoundly he said “at your age now is the age I came to Australia with you and had to start a new. Think of what we have achieved since then and think about what you still have to achieve in your life”. The comparison was stark and gave me a perspective I was blinded to. He was there when I needed his support most.

So I will continue to stay up on a Friday or Saturday night, set my alarm to make sure that I don’t fall asleep, and do the pickup. On what is often a quiet and wordless trip home, understanding that we are both tired, the reward is the simple spoken ‘thank you for picking me up’ on entering the garage.