Instead of a bipolar skivvy who shouted at them, my children now see me as a fearless Byronic exile

Leafing through a copy of one of my parents’ magazines, I notice and read a piece by Toby Young bemoaning the lot of the modern father, whom he describes as an unpaid slave to his children rather than anything approaching a meaningful authority figure. Yesterday, I read Tim Dowling’s column in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine in which, as is his wont, he describes his own tribulations as a father and husband. For his birthday, his wife has given him a salad spinner.

“Amateurs,” I think to myself. This is not to disparage the quality of their work – Dowling is particularly talented at describing a miserable marriage, and raises the bar very high indeed for car-crash confessional journalism – but to cast aspersions on what they are doing with their lives. May I respectfully suggest that they get divorced? Drastic, yes, but it would put an end to all the problems they write about. True, it would create a whole new set of exciting and often intractable problems, but men like a challenge, on the whole, and it doesn’t get much more challenging, outside of the armed forces or the emergency services, than being thrown out of the family home.

My thoughts drift this way as I approach the second anniversary of my own ejection from the nest. I know exactly when this is because it is the day after my friend T–’s birthday, which in 2007 had turned into an impromptu bourbon-tasting session with his friends J– and D–, both Americans, and therefore very knowledgeable about bourbon indeed. I will draw a veil over what happened next, but suffice it to say that my wife’s demand next morning that I find myself somewhere else to live tout de suite did not exactly come as a bolt from the blue. I recalled the myth which says that all a Muslim man has to do to divorce his wife is say “I divorce thee” three times; and it occurred to me that this was exactly three times as hard as it is for a western woman in Shepherd’s Bush to kick her own husband out.

Since then, there has hardly been a dull moment. There have been long periods of deep misery, but substantial compensations, too. Let us apply them to the two journalists named above. In the case of Mr Young, he will find his position as a male authority figure significantly enhanced. Since my own expulsion I have found relations with my children improved beyond measure. Instead of the bipolar skivvy who kept shouting at them to stop bothering him, they now see a fearless Byronic exile, genuinely delighted in their company for every second he has it. The delight is mutual; and there is no one around to undermine such charisma as I possess by drawing attention, in tones of high contempt, to my habit of, variously, twiddling my fork when I speak at the dinner table/letting my trousers get hitched up over the back of my Chelsea boots/being too short. (I particularly resented this last one. It is not as if I had been dissembling about my height for the previous 19 years.) True, these trivia were aired as a means of not bringing up rather more serious derelictions, but being told I was a twerp in front of the children 40 times a day did not, I think, enhance their respect for me.

That’s all changed. As for Mr Dowling, it all rather depends on whether he is actually telling his readers the truth when he writes about his own family life. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that he is. For those not familiar with his work, he regularly describes a domestic regime which combines ritualised psychological warfare with the deprivations of the gulag.

His wife, let us not put too fine a point on this, does not come out of his bulletins very well. A salad spinner, indeed. Even my own soon-to-be-ex-wife, at the very nadir of our relationship, ie, the two years when we were barely able to sit in the same room as each other, always came through with the goods on my birthday – rather better than I did on hers, if truth be told. I suspect that Dowling’s column, if we are not to impugn its veracity, is in fact part of an ongoing campaign to be given his own marching orders – it is easier to play the wronged party if it happens that way round, as opposed to stomping off oneself.

It will, of course, be hard at first – so hard, in fact, as to not seem worth the bother. The first six to eight months will be spent more or less entirely in tears, or, if they are going to be stiff-upper-lipped about it, on the verge of them. Any artistic representation of domestic unity – eg, Family Guy – will be unendurable. The only music they will be able to listen to will either pre-date or post-date their relationships. They will be broke. But in the end – consider the freedom, the recovery of self-esteem. I’m amazed people don’t do it more often.

Nicholas Lezard

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