BABY SPIDERS EAT THEIR PARENT

It wasn’t until I experienced my own mid-life crisis (the truth is, I’m still pretending it comes with a satisfactory outcome) that I found myself seeing a great deal of my father in me. He experienced his own period of wandering lost and wondering how the hell all his ambition resulted in a feeling of disassociation. I have a theory that a state of anxiety or depression sets in once the final addition to the family is born, and that child progresses to walking and talking back.

My virile prime directive to recreate the wonder of me has run its course. My usefulness on this planet no longer extends much beyond ensuring that my two children become successful, functioning adults with, one hopes, an independent, non-judgmental mind that practices tolerance. What I achieved or did not achieve in my youth now pails in comparison to that duty. The ‘I’ at the heart of me has been made redundant. The actor once defined by the unending hunt for a new character can’t even find himself. Serving the sense of purpose one had before parenthood is replaced with a need to soothe a continuous state of exhaustion with rest and relaxation. An identity crisis was surely inevitable.

I’m reminded of an episode of TRAVEL MAN, in which the hosts travelled to the Benelux countries and encountered catacombs filled with female spiders that laid eggs on their own bodies, and whose hatched offspring devoured their mother for their first meal. I adore my children. I would do anything for them. They are the greatest thing I have ever done with my life and my greatest addiction. I have seen how many (not all, of course) of those who choose not to procreate fill their lives with daily affirmations about the universe providing all they could need and desire. No thank you. The universe and I are barely on speaking terms most days, but my kids still would prefer to be no other place than in my wife’s and my bed planting a sharp knee in my lower back. That is painful, yes, but tangible. The philosophical realms are made up of emptiness and death, which no gold foil-wrapped probe or space-based telescope has yet to prove me wrong on.

All this has made me appreciate my father, whom I now for the first time in my life, view as somewhat of a kindred spirit. I have even taken to repeating his words of wisdom to my own loud, savage children. During one particular bout of screaming and whinging that cut through to the deepest of bones in my body, I yelled out, ‘If you don’t shut it, I will sell you both to gypsies.’ Thank goodness my wife leapt in and righted the ship with, ‘What your father means is that if you don’t mend your ways, he won’t hesitate to make you take an after-school job with a nice Romani lady who pays a living wage.’

So how does a middle-aged man find himself again?

I have always found a change of environment to be a catalyst for rejuvenation. It’s a reboot for the brain and spirit. After ten years in Los Angeles, I moved the family to Canada for three months, where I learned I still had the ability to land work in my chosen profession. Sometimes you just need to go where you are the fresh face in the room. The pandemic has prohibited more such meaningful voyages of discovery. (At least with me it has.) And the uncertainty about the future we have all lived with these past two years has had the alien effect of making me cautious… and even fearful of… change. Yet without new challenges, there is no way to grow and realise new potential.

Doing something just for yourself is rarely compatible with the full-time plus overtime job of parenthood. Finding a passion you can share with your children is a way around this conundrum. One day, after several years in hiding, I pulled my Ovation guitar out of its case and found my daughter eager to learn chords. A friend of mine takes his tween daughter golfing every Saturday morning.

Then there is talking. Once I opened up to friends my own age, I came to realise I wasn’t the only person in the world who felt weary. Such discussions were a bridge to professional help with tackling my anxieties.

Finally… there is London. ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,’ Samuel Johnson tells us. Move the family to London. That’s what I’m planning to do. Contemplating reinvention in the bottom of a pint glass at The Case Is Altered pub in Middlesex always did the trick in the past.