AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human. Robert Smith Rowland
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arrival signals our departure, no matter how drawn out. Obviously, people without children are mortal too. It’s just that, with an extra generational layer beneath them, parents may find their mortality more clearly framed. The clock doesn’t tick any faster for parents than for non-parents, but perhaps it ticks louder.
In my case, there was a twist. Let us run with the hypothesis that, by becoming a father, I was replacing my own father. In doing so, I was also giving life to my own future replacement, in other words the baby. I made myself both vital and redundant at a stroke. Hardly the action of a genius. Really, all I needed to do was to love my father for who he was, rather than wishing he were someone else. Trying to change their parents is one of the most futile pastimes in which children can indulge. If only I had learned that lesson earlier. I might have spared myself those psychological contortions.
But had I done so, there might never have been any Anna, the daughter who began life in the womb as Sweet Pea. Not to mention my second daughter, Ruby, and my third daughter, Greta. They arrived in 1991 and 2006 respectively, as if fulfilling a prophecy.
The dream revealed nothing, however, about that fifteen-year gap, nor the fact that the daughters would have different mothers. In this respect, the dream was a riddle, not unlike the witches’ prophecy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.fn4 In Act One, the witches tell Macbeth that he will never be killed by a man ‘of woman born’. From this information, Macbeth quite reasonably infers that he is invulnerable to murder. In Act Five, Macbeth is stabbed by Macduff. It turns out that as a baby Macduff was delivered by Caesarian section. He was never ‘born’ in the technical sense. The prophecy was playing with Macbeth’s assumptions, just as my dream had tricked me into assuming that all three daughters would share the same mother.
The importance of doing nothing
Trying to stand in for my father spoke to an urge on my part that was immature. Or premature, rather. Because I couldn’t bear to spectate on his life, I was trying to hasten his death. Doing so would turn me prematurely into a father in my own right. As a precocious essay at adulthood, that fitted with acts of far lesser import, such as the calling of my parents by their first names, which was supposed to prove how grown-up I was. It fitted with starting to shave before I really needed to, as I had done at fifteen. It fitted with lying about my age to my first girlfriend, Emma. I told her I was doing my A levels like an eighteen-year-old, when at sixteen I was only doing my Os. In all cases, I was jumping the gun. Maybe it was a response to having an older sister, showing that I wasn’t lagging behind. Whatever the cause, the natural – and unhurried – process of maturation caused me stress. I was forever trying to catalyse it.
Knowing when to act is at least as important as knowing what to do. Ripeness is all. And sometimes the best course is to do nothing. Broadly speaking, that is the Taoist approach. It’s not about inertia, however. The advantage of minimising our own activity is that it maximises the effect of powers larger than we are. We get out of our own way. That allows us to be carried instead by a knowing tide. We recognise that there are wider forces ready to disport themselves, forces such as that species imperative. If being human means standing in the flow of life, then perhaps we should allow that flow to happen, and accept that life is stronger than any of us. Let us stop trying too hard.
Because we in the West live in a culture that believes in making rather than letting things happen, that approach might be unpalatable.fn5 We favour action, looking down on inaction with disdain. Yet it was exactly at the point where I was no longer calling the shots that I was rewarded with a daughter.
When I decided to drop out of Oxford, I believed I was taking my life into my own hands. I was exhibiting, even flaunting, my agency. As I’ve said, there was a powerful enough default option, in the form of carrying on with my degree. Interrupting that momentum took effort. But as the thunderbolt of Simone’s pregnancy proves, I could direct events only so much. My interruption was interrupted. The result, however, was a daughter whom I love. That raises the question of what other powers were at large, powers operating a level deeper even than the species. Might there be a fifth layer to our triangle, a wider base?
That I was prematurely made a father might have been chance. Except that ‘chance’ is such a non-answer. Given that Anna’s appearance in the world was so positive, was there a benign will that made it happen? In pop terms, was this ‘the universe’ doing me a favour? The practical benefit of Simone’s pregnancy was that it made me realise I should go back to Oxford and finish my degree. It forced me to sober up. If I was to be a father, I should give us as a family the best foundation. An Oxford degree, which luckily enough I was two-thirds of the way to completing, was exactly that. At the very least, I would be pulled out of the hole I had dug. Whether it was chance or the machinations of a spirit, some goodness was abroad, some benefit being dispensed like overnight dew.
Again, it’s hard to know. Powers such as chance or ‘the universe’ are inscrutable. That is partly what it means to be human. We never know for sure the balance of our own agency versus all the other forces operating upon us. The lesson that I draw from Simone falling pregnant is that sometimes it is better to take one’s own hands off the steering wheel. Trust that you’ll be delivered safely to the right destination, even though that destination might not be the one that you punched into the SatNav.
A pint of Guinness
Put another way, knowing can be the enemy of being. Although it is human to want to know, the fact that our knowledge has limits is what keeps us open to experiences we can’t fully understand. That is possibly the moral of the Garden of Eden. In warning Adam and Eve against eating from the tree, God is imparting general advice to us all: keep your knowledge in check, so that you can enjoy the benefit of forces beyond your ken, forces working for your good. Yes, that sounds paternalistic; but then we are talking about God.
The experience of Anna’s birth was one I will never fully know or understand, no matter how many the hindsight miles by which I overtake it. Too many thoughts, feelings and prior events had converged at that point for me to make sense of them. But that is exactly what allowed it to make such an impression. My reasoning couldn’t block out the experience. Some fragments: the grey light filtering in from the courtyard; Simone squeezing my hand to the point of crushing it; the crowning of the baby’s head as slick as an otter’s; the rapidity with which the body slithered out once the shoulders were through; the whole scrunched-up baby held aloft by the midwife, with the umbilicus attached, as though she were lifting an oversized telephone with its cable; the placing of this rubbery alien on Simone’s breast.
Later that day, my oldest friend from school, Charlie, came to visit. He was at the same stage as me, about to start his third year at university. He insisted that we wet the baby’s head. We went for a swift pint of Guinness at a nearby pub. It was there that he told me his girlfriend had fallen pregnant by accident, and that they were going to keep it.
Now the family is rejoined. In a
gold circlet they weep of old fears.
It is warm here, the sycamore
pales at last. His to keep. Amass.
J. H. Prynne
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.
Thomas Merton
Michaelmas Term 1987 began two weeks after Anna was born. By now, the three of us were ensconced in a breezeblock-lined, one-bedroom flat, in a university accommodation complex several leagues north of central Oxford, far up the Banbury Road. This was the very flat where, a fortnight previously, I had received