Learning to count

Last week in a cafe, as I was having lunch with a friend, a couple sat at the table beside us with their baby, whereupon the infant began to stare and stare at me, looking away and then looking back over and smiling, and gurgling, and laughing - and I, naturally, being a person of immense dignity, responded by courting the baby's full attention to the max, grinning and making faces and playing peekaboo behind my hands. Babies and children tend to like me, and I like them back: if I'm at a wedding I'll spend a good long time cuddling any attendant babies rather than making conversation with besuited elders; and if your small child should challenge me to a race in the park, of a fine summer's day, you can bet your last penny I'll lead from the front and then stage a pratfall on the final lap. My dad has five younger siblings, most of whom had children as I was growing up, and so throughout the 80s and 90s there was always a succession of tiny cousins to hold and make goo-goo sounds at, or hold a bucket for at the beach while they farted about in a rockpool. 

I can't say the sentence "I always wanted to have children" - even though I have two children, now, whom I love more than anything and who must surely figure amongst the most wanted kids on planet Earth - because for so long it was clear that I would never have any of my own. The notion never really even came into my mind, save as a total impossibility, since I am and have always been queer and single. I know that if I had not had these children, with the co-parents I have (after they sprang the idea upon me at the pub one night in 2011), I would most certainly never have had any. In fact when I was younger, in my early 20s, and was tormented by my sexuality, one of the worst aspects of my quandary, as it seemed to me, was the fact that I would never have children - that I could exist on this planet, make no mark at all, and leave it with nothing to show for my existence; also, that I would never be a father, and know the joy of parenting. Now I recognise that this turmoil was a nonsense: I was working from a deranged set of preconceptions and retrograde assumptions about what it means to be a valid member of society; ideas that were intrinsically homophobic and sexist. Nevertheless this was something that ate at me; and I don't believe the motivations of most straight people for wanting children must be any more sophisticated. 

Next week I am publishing my first picturebook for children, called How To Count To One. I have dedicated it, of course, to my own two delightful offspring, Z & F, who are now 7 and 4 - but I am mindful that it has taken something akin to a miracle for them to exist at all, and be a part of my life. I am more thankful than I can even begin to say for their being here; as I write these words, they are slumbering softly next door, both in curiously noble poses as they sleep, each with a hand on his gently rising-falling, rising-falling chest, looking like The Death of Chatterton crossed with Oliver!. Going in to the bedroom after they have nodded off, to even out a corner of duvet and deposit a kiss on their never less than boiling, boiling hot foreheads, and by chance hear Z mumble some woozy gibberish, or see F stretch and shift his arse skywards in his sleep like an early Disney cartoon, is the loveliest pleasure in my life. They were never supposed to be here! What are the chances??

The book I have written draws a fair bit on my parenting style, being in essence a cruel act of trolling towards kids from the first page to the last. My children like nothing more than being right, and my being wrong, and seizing upon my mistakes, and lording it over me. In return, I often enact a kind of playful tyranny, acting ever more outraged and issuing orders in a mockery of "laying down the law", which the kids are not intimidated by at all and seem to derive great joy from disobeying. I also think that our family unit - or units, rather, since the kids are parented most of the time by their two fabulous mothers - must subvert standard parenting in a multitude of sometimes indiscernible ways, such as in our performance of gender roles. For instance: my children abruptly stopped calling me daddy about two years ago and began calling me Caspar, and have never once slipped up in that time or ever reverted to the earlier appellation - nowadays I'm infinitely more likely to get called "mum" by accident than "dad". Often one of the children will say, "Mum...", not even realising he has said it - and these days I just reply, "Yes love?" Calling me by my name (although it's not completely unheard of in children of straight parents) indicates to me that the kids see me as something other than a father, and wish to recognise that difference of relationship - indeed, I can see a strong argument that I am not a father, since I don't really perform a great deal of the functions of fatherhood as we commonly understand it. I'm chill with being a more loosely circumscribed carer-provider grown-up friend-companion guy; it's beautiful, in its own way, that my kids have quite literally rejected a certain aspect of patriarchy. 

All of this to say that the book takes inspiration - to the extent that a silly book for kids can - from this relationship; it's playfully tyrranical, nonsensical, and subverts the dreary idea of learning through fun; I hope that parents find it surprising, and children stimulating. (On that subject: gay writers for children have always gone against the grain, giving a sense of danger in their work, a piquancy, from Edward Lear's arch other-ness to Maurice Sendak's intimidating beasts and Hitler lookalikes; nowadays, the writer Alex T. Smith proposes a camp and saucy world in his Claude books, which I find gently provocative)  So far, the book has pre-sold fairly well, and comments have been positive. But I cannot fail to notice that the book is coming out at a time when homophobia and transphobia are in the news, and when both scourges have been given legitimacy by a media establishment endlessly tilting at the windmill of "wokeism" and "culture wars". Two days ago the gay writer Simon James Green was disinvited from a talk he had been scheduled to give at a Catholic boys' school in Purley, on the grounds that his work fell outside of "what is permissible in a Catholic school." (As an aside, governors may wish to look into the history of things that have been deemed permissible in British Catholic schools throughout the ages) 

This week, the "Don't Say Gay" bill was also passed in Florida, enacting a kind of American version of Section 28. Under the terms of that legislation, among other things, school districts are enjoined to avoid LGBTQ+ topics "when not age-appropriate": this is woolly, and evidently gives any common-or-garden homophobe licence to consider queer rights inappropriate at any age. This is patently a nonsense: and yet we have had the same rancid "debates" here in the UK, such as when the Parkfield Community School in Birmingham became the scene of hateful protests against state-approved LGBTQ+ education in 2019, with several parents removing their children from class. Asked about the protests, the government minister (!) Esther McVey sided with homophobic parents, stating that it was appropriate for parents to prevent their children from receiving LGBTQ+ education "while they're still children", thereby promoting the bullshit fallacy that there can be an appropriate age to learn about the existence of queers. This is hateful, homophobic nonsense: parents who block their kids from these subjects blatantly do not know best. (Quick reminder: children can learn about gay people at the age of zero, at the same age as they learn about cats, how to hold breadsticks, and that water is wet. LGBTQ+ stuff would come as a great deal less of a shock to a group of people who couldn't spell "hat" two years ago than finding out that somebody had been on the moon.)

Yet these toxic views have been given succour in recent years by an army of columnists continually advancing the merest hint of a suggestion (just saying!) that it is inappropriate for queers to be around children, in order to protect their innocence you see.  When the film Cuties was released a little while back and caused a furore for its (extremely delicate and nuanced) depiction of pre-adolescent sexuality, the Sunday Times columnist Janice Turner seized the opportunity to lob a wholly unrelated, histrionic broadside at Stonewall for its work with queer youth. Turner also accused Mermaids, a charity supporting young trans people, of "grooming", on the basis that they had brought in an exit button on their services - a very standard security measure to protect young LGBTQ+ people from being caught by, for instance, homophobic or transphobic families. Grooming is a dangerously vicious accusation to make, and you might expect somebody to face professional consequences for it - but this stuff is now the meat and drink of Sunday papers, week in, week out. Accusations against Stonewall, for its work with trans people, have since reached a fever pitch in the UK, leading to the BBC pulling out of their scheme. Meanwhile, Britain's media fights battles against puberty blockers that give trans and questioning young people the chance to ward off potentially traumatising bodily changes while undergoing trans-related care. 

I am in no doubt that a transphobic segment of Britain's media has helped foster what you might call a "hostile environment" for LGBTQ+ individuals, giving the impression that rights that have existed for years are now somehow a legitimate matter for debate by an imaginary "both sides". This comes, in my view, from a rising fear about queers not stopping at the rights we have been given, and not being cowed anymore. In the years since my children arrived, I have met and spoken with growing numbers of queer people looking to start families: S has started on the ol' turkey baster method with G, and we correspond on Instagram about the icky technicalities; a Twitter acquaintance, R, asked me to meet up to discuss my experience last year; a few months ago another friend, R(2) met with me and his co-parent-to-be in the pub and I went through the ins and outs of timeshare. D, a pal, has a daughter with two friends, and they hang out all together a fair bit, although he doesn't have official father duties. Each group is making it up, conceiving of the role in different terms, trying to seize on what will work best for them. What links all these people is that they have been truly planning their parenthood: these children will be among the most intended kids on the planet. 

No accidental kids for us! Because - and this is what scares the straights - queer people revolutionise the idea of sex, as we have it almost exclusively for pleasure. No procreational intercourse! The idea of fucking because it feels fantastic flies in the face of what so many would still have us believe, that sex is the highest expression of a blessed union bla bla bla to make babies. This is misogyny, because the sexual pleasure of men is always assumed in straight sex: that of women, much less so. Queer sex - lesbian sex in this case - in the idea it gives that sex could exist outside of roles of domination, outside of procreation, is too liberating. This is why the normies don't want us in schools. Because the mere idea of us, to even the dopiest child, revolutionises the idea of gender roles: that freedom would be too risky to let advance much further. What would become of society? 

A few weeks ago, a friend, C, re-shared an Instagram story about the utter, dehumanising exhaustion of being the mother to a newborn/young children. I never had our first child over to stay the night with me, in his first year, as he was breastfeeding, so I missed out on the worst of that deprivation; but I saw that exhaustion in my co-parents and my sister, and in friends. I felt some of it myself once Z began staying over, on weekends when he had vomited three times in one night, and I found myself crying on the phone to my mother as to how to get him washed, covered and back to sleep, and subsequently showering puke off a duvet in the bathtub at three in the morning, and then the next morning staring glaze-eyed at a clock that said 7:12am while the baby wanted to eat and play, knowing that there was a whole day to be got through somehow.  I re-shared the Insta story that C had shared, with a few words about my experiences as a parent, saying that I thought queer families could be a remedy for this kind of situation. For instance, in the kids' early years, the fact that I could take the children away from their mothers for a day, allowing them to sleep or see friends, must surely have helped us all stay a bit more sane. One time when I had Z for the weekend, when he was two, his mums went to Copenhagen! Imagine! A friend replied on Instagram: "If I could hand [her newborn] over to somebody for even two hours I would cry with joy." Dozens of young mothers I know got in touch to express agreement, to support the idea of parenting as a team, removed from the strictures of the couple. 

Some people I know, contemplating parenthood, say to me: "I'd do it if I could have your situation." (I look after the kids one day a week and every third weekend, with summer holidays every year and Christmas every three years) Here is where I let you in on a secret: you could! Society as a whole could, absolutely could, devolve parenting a little: you could have a child with a friend, or with a couple you know, and split the time between you. There is literally nothing to stop you - you are allowed to make it up as you go along. You could be somebody's mother every other week, and then hand him back to another mother and go to the cinema. In lockdown, I felt deeply for my friends who had new babies, because Covid - since it has had a vicious way of reinforcing things we already knew to be true (for instance: medical provision is unequal in the UK; the 5-day working week is unhealthy; Tories are thieves and liars) - showed up the the problems of couples (straight, monogamous, working) as society's principal organising unit. Far from the help of their own parents, these new mums and dads had to struggle on their own, tending by themselves to a tiny, hungry, cold, lovely, energetic, chaotic, itchy baby, often while working from home. It was like a parody of straight capitalist society - and the moral was stark: the model of the straight couple is not able to shoulder all the responsibilities of the modern world, least of all raising another human while working all the time. This is not an original thought, just a truth: that we used to raise children as communities, with grandparents and other figures more actively involved, before all of the big city exodus for work. But the queer co-parenting family offers an example, in an age where rent and energy prices are through the roof, of another way to manage parenting, by devolving some responsibilities, sharing the time out between one another, relinquishing certain gendered roles. 

So. The book comes out next Thursday, and it will be my great joy to go and camply read it in whatever schools will have me, and have my own ridiculous words shouted back at me (the book is organised as a kind of call-and-response battle) by children. The queers are just getting started. I am finishing writing this on an afternoon before one of my weekends with the kids: soon I will head off to pick them up, feed them snacks, shoulder their weekend clobber and listen to their incessant, incessant babble as they talk over one another on the bus homeward, and then we will eat pizza and I'll run a bath, and then they must give me an idea for a second picturebook sharpish or, really, what was the point?