For Poorer

by Tim Dowling

As the twentieth century draws to a close, I find myself the father of three boys under five.

The youngest is born under circumstances that seem positively routine compared with our first outing. When I return to hospital six hours after the birth, my wife is dressed and ready to go, the baby packed up like hand luggage.

Initially, at least, there are few additional costs associated with the new baby. We already have all the stuff. There can be no paternity leave for the stay‐at‐home dad, because I have nowhere not to go to. Instead I just slack off for a few weeks, dodging phone calls, filing late copy, and writing with severely impaired concentration. Few of the publications I write for notice the difference. It is clearly possible to carry on working under these conditions indefinitely, so I do.

I have a small office in the attic, but I often have to come down and work wherever in the house I’m needed to provide minimal parental cover. My biggest skill as a stay‐at‐home dad is not child‐rearing; it’s being able to type while everyone around me is screaming. I’m hardly the primary carer (we have an au pair called Kate, so technically I’m the tertiary carer or, if you like, the parent of last resort), but I am such a domestic fixture that my oldest son actively disapproves of my going anywhere, as if it were a liberty fathers simply didn’t take. He spends a fair amount of time away from home himself — at nursery, or swimming — but when he gets back he likes having me available for a lengthy chat about How Chickens Get Dead.

In spite of my stay‐at‐home status, I am occasionally required to leave the house. At the end of a rare three‐day stint commuting to someone else’s office, I come home to find the oldest one looking very disappointed indeed. He says he never wants me to go to work again, and I promise I won’t. A few months later, when I tell him I have to go away for two days on an assignment (to Scotland, if I recall, to visit the set of a TV program), he starts rolling around on his bed, his little fists clenched in fury.

“Why can’t you just write about this family?” he hisses.

There’s a lesson there: be careful what you wish for, children.

As a child I had once calculated the age I would be on January 1, 2000: thirty‐six and a half. An immense sense of disappointment instantly swept through me as I realized I would be too old, decrepit, and joyless to appreciate the significance of such a huge event. My life would basically be over by then. Would I even notice the millennium?

The year 2000 is also the year the money runs out.

My career strategy until this point had relied entirely on the regular promotion of commissioning editors who like me. Several have moved from magazines into newspapers, then from one newspaper to another. The year before I’d started to write for the deeply understaffed Independent on Sunday, where I’ve since been made to feel indispensable. I write profiles and TV reviews and magazine features. I regularly get rung up to fill in for AWOL columnists at short notice, and I have two regular slots of my own. I barely have time to write for anyone else, which means I don’t have to do the one part of my job I’m really bad at: casting around for more work. I wake up, change a nappy, drink a coffee, and spend the rest of my day with my nose pressed to the computer screen, making money.

Then there’s a surprise change of editor, and I’m history, just like that. It’s not a sacking, because I’m not on staff. I don’t even have a contract. All I had was a lot of eggs in a single basket, and now I don’t have that anymore. It’s the sort of setback that all freelance writers face on occasion, but this is the first time it’s happened to me. From one tax year to the next, my earnings halve.

At this point, my wife is not working at all. Our youngest child is still not a year old. For some years we have been living our lives at the very edge of our overdraft facility, and the sudden absence of a regular income tips us into dangerous territory immediately. For a while our marriage, which has stayed buoyant through repeated bouts of birth and death, looks as if it might founder over money.

Fighting about money is the worst kind of fighting. Money is freighted with associations — notions of power, control, success, status, dependence — so that when you fight about money, you’re always fighting about something else as well. For this reason arguments over money are particularly unpleasant. They also last longer, and they’re the most difficult to resolve: at the end of the fight, you still don’t have any money. Studies have shown that financial disagreements between couples are a huge predictor of divorce, bigger than disagreements about chores or sex.

Before we ran out of it, I hadn’t realized how rarely my wife and I disagreed about money. We never fought about spending or earning. We weren’t extravagant. Money came, money went. Our financial affairs were managed calmly, if haphazardly. That was fine; neither of us aspired to be in charge. We lived, as many people do, a short distance beyond our means. But the mortgage was covered every month, and it seemed we’d learned to manage the perpetual juggling act. If we were pilfering small sums from the future, that was the future’s problem.

However, in the time since I’d accidentally assumed the role of primary breadwinner, much has changed. Our division of labor has become, shall we say, a bit gendered. Because I can plausibly claim to be too busy earning, I’m excused a certain amount of parenting and general household bother. I never have to sit in a room with eighteen toddlers dinging a triangle and mouthing the words to “Nellie the Elephant.” In my bid to prioritize work, I have begun to ignore the cat sick on the stairs.

By the time the money stops coming in I’ve begun keeping regular office hours, staying put at my desk, busy or not, until at least five p.m., so that I can arrive downstairs when my children are having supper, in a rough approximation of my own father’s nightly return, when he would come in from the car and place his cold hands on the backs of our necks and we would squeal with delight.

“Get off, Daddy,” says the middle one. I remove my warm, clammy hand from his collar.

“Look who it is,” says my wife. “Your absentee father.” She hands me a bowl of mush to post into the baby.

“How was school?” I say to the oldest one.

“Not fine,” he says.

There are bills left out for me to see, bills with red stripes across the top. I know we don’t have the funds to pay them, and I’m not exactly making a killing by pretending to be busy. I’m not fooling anyone, not even myself.

For two months I make the terrible mistake of waiting to see what happens. Nothing happens. Work does not magically come my way; my sudden disappearance from the world of freelance journalism has not caused a ripple. No one is saying, “Hey, whatever happened to that guy who used to write that thing sometimes?”

Discussions about what to do next are tinged with rancor.

“This is not about whose fault it is,” says my wife, which to me sounds a lot like: this is your fault. My self‐esteem plummets. I’m surprised how bound up my earning power and my self‐worth have become; it’s only been a few years since they’d been — out of necessity — completely decoupled. Now I’m starting to wonder how we ended up in the precarious position of relying on an idiot like me for financial support. Can I get away with blaming my wife for that?

My efforts to reestablish contact with former editors are answered by e‐mails with vague promises in them. Nothing, I can see, is going to go right soon, certainly not soon enough to get us out of our growing financial hole. I begin to wonder if I can get my old day job back, which might well mean the end of freelance writing, which might well be for the best.

Fortunately my wife, who is weird about many things, is not remotely weird about money. One of her greatest assets is her ability to separate financial issues from emotional ones, and to deal with the former with a certain brisk disdain. After several psychologically traumatic (for me) arguments about money, my wife decides that my complete failure as the primary breadwinner is, as far as she’s concerned, an issue to be revisited later, at leisure, when I least expect it.

“Stop freaking out about your career,” she says. “It’s a bad patch, that’s all. We just need to get some money from somewhere.”

It is, she insists, a simple matter of a loan. Her readiness to incur more debt is, in an odd way, a tremendous vote of confidence; it demonstrates a willingness to gamble on future success. Unable to share her confidence, I settle for keeping my mouth shut.

So we go to the bank and borrow against our home for what I hope will be the last time (not even the second to last, as it turns out), and then I set about slowly rebuilding my tepid freelance career from scratch. In the meantime, I find myself available for a shitload of parenting.

Tim Dowling is an American journalist who writes the weekend column for The Guardian. He lives with his wife and three sons in London. This article is adapted from his book “How to Be a Husband,” out this month from Blue Rider Press.

Photo: Vinoth Chandar

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