A DAD'S LIFE:We need to stay in good shape for our children too
WE ARE a lucky family. For all my griping, we have not had to face any real health nightmares. This far, he says, clutching his wooden desk with arms and legs. Our exposure to illness has been limited, even in friends and family, but in only the past few months we have heard of three families with young children in the vicinity who have lost a parent to cancer.
Cancer. Scary word. And not a word I gave any real consideration to until the kids came along; it never impacted on my life. It was the preserve of old people, something to be considered 50 years down the track when the accounts for youthful behaviour would have to be settled.
All through school we were hounded not to smoke, usually by teachers stinking of stale tobacco, straight from a quick ciggie themselves in the staffroom, lurching around the back of the bike sheds to confiscate 10 Major and save themselves a few bob that evening.
Occasionally in biology class, graphic visuals of throat and lung cancer would be thrown up on the projector, again with dire warnings that this awaited us if we should choose to suck the cancer stick. The slides fumbled into place by the nicotine-stained fingers of the science teacher. We would gather at the next break and discuss what we’d seen, cadging drags and pulls off each other if we were so skint that week that buying 10 Blue was beyond us. Quitting didn’t enter our heads.
Add to that the fact that we went home to dinners of deep-fried chips, sausages, frozen pancakes, whatever you could drag from the freezer and dunk in a bucket of boiling fat. You’d need something strong to loosen the grease from the roof of your mouth afterwards. John Player Black anyone?
We knew the ciggies were bad news but figured we’d quit when we were old, like 21, or as a friend once said, “When a pack of 20 reaches two quid. You’d have to be mad to pay that for smokes.” We knew very little about the potential harm food could do and ate rubbish with the vigour of the first generation to have truly discovered cheap convenience grub.
Fortunately, as some sort of counteraction to our dire smoking and eating habits, we were kicked out onto playing fields at least three times a week. It’s seems farcical now to think the first fags were lit in the showers afterwards as if our need was so great we couldn’t hold off until we were dressed.
At some point between school and the arrival of children, when exercise had fallen by the wayside and a high percentage of meals contained only carbohydrates, fat and salt, the realisation that this ill-treatment of the body could have far reaching consequences began to seep in. But again, there was always the future, when things would be put right. We’d give up the smokes before we were old, definitely by the time we were 30, nothing to worry about yet. As for diet, most of our dads were off the salt for the heart at this stage, that was really all you had to watch. Wasn’t it?
Then the kids arrive and everything changes. You’re no longer the youngest generation, you’ve slipped into the middle, and with the realisation that births happen comes the reality that death occurs too. In many cases, the scramble to claw back the cost of the liberties you took with your body in previous years begins here. The simple fact that you are not the only person dependent on your good health anymore shifts the world on its axis.
Exposure to young children also brings home how crucial good health is. Small babies get sick easily. Watching your child suffer is a terrible thing and every parent carries the worry that they will be unable to help as their child struggles before them. Our health and their health assume paramount status. We live as close to the good life as we can in bodies accustomed to the not-so-good life and hope the nippers will follow our lead.
They won’t. They’ll act as if they’re following our leads from the times we believed a coffee and a Marlboro was a nutritious breakfast. They will believe in their own immortality until some tragedy befalls them and they understand their link to the earth is tenuous. But you can’t live with a fear of getting sick, nor can you prepare for that inevitability. You can only eat your porridge, breathe nothing but fresh air, run outdoors as often as possible and hope your kids have more sense than you did.