Harry Paterson

It’s heartbreaking being a parent and yesterday was one of the worst days in my life.
You devote countless hours of love, devotion and guidance to your kids. You offer care, support and moral sustenance, all the time praying that you can keep them on the straight and narrow, all the time hoping, with everything you’ve got that somehow, someway, they’ll find their way out of the dangerous and lonely no- man’s land of adolescence, arriving at adulthood as decent, compassionate, rounded and balanced human beings.

Almost paralysed with fear you watch them grow up, day by painful day, praying to a God in who most don’t believe that they’ll stay alive, away from bad company and out of jail. You instil your values while all the time trying not to stifle their individuality. You’re patronised, dismissed, ignored and rejected time after time after time. The frustration of watching them arrogantly marching to certain disaster, all the time contemptuously dismissing your heartfelt pleas, is agony.

I recall a strange mix of disgust and smugness as other kids went bad: “I blame the parents” huffed I, pompously. “My kids have been bought up correctly. They’ll not shame me”. I was the expert, you see. I knew it all and it was so simple: discipline, love, discipline, patience, more discipline and how could one fail? After all, it’s all about wills. Whose is the strongest? Whose will would prevail? When the stakes are as high as this there is no room for wimps, faint-hearts and moral cowards. A human life is what we’re talking about, for Gods sake, and there can be no greater challenge, no greater responsibility than bringing up a child. Anything else we might ever accomplish in this life is as nothing when set against that task.

Oh how pride goes before a fall. I thought I was so strong and yet the sheer, wilful, badness of my thirteen year old son, Satanicus Maximus, has sapped my will to live and shaken my very faith in human nature. As the news, almost daily, it seems, screams another horror story involving prepubescent children I have been bought to the very brink of despair. What is the world coming to? How did it end up this way? How can mere children be so cold?  How can they have such little regard for decent humane values and ideals? How could my own flesh and blood so resolutely go against everything I believe and turn his back on all he has been taught? The traditional, Scottish, working class values that so shaped and defined me just leave him untouched.

Over one issue, we’ve fought and fought and he has remained immovable. Despite the inherent wrongness of his course of action I have been unable to move him even a fraction of an inch. In the end, with tears in my eyes, I was forced to accept that, in some areas, a parent has no control. I just have to sit back and hope against hope that he will turn out ok in the end. And so, with heavy heart, tears in my eyes and a deep, deep, burning shame, I gave in and took him to JJB Sports and allowed him to buy…an England shirt.