How to leave home
21st February 2009


It is 10.30 on Friday night and I find myself in a tight place. I am attempting to carry a large office desk down a flight of uncertain concrete steps between two of the least desirable student flats in Dunedin.

I negotiated the waist-high grass in the front yard, sidestepped the hedgehog (sleeping? terrified? dead?) but now find myself wedged between the concrete foundations of the building on my left and a rusting toilet wastepipe fixed loosely to the building on my right.

Small yelps of distress – not from the hedgehog – fill the dark Dunedin night. The desk slips sideways a little, the wastepipe creaks. “This is a helluva way to leave home,” I strain to Marjan.

When I embarked on the journey of fatherhood twenty odd years ago, I had no plan. Moving directly into survival mode I basically took it in 15 minute blocks and have tended to work that way ever since. The wisdom of this approach was borne out time and again as I observed better organised parents anticipate their children’s needs and fail.

Fifteen-minute-fatherhood is, by nature, a journey of surprises. One learns to expect the unexpected, to roll with the punches. Most fathers finding themselves in my position, caught between a rock and a wastepipe on a Friday night, would make a fuss. Actually, most fathers reading this will tell you they wouldn’t be so stupid as to get themselves into this position. They lie.

Did I make a fuss? I can honestly assert (because the other witnesses have no opportunity to reply) that not only did I not make a fuss, but I used the moment to reflect on the phenomenon of leaving home.

How did you leave home? I mean, how did you leave your parents home, the home of your childhood and youth? – assuming you have. Whatever your experience I bet it wasn’t as straightforward as you anticipated.

In my keen observation the modern world has made leaving home desperately complicated. Think about it. Traditionally, young people departed their parents’ home on their wedding day to set up their own home in which, if things went to plan, they would dwell in peace and fidelity for the remainder of their lives.

Young men had a couple of alternatives: they could run away to sea or be apprenticed to a bootmaker uncle in distant Dorpsville. Young women had to sit tight and wait for their father’s permission.

Then society invented tertiary education and condemned its youth to years of enforced poverty, of straining against the umbilical cord but not daring to break it for fear of cutting off essential support. A former boss had a terrific expression for this – ‘sucking on the back teat.’

My parents, with six children, discovered this the hard way. Us kids were always leaving home. One after another we moved out with fanfare, only to return when the university holidays rolled around or a relationship went belly up or a job moved off-shore. Even when we eventually set up our own homes we still retained a pied-a-terre at mum and dad’s: a few boxes of books in the spare bedroom, a rack of clothes in the sleepout.

My own kids are equally ambitious. So when Marjan, at 19, decides to go flatting in Dunedin I’m all for it. When she suggests we hire a trailer to move her stuff I’m right there. When the trailer needs to be a large one because she’s taking ALL her stuff, including the mattress off my bed, I apply maximum fifteen-minute-fatherhood and go with it.

But when I’m stuck down a flight of steps on a dark Dunedin night I know that leaving home is not as easy as Marjan thinks. And I know I will be here again, straining against the wastepipe. Marjan, and her desk, will return.