remind us that, geologically, Iceland is a young country: like our sons it is still being formed, as the mid-Atlantic ridge that splits the island right down the middle slowly pushes the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates away from each other.
We tell Hanna Gunnarsdóttir and Solveig Gudrunsdóttir and Sigrun Eiðsdóttir that we know how it must feel to be the western half of the country, helplessly watching the east speed towards the horizon at a rate of three centimetres a year. If only our sons were drifting away from us that slowly, we joke.
But they’ve already stopped listening.
We’re teaching our sons about sport.
We’re teaching them how to ride a bike, how to kick a ball, how to run at and go round and pick up and jump over stuff. We’re giving them suggestions on how to choose a team to support.
Ideally we’d have outsourced a lot of this. It’s not an area we have much expertise in. We don’t tell our sons that.
‘Throw the ball!’ we shout at our sons, trying to get into the spirit of things. ‘Catch it! Pass it! Hit it with the racquet/bat/stick!’
Our sons stand in the middle of the sports field, looking at their hands like they don’t know what they’re for. Our beautiful, brilliant sons.
Our sons getting hit in the face. Our sons getting upended into the mud. Our sons getting trampled on. Our sons crashing their bikes into walls. Our sons falling off their skateboards. Our sons falling off trampolines and vaulting horses. Our sons missing catches, in slow motion. Our sons unable to climb ropes. Our sons with water up their noses, gasping for breath. Our sons slicing golf balls and swinging wildly at pitches and hooking penalties wide. Our sons tripping over their own feet. Our sons, gamely, getting back up again and again.
Our brave and magnificent sons.
We can’t take it any more. We sprint onto the field, knocking small children flying in all directions, and scoop our beautiful sons up in our arms. Wipe the mud out of their eyes, the snot from their bashed-up noses.
And then, carrying our glorious, broken sons, we run.
We’re teaching our sons about emotional literacy.
We’re teaching them about the importance of understanding and sharing their feelings, of not being stoic and trying to keep things bottled up.
Because we are aware of the concept of toxic masculinity, we’re trying to make sure our sons grow into confident, well-balanced and emotionally open young men.
We’ve come to the park to ride on the miniature steam railway. The miniature steam railway is operated by a group of local enthusiasts who hate having to let children ride on their trains. The enthusiasts are all men.
‘How are you feeling?’ we shout to our sons, repeatedly, as we clatter around the track on the back of 1/8th scale trains. ‘What’s really going on with you? You can tell us. We’re listening.’
Our sons pretend they haven’t heard, try to ignore us. We don’t blame them. We can’t imagine talking about our feelings with other men either. The idea is horrifying. That’s why we all have hobbies.
We explain to our sons about our hobbies. About constructing and collecting and quantifying things, about putting stuff in order. Classic albums. Sightings of migratory birds. Handmade Italian bicycles. Like our fathers and their fathers and their fathers before them.
All those unknowable, infinitely quantifiable fathers.
Two of the steam enthusiasts are arguing with a customer who keeps letting his children stand up while the train is moving. Nobody wants to give ground. Eventually the customer leaves the park with his kids. He’s coming back, though, he tells us all. He’s going to sort this out.
We imagine the stand-off between the gang of ageing steam enthusiasts and the angry posse that the dissatisfied customer has, we assume, gone to recruit. The fist-fights on top of the moving trains. The driver slumping over the accelerator, the train barely speeding up, the terrifyingly slow-motion derailment, the ridiculously minor injuries. The clean-up costs and the story in the local newspaper.
‘Can we go home and play video games now?’ our sons ask.
We wonder, just for a second, how long it would take us to die if we threw ourselves in front of one of the trains. How many times we would need to be run over. How long we’d have to lie on the track. We imagine the confusion as the trains hit us again and again every few minutes, the slow realisation of what was happening, the spreading feeling of horror among the other passengers, the eventual screams.
We don’t know whether we’d have the force of will, not to mention the patience, to wait it out.
We’re teaching our sons about sex.
We’d rather not have to teach our sons about sex this soon, all things being equal. Our sons would probably rather not have to learn about sex from us right now. Possibly everyone would be a lot happier if the subject had never come up.
But we have a responsibility, we tell them, as we follow the tracks together through the fresh morning snow. If they don’t learn it from us, they’re going to learn it from their school friends and all the pornography.
The pornography is everywhere, waiting to ambush our sons. Possibly it’s already ambushed some of them. We don’t know how we’re supposed to respond to all the pornography. Obviously, we have fairly rudimentary responses to some of it. We’re not saints.
But the sheer quantity, the scale, makes us feel dizzy.
And old.
‘Well,’ say the dads among us who actually perform in pornographic films, ‘yes, but …’
‘Sorry,’ we say, ‘we didn’t mean to –’
‘No, no,’ they say, looking hurt, ‘don’t mind us trying to earn a living, trying to provide for our sons. It’s fine.’
Obviously, it isn’t fine. But, come on, nobody forced them into the business.
The divorced and separated and widowed dads among us, of course, have their own take on things. They’re back on the market, whether they want to be or not, after years out of circulation. They all have thousand-yard stares, like men who have been under shellfire.
‘It’s all different now,’ they tell us.
We stop by a silver birch tree, its branches heavy with a month’s worth of snowfall.
‘Different how?’
‘Everyone
