Patrick Carlyon: Say goodbye to fatherhood and embrace freedom
RICHARD Gere is joining celebrities like Mick Jagger in embracing fatherhood in his autumn years. He must be mad, writes Patrick Carlyon.
Patrick Carlyon
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ACTOR Richard Gere may be calling singer Mick Jagger for advice if the reports are true.
Gere, at 68, is said to be fathering a child again and Jagger can tell him what to expect.
When the Rolling Stones’ front man fathered his eighth child at 73, a couple of years after he became a great-grandfather, bandmate Keith Richards announced that Jagger really ought to get the snip.
The news also triggered analysis about how old is too old. When 60-something Jeff Goldblum had his second child last year, his wife posted photos of father and baby son in the bath with the wonderfully idealistic caption: “I can’t believe it’s been a week already.”
Goldblum projected peace and youthfulness in the images. Perhaps there is an upside to not tackling fatherhood until your seventh decade.
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Actor Steve Martin had his first child at 67; in keeping with his oddness, he would not tell the world his daughter’s name.
Old Man Dad is a celebrity contagion. Fellow actor Robert De Niro had a daughter at 68, when his oldest daughter was already 40. The wife of another Rolling Stone, Ronnie Wood, gave birth to twins not long ago. The children celebrated their first birthday when Dad had his 70th. Those men, according to the women’s magazines, are not too old at all. Their wives represent second or third or fourth chances at domestic happiness.
Those men are cosseted by youth as well as wealth. They know that if they cannot or will not change the nappies, someone else will.
For the rest of us a generation or more younger, too old is being 10 minutes late on a wintry weekend morning, ferrying kids from sports venues to “play dates” and running out of fingers as you mentally list all the things you’d rather be doing, then running out of toes as you count the hours until you can have a drink.
Too old is lamenting the grown-up footy matches you cannot watch, and the horse races you forget to bet on, and the text messages you cannot decipher because the a) modern acronyms are meaningless to you and b) the emojis are too darned small.
Too old, or so I’m told, is seeking out ’90s music and harping about the “derivative crappiness” of today’s hip hop. It’s definitely sighing each time you get up from the couch or slump into it.
It’s that reflexive fear response when young people casually allude to technologies you’ve never heard of. Being unable to accept that Year 9 history homework asks students to ponder whether Australia’s colonisation was a settlement or an invasion. And chanting that Danny Glover catchphrase from the Lethal Weapon franchise.
Too old is casting back to hazy and disjointed images that sometimes poke through the defensive amnesia. Here’s one, featuring a huffy nurse, at a baby sleep school, placing your daughter in a blacked-out room, one in a line of blacked out rooms.
They resembled cells, from whence the screams projected an unbearable cacophony of torture. Here’s another, of hovering in a semi-crouch as little feet tottered towards stairs or dog bowls, because of all the times when the darling toddlers had plunged down the stairs or smeared themselves in pet food.
Too old is the absolute knowledge that those days of new fatherhood are happily trapped in yesteryear.
And the understanding that it was never about you at all, despite the self-centred pretensions of your youth. It’s what Gere, a committed Buddhist, once said about putting energy into sacrifice and service and notions of suffering. For being too old to be a father again is being free.
— Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist
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