My son isn’t scared of many things. Sometimes this makes me proud. When he overcame his initial fearfulness around dogs, I felt a swell of admiration for his forbearance, even as he was starting to become one of the most rapacious dog-botherers in Hackney. We are, I’d imagine, just one more interaction away from seeing posters of his chubby little face on every lamppost in Stoke Newington, warning local dog-owners of this cube-headed, tail-pulling menace.
Things get more complicated when he proves himself to be braver than I am, forcing me to reckon with the fears I still carry around as an ostensibly sensible, adult man.
Baz Luhrmann once said, via a male actor he paid to paraphrase the words of Mary Schmich, ‘Do one thing every day that scares you.’ It sounded deep and meaningful to me in 1999, but I never followed this advice back then. For one thing, I spent most of my teens in the grip of an idleness so profound that imploring me to do anything every day – even things I liked – was ambitious. For another, my only fears at the time were big, hairy spiders and talking to girls, both of which were easily avoided at an all-boys’ school in Derry.
One exception was the sea. I don’t like open water, stemming from a semi-drowning escapade that happened on a trip to America when I was 15. I mistimed a dive, swallowed water and ended up being pulled out, pale and limp, and resuscitated by the prettiest lifeguard I’d ever seen. This compounded my near-death experience with the additional horror of having to talk to a girl, while water and snot poured out of my stupid face.
Since then, being in water makes me dizzy and faint, filled with a panic so profound it’s overwhelming. I’ve spent the past two decades rebranding this aquaphobia as a cranky and logical dislike for the sea. But where does it leave my son, who shows no horror of the stuff?
As a much younger child, he hated the sea. To my shame, I rejoiced. Here was a confederate who could make me feel better about my frailties. This changed a few weeks ago, when a trip to the beach showed he’d become every inch the waterbaby I am not. I felt a pang of melancholy watching him amble through the waves with his mum and all my cantankerous excuses suddenly seemed pathetic and self-defeating.
I barely had time to register this before he was grabbing my arm. Soon he was doing something my wife had never managed in 12 years’ acquaintance, pulling me with forceful steps through soggy sand and into the open water. As I held him, chest high above the tide, I felt that dizzy, fainting panic I’d denied for all these years, but on I trudged. I was holding him, but he was really holding me, transferring some small part of his infinite bravery with the grip of a tiny, guiding hand.
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