More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Whenever I’m difficult. Whenever I’m embarrassing. Unreasonable. Unfair. I want you to think back to that day. That day when you refused to tell me where the hell you’d hidden my damn car keys. And I want you to remember that it was you who started it.
We don’t do trial and error; we call someone who knows. Nature didn’t prepare us for you.
We keep your entire childhood electronically monitored to such a degree that it makes the Big Brother house look like a damn wonder of integrity, and we go to baby swimming lessons and buy breathable, practical clothing in gender-neutral colours and we’re just so insanely, insanely terrified of making a mistake. So indescribably scared of not being good enough. Because we spent so long being the biggest narcissists in world history before we became parents and realized how unimportant we really were.
Because we didn’t inherit the Earth from our parents, we’re borrowing it from our children and all that crap.
having kids is in many ways like trying to drive a bulldozer through a china shop. With broken legs. Wearing a back-to-front ski mask. While drunk.
Because we didn’t inherit the Earth from our parents, we’re borrowing it from our children and all that crap.
Let function come before form.
Buy the sofa you want, not the sofa you need.
The majority of things in life are about picking your battles.
beech
veneer.
So find someone who doesn’t love you for the person you are, but despite the person you are.
Be kind when you can, tough when you need to be.
And it’s really hard not to feel like you’re saying, ‘There, clever idiot. You found my mouth. Shall we see if you can do it again?’
That, regardless of all other circumstances, it’s always 0–0 to begin with.
and now I wake up in the middle of the night several times a week and have to check you’re both still breathing before I can get back to sleep. Can you grasp that? If I’d acted this way before I became someone’s dad, they would have locked me up in a padded cell with an iPod full of dolphin songs.
I’m not afraid of saying I love you. It’s just all the rest of it that scares the living crap out of me.
I’m just worried I won’t understand it.
Scared of the day when I lose my place in your life.
That feeling of being left out. The awkwardness. The loneliness. Mine.
Girl throws out boy’s shoes.
There’ll be a LOT of stuff.
Someone should have done some kind of
Your grandfathers built their own houses before Google even existed. Can you comprehend the scope of that accomplishment? They’re not people. They’re Swiss Army knives with beards.
These men tamed nature.
We’re just not going to be able to use a single one of them until someone has reinvented electricity.
But if that’s the case, they’re making up for it now by covering over the cracks and faults in ours.
Masculinity changes. That’s the whole idea.
everyone, most people just want things to be FAIR for everyone.
And I’ve done what I can to teach you to never feel threatened by strong women. I married the strongest one I’ve ever met.
In terms of brains, though, it’s harder to measure for sure. I mean, on the one hand she’s definitely smarter than I am, everyone knows that. But on the other hand: I got her to marry me. So I still feel like I have one up on her.
One day, you’ll be holding a woman’s hand as she gives birth and then that’ll make you feel more ashamed than you’ve ever felt about anything. Words matter. Be better.
but I know for damn sure that no one in that locker room was more of a man at that moment than he was.
want you to always remember that you can become whatever you want to become, but that’s nowhere near as important as knowing that you can be exactly who you are.
That’s something you need to teach me. That’s the only way forward.
Because the only thing you can give to men who already have everything is a second chance. And you’re all of their second chances. Every day.
And they became different men when you arrived. Better men. We all did.
As long as you are kind to your mother and don’t murder or steal or start supporting Manchester City or any other horrible thing like that, I genuinely don’t care whether your moral compass is shaped by an old book or a box of jam doughnuts.
transport. So a woman (or a man! Let’s not just assume it was a woman, once in a while men find things out on their own too!) of the people invented the wheel.
Because people are really bloody stupid.
Because we both know you like your mother most. I do too. She’s the best thing to ever happen to either of us. And that’s actually the biggest reason you need to be quiet.
The way she lives every single feeling in her body to eternity and back.
And the ONE thing in life I’m better at than she is is handling a lack of sleep. I park in the wrong space when I’m tired, but she drives to the wrong job when she is. When I’ve had a rough night she finds the cheese in the freezer, but when she’s had a rough night I find the fridge in the basement. She’s better at absolutely everything else, but just after you were born we noticed that this was one area where I was more high functioning than she was. The only one.
And one thing you’re never lacking once you become a parent is people criticizing you.
know, you’re identity markers.
Men coming back to work from paternity leave don’t like it if you welcome them back from their ‘holiday’.
But what I’m trying to say is that sometimes the strongest person isn’t the one who hits. It’s the one who doesn’t hit back. All right?
The brave person is the one who knows he would win and still holds back.
This world sometimes seems like it’s full of incomprehensible, unintelligible, unembraceable, inexorable evil. Violence and injustice and greed and blind rage.
Loyalty and friendship. Someone’s hand in yours on a Sunday afternoon. Two brothers reconciled.
