I could have done more.

Subject: I could have done more.

It's funny  looking back. It's as if you were a bystander in so many things, somehow removed by the necessities of work, not being at home, not playing your part.
I suppose it's the lot of many men (and now a days, women), that the home takes second place to the immediacy of fulfilling someone else's calling. Each morning Into a car and out on the highway, like robots we fulfil our primary role if we are the predominant bread winner, leaving behind a wife and children to fend for themselves.
Now retired and encapsulated at home for much of the time I look around at the memorabilia strewn on the shelves and in the cupboards, even the furniture itself and have little recognition as how and when it was purchased.
Obviously a benign hand was guiding matters. From mealtime to child rearing, from house cleaning to the holiday arrangements it was "she" the mistress of all affairs which went on under the roof we call home.
Even today it still happens. My wife Marie and daughter Angela descended on me for a few days last week and immediately set about cleaning and rearranging, complaining incessantly about my lack of attention to those fundamental things which encapsulated were called a housewife's pride. Things which I had thought had been taken care of having, the day before given the place a quick run around with the vacuum cleaner soon revealed how inadequate I am. To a cleaning gestapo who took no prisoners they squirrelled around the kitchen, in the toilet, particularly the stove seemed to provoke as it often does, most opprobrium. Upstairs and downstairs they went poking and pointing, squirting and scrubbing until cast in the dog box with my tail between my legs I sat quivering, well not quite, but you get my drift.
This of course reveals a wider, deeper issue of roles not only in the family but also in the wider aspects of life itself.
The home is quintessentially  the place to focus our lives. It's the place where we engage in those two great experiments, ‘being a parent’, and 'lover’ maybe both, each unique in their importance and laying well outside the confine of paid work or the aspirations of the boss.
The idiosyncratic journey of a child as it grows up and the supportive hand a parent can play in it are often stereotyped by the ‘perfect family’ who somehow retain their humour and that sense of the special moment when it came to reading a bedtime story or paddling in the sea and making sand castles.
Sadly I failed in much of this. Enjoying my work and the camaraderie of ones work colleagues I missed out on the 7pm bedtime performance. I was there at school events, cricket practice and refereeing the boys football but the fundamental parenting work (other than the two in the morning "winding" performance) was left to Marie. I don't know if the kids noticed my absence, you would have to ask them but looking back I could have done more