Andrew: I’m not sure that I have additional family responsibilities. Certainly I have different responsibilities. In Australia, my wife and I played an equal part in caring for our two children and doing those domestic duties that are a normal part of life back home: cooking, cleaning, gardening, wrestling crocodiles, that kind of thing. In Manila, we do domestic work rarely, and never wrestle crocodiles. We do, however, spend a lot of quality time with the children, who despite our over-parenting and their privileged place in the world have turned out to be pleasingly caring and marvelously interesting little homo sapiens. We have a lot of fun together, or at least we did until my daughter turned 11 and decided that Dads in general and her Dad in particular are definitely not cool. Perhaps my biggest family responsibility right now is embarrassing her in front of her uber-cool friends.
Andrew: My children are 11 and 9. They're still young enough to think that I’m mostly alright and not a bad guy to hang around with. Even my daughter will admit to that when her friends have gone home. They’ll learn soon enough how wrong they are but for the time being their ignorance is my bliss because it means I get to spend a lot of time with them. It means I also have to pretend to like computer games. And listen to their music. I think there’s a reasonable case to be made for placing One Direction on a human rights watch list. In their defense, the children are forced to listen to me play Bob Dylan songs on guitar, so I guess we’re even.
I attend all of the children’s key events at school. Not through choice. Their Mum says I have to.
Source: Enjoying home away from home
Aug 28, 2013
