Two years ago I started writing this weekly column as a celebration of the state of childhood with all its beauty, intrigue, and startling odours. I promised myself I’d stop before my kids were old enough to be embarrassed by it. And so now – as the world’s parents say a billion times a day at the swings in the park – I think it’s a good time to stop and let someone else have a turn.
Our amazing eldest child is six years old. When this column started, he sincerely believed he was Batman. Now he has reached the age of reason and his brilliant insights are becoming revelatory of him as an individual, rather than of the condition of infancy in its universality. This is a magical and a fragile time; it belongs to him alone and isn’t mine to redistill and reinterpret.
Likewise for our three-year-old, who hadn’t grown all his milk teeth when I started, but who is now a lovely handsome charmer, made entirely of imagination and dynamite, who has audaciously reinvented the office of middle child as a leadership role.
And likewise for our beautiful, smiling baby daughter, who wasn’t even under construction when this column began but who, as I write, is crawling across the kitchen floor, busy on youth’s eternal quest to find biscuits to ingest and electrical sockets to stick youth’s fingers into.
My wife and I are incredibly lucky to have such kids. While writing this column I have received hundreds of kind and funny messages from parents and grandparents who feel similarly about the children in their lives. Contrary to the negativity on display in some of the media, we are a society that loves its children and does not consider them doomed, feral or fallen. If your letters and emails are anything to go by then children unite us in hope, and the way we bring up our kids says more about us than the jobs we do, the beliefs we hold, or the way we vote.
Please let me thank a few people. My wife, as 88 episodes of this column have proved, is wiser, calmer and wildly more physically attractive than me. While I’ve been showboating about parenting, she has been quietly and brilliantly doing it, and working at the same time. She has been wonderfully assisted by our nanny, Danielle, who is the kindest, gentlest, most dedicated person anyone could hope to meet. I also want to thank my brother, Alex, for being a rock. It has been famous chuckling over the stories in these columns with him – and a lot of the best jokes were his. Thanks also to my mum and dad, who still show me and my brother, at 30-something years, the same unselfish kindness they showed us when we 30-something months. It is a measure of how great they are that as a parent I hope to be just like them.
Thank you to my editors at The Guardian, a superb and important newspaper that I’ve been very proud to write for. I admire their free spirit in affording a novelist this space on their pages. And I want to thank you, the regular readers of this column. I have loved all your warm and funny messages. Let me leave you with a parenting tip from top childcare expert Cormac McCarthy, in ‘The Road’: “He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
Finally I want to thank my children. Kids: they give me 650 words in this column, which is either a billion words too few or 647 words too many to say I love you. Maybe one day you will find these columns curled in the bottom of some drawer. If that happens, I hope they will make you laugh. I love it so much when you laugh.
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I’ll miss you and the stories of the kids and their antics. I’ve shared many of your columns with my friends and colleagues, who have enjoyed them as much as I have. Thank you to your family, too.
Lovely post. Keep on writing. I’m sure they’ll be proud of you when they’re older!
Thanks for your columns, I will miss them. They really made me laugh and I admire the writing. I hope they will be published as a book.
loved being on your journey with you, I’m sure your children will cherish your words
Thank you for your lovely posts all this while and I am sure many of us will pine for them. Continue to keep those wonderfully inspiring novels coming!
Having been recently introduced to your column my wife and myself have at times laughed hysterically at some of the antics of the Cleeve kids. Your writing has brought back nostalgic memories of our own children when they were little. I think a publication of the collection is now due!
Thanks for the memories.
xxx
Feel very sad that I won’t be reading your column any more! You thoughts on parenting have made me feel so much better and I smile at the antics of your children. Take care and keep writing!
Your column will be sorely missed. My girls are all grown up at 18 and 23, but your light as air descriptions of your family never ceased to evoke precious memories and more than a few howls of laughter,
Thank you x
What a pleasure it has been. I’m in my late 60s & have no children; but I have a large number of great nieces & nephews, & reading your column has enhanced the pleasure in watching all of them grow up. Weekends just won’t be the same! You have given me great insights into what wonderful creatures children are (well, mostly!).
You are all so kind. Thank you for all these lovely messages. I’m so happy that you have enjoyed the column. I loved writing it – it was never a chore – and I’m really sad about stopping. On the bright side, though, I will have more time to write novels, and I hope you will enjoy those too! You are kind and thoughtful people, and I am very lucky to have readers like you.
Dear Chris,
I was fortunate to meet you at my library, St. Louis County, when you so generously shared an evening to speak to us. So many groups of people to share your warmth, love of words, love of people, love of your children and love of books! We love people who love what we love, don’t we?
The above was certainly not a quotable line; but so true!
I also was in awe of my three children. We adopted the first two, who are both very beautiful (It was easier for me to openly brag about the beauty of my adopted children, being way too self-conscious if they were genetically connected to me). That being said, I think my “born child,” the writer – headed for Grad School in Journalism – is gloriously beautiful, inside and out, also. They are indeed gifts.
I’m sad your column is ending, just when I discovered it; even though I’m past that stage of parenting (mine are in their 20s); but you never lose the wonder.
I will wait for any vehicle your writing takes.
God bless you and your family.
Chris
Even for those of us that don’t have children- I know, I know, we should be out at weekends in our origami handgliders, sleeping til noon or rocking the crowds at Hyde Park (oh hang on, I actually did the latter last Saturday) – but know them, love them or work with them, your column was a delight to read. So which Guardian section shall I go straight to now on a Saturday morning? Enjoy Easter hols with the kids and the American tour part two.
Thanks for your columns – I will miss them. I’m consoled by the promise of more novels. Thanks to all your family for sharing the joy.
Any old writer can move a reader with melancholy, but to move a reader with humour, that’s high art that is!
Of course your novels do this but it’s your column that was so sneaky, thinking you were being lightly entertained with childhood antics and before you knew it you were deeply moved by an embedded and superbly crafted sentence.
Needless to say I’m sure many will missing this small pleasure.
I can’t believe it! I’ll miss a lot.. I was fallen in love with your colum..It has been a pleasure to have the opportunity to read your words and use your articles to study english…I eagerly wait for reading your next work..anything you’ll write..even if it is just your shopping list!
thank you.
All the best.
i enjoyed your presentation at books and books in miami so much i went right home to look at your website in advance of hoping to read everything you write. tonight was a gift to all us who were present. thank you
Ouch! I turn my back for a moment, and, when I look in again, you’ve turned your back for good. Your column made delightful reading. My thanks to your offspring for their inspiration, and to you for your words: Saint Cormac also wrote “each the other’s world entire” – may it be so for a time yet. Roll on the next Cleave bestseller!
The sadness I feel at losing the first thing I would pull out on Saturday mornings goes into the box with Letter from America and John Peel.
The last installment summed up why I loved it, your respect for your kids is inspiring.
Thankyou
I am so glad I came across your blog and well, you know how much I enjoyed them. May God bless you, your family, your work and your life. Keep emjoying your kids, my son is 11 and I can honestly say it only gets better:0)
Dear Chris
I’m sad that there will be no more of your wonderfully funny columns in The Guardian. I enjoyed reading every one of them and in a strange way feel as if I almost know your boys (esp. the youngest).On the upside I guess I’ll have to start buying your novels !!
pip pip
nigel
Hey Chris, say it aint so! I loved your column – it rang so true. It made me laugh, it made me cry. Saturdays won’t quite be the same.
Oh no! I love your column, but, yes, you’re forgiven so long as you write more novels. I think that your children are lucky to have you and your wife. You are clearly a wonderful daddy to them and that’s the hardest job, I’m sure. Be proud.
I saw you on your book tour in St. Louis MO and promptly told everyone about you and your Guardian articles. Too bad it’s ending so quickly (for me at least). Does this mean you’ve decided to go into stand up comedy afterall? Good luck and I look forward to reading your next book. Just finished Incendiary and I’m looking for the next best thing. Thanks again for making me stretch my mind.
Chris, oh Chris! No! As the mother of a rocket fueled nearly 3 year old, you are my first port of call if I ever get chance to read the Saturday Guardian. Last weekend I turned the Family section inside out trying to find you (yes it’s been a while as Oscar has been orbiting Earth). I was about to start a “how dare you” letter to the Editor for removing you when I googled you and the rest, as you have so wisely decided, is “History” .
You made me rock with laughter in your column and now I am crying with your last line. In the expression of the love you have for your children I can hear the roar of my own wild bear, ready to tear any intruder limbless such is the intensity of it.
I demand you have all 88 columns published! Please.
Do I need to add how much I will miss you?
Thank you for sharing.
Chris,
I am a writer myself, a freelance writer for our local newspaper here in San Diego, CA. ( Alpine, CA ) which is East
I joined a book club and this is how I stumbled across your work …. Please put your columns in a book as the world can always use more humor.
Best wishes to you and your family,
Carol
Hello, Chris. Greetings from Canada. It is a cold, allegedly Spring morning in Toronto and I just got up from an old, comfy sofa after finishing, regretfully, “Little Bee”. How brilliant, warm, hopeful and painful. You are too humble in your acknowledgements at the end. I know it is bad manners to acknowledge oneself but you ought to — you must know how good this book is. I fully intend to tell ALL my friends and even some of my closer enemies to read this wonderful story. I have not yet read “Incendiary” but picked it up when I was part way through “Little Bee”, already aware that I would have to read it. It has been said that the caregivers of the world spend the least amound of energy on taking care of their own selves. For this reason, and also because I love anticipation almost more than that which I await, I am saving “Incendiary” for when I need to give myself a present. Thanking you in advance . . .
i just finished reading little bee, in a wonderful dutch translation, and read everything else about you on the internet, also the last column about your children. I’m really impressed by your empathic power. Please do not underestimate your own ability to be a much more than average parent. you seem to allow your children to develop in their own time and conform their possibilities. The scene in little bee where the girl shows this immense understanding of the batman boy in a loveless child care is proof of your empathy. I mean, that is yours, you cannot invent that. Yes, i believe you when you say that you have great children. but i would say, these children have great parents and that’s why they are free to develop as real and realistic human beings who will never forget what it is to be a child. And who will never lose their power of imagination. thank you for your book, mr. Cleave.