Ah, the indomitable optimism of middle age! When I was 53 and Hugh Grant was 52, I congratulated him in an article for becoming a father for the first time. It would be a blast, I promised. While piggybacks were harder on older than younger bones, I offered assurance that nature gave geriatric dads inner reserves of strength and a superhero’s ability to survive on less sleep.
Now 13 years on, and with five children to his name, the Paddington actor (formerly the Four Weddings actor) has told a podcast he had his children “much too old in life” and at 64 he needs “a long stint in a sanatorium or an abbey”. The one from which Maria was liberated into family life in The Sound of Music would do him fine.
So now we are 60 plus, as AA Milne never put it, how is it looking? I had my first daughter when I was 49 and my second at 52, and for the first dozen years I enjoyed every day of bringing them up.
The girls were funny, cheeky and loving, their strops sincere, their misery heartfelt (and pretty easily mopped up), and their excitements inextinguishable. In their childhoods I relived mine — the walks in the woods, the British beaches, the involuntary descent into giggles, the looking-forwards (let us count the nights), even, in the age of remakes, the same films and TV shows.
Hugh Grant became a father for the first time at 52
REBECCA CABAGE/INVISION/AP
But it was better this time around, for I had some agency. Also, I was lucky: solvent, not cursed by money worries as my parents had been and as my wife would point out resentfully I still had my career, my job, my Daddy’s-in-London days.
But the girls are teenagers now, the older one just eight months from adulthood. The glory days are gone. The child actors have been recast as young adults. I used to explain my world to them. Now they explain their world to me — and I still don’t understand it.
In the heyday of their childhoods I would lovingly pack them off to bed (they tuck you up your mum and dad). Now as I slumber they remain socially active. I wake to midnight flushes from the bathroom, repeatedly.
The next morning, their put-downs are no longer benign, their tantrums less spontaneous than tactical. The rows that were once bantamweight bouts over who exactly was in charge here (the kids, obviously, most of the time) are now long-term wars of attrition in which the freedom fighters know that the day of independence is coming and ultimate victory therefore theirs.
Parents mark their children’s firsts — first toddle, first word, first report, first cycle ride. It is harder to notice the very last time they do something. I remember this moment, however. It was two years ago, perhaps, and I was sitting alone reading for work. My second daughter came in without a word and kissed me on the lips. She must have been 12 and father-daughter lip kissing any later than that is suspect if not disgusting and I would not want it. But still I mourn that last kiss.
So get over it. They are growing up and that, if we are lucky, is what parents, young and old, always have to face. Perhaps Grant will find he will eventually enter a less exhausting period than the one he is enduring (although I doubt it, because there is so much shouting and nagging involved with teenagers, so much anxiety about where they will end up in adult land).
But what he may not quite appreciate is that when in ten years’ time his youngest is 16, a sanatorium or an abbey will be, at least metaphorically, all his future contains. This is not the same for fathers who reproduced in a timely manner. They enter their forties or fifties with their youth returned to them, slightly foxed and showing signs of wear and tear for sure, but still serviceable.
The older father — and I will be 70 when my second reaches her majority — will be lucky to detect any spring in his step, ambition in his ego, wanderlust in his heart. And what is worse is that he is likely to be deprived of the one true consolation of old age: grandchildren.
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In this age of delayed parenthood, of which fathers such as me are the most egregious examples, the older dad will never see his children’s children, or if he does (to adapt Nora Ephron on seventysomething Charlie Chaplin) he will be too old to pick them up. Nappy Days will not be here again.
For that reason, and that reason only, I am with Hugh: I wish I’d had my lovely girls ten years earlier.
Comedian Nick Page with his son on stage
I get called my four-year-old son’s grandad
By Nick Page
I became a parent for the first time at 50, having always been convinced that I wouldn’t. I believed I wasn’t grown up enough to have kids. I’m a stand-up comic, and comedy is supposed to be showbiz androck’n’roll and children are not.
My wife is 20 years younger than me. I had assumed if she wanted kids she would have them with her next husband. We knew people with children and our lives seemed a lot better than theirs. Our house was tidy, with stuff in it that we’d chosen, we had friends that we liked. Sometimes we would just leave the house to do stuff and sometimes we didn’t want to do anything and that was fine.
Then, in 2020, six years into our marriage she announced that she wasn’t going anywhere and that we had decided to have a child. It was a unanimous “we”.
I wasn’t prepared. There was no training course. I turned up to the hospital. They asked if I had a car seat, I showed them the car seat and they put the baby in the car seat and I was a dad. All of a sudden I was drawn to terrible puns, knew how to put up shelves and was acutely aware of which lights had been left on.
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I’m now the 54-year-old tired dad of a huge and very active four-year-old. The zipline in the garden was supposed to tire him but has just made him stronger. He knows so many things about dinosaurs and is insistent that I hear them all. I’m part of three parental group chats and I have favourite episodes of Bluey and a hatred of Bing.
There are days when I look into my son’s eyes and I well up, because I realise how stupid it was to leave it so late in life to have him. He’s so full of love and trust and wonder and joy, and I’m not going to be there for a huge chunk of his life.
I’ll miss his greatest triumphs and disasters. But then I remember how good our life was before we had him and the anger really helps to get me past those moments. The other day I boasted that we’d had a lie-in on a Sunday until 7.45am.
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Seven forty-five is not a lie-in. Before we had him we would have a lie-in on Sunday until Tuesday, unless friends were staying for the weekend, when we would surface at the crack of noon and have a long pub lunch (the pub was never chosen based on the size of the climbing frame in the garden).
We seem to have been issued new friends just because they had kids at about the same time, and by 50 you’re already well into the process of whittling down your friends to the ones you absolutely have to speak to. You don’t need any new ones. Some of the ones we’ve been sent are tedious and I’m fairly certain that I’m not their first choice either.
No one can prepare you for the ignominy of being referred to as your four-year-old son’s grandad. And nobody can prepare you either for how much you love your child and think about them.
I didn’t want to be one of those parents who bangs on about their kid all the time, but as soon as I met him I realised he was exponentially better than all previous babies and talking about him is like a public service to get the rest to raise their game. For the record, the best Bluey episodes are Cricket, Camping and Granny Mobile.
