Today I’m trying to memorise a speech I will give at my eldest daughter’s wedding. The wedding is next Friday but it will be last night by the time you read this, because I file this column a week ahead of its publication. So, as I write, it’s a week until my daughter’s wedding – which was yesterday.
The father-of-the-bride speech is a piñata at which FOTBs swing dutifully – more often than not taking out the groom’s mother’s eye, or wounding some aunt wheeled in from an old persons’ home doused with a lavender cologne that, in its attempt to mask the scent of death, has paradoxically become a blaring memento mori.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
I have witnessed much collateral damage inflicted by the bride’s father at slipshod nuptials after he’s pulled on the oversized clown shoes and let rip with a catalogue of his own pre-marital sexcapades, his daughter’s moleish navigation through puberty, and the groom’s failings as a real man.
I once heard a speech in which the FOTB said everyone admired his daughter’s tenacity, citing her struggles to become a normal-sized woman, and saying that though she’d never come close to that, she was always super keen to have a crack at the latest diet. The inadvertent takeaway from that FOTB speech was that the bride was tenaciously suggestible and unrectifiably fat. Thanks, Dad.
I hope I didn’t wound anyone last night (that is, next week) with what I said, or will say. Firstly, I will (I did) welcome Tom’s family to the genealogical gulag that is the Cameron family. Then a small joke about what swine my siblings have been to me – they’ll be tense, expecting a blow, so best to get that over with. Next I will toast absent friends – our beloved dead, who made us.
And then to the meat of the thing… the arrival of Asta in our lives. That goes like this: “I’m breaking a patriarchal pact by telling you that men are equal parts mystified and horrified by the arrival of a baby. It’s routine today for men to tell you that the birth of a child was the happiest day of their life. They’re lying through their vape-stained teeth to get post-natal nookie.
I’ve spent all my life nurturing a reputation as a hard bastard, only to find… I’m not.
“Becoming a father is like taking delivery of some rare, fragile jellyfish. ‘Here, keep this thing alive if you can. Look after it for a quarter of a century. Teach it to add and subtract and to tie its shoes. Make it eat beans and broccoli. Pander to its every whim and cater to its every appetite. And this privilege will only cost you a million bucks… and your freedom.’ A baby is a terrible, frightening curiosity to a man.”
After that scathing attack on the nursery, I’ll have to make amends. A speaker must reverse every iffy joke with an emotional counter beat if they don’t want to get the crowd offside. So I will next tell the wedding guests how I fell in love with Asta. And that’s when the trouble will begin for me. I’m afraid of becoming unsalvageably bogged in emotion. I’ve spent all my life nurturing a reputation as a hard bastard, only to find… I’m not. Or, I’m not any more.
