Decaf Tea Bag Anxiety
What having some tradies in my garden has taught me about the emotional baggage we carry as parents
If you’re a keen user of Substack Notes (you should be—it’s close to what Twitter used to be like back in the early 2010s), you may recall a Note from yours truly recently, in which I lamented the fact that there are builders working in my garden every weekday for the foreseeable future. To an introverted being like myself that treats his home like an inner sanctum to keep the harsh realities of the world at bay, this is my idea of a personal hell.
It’s my fault, I guess. I’m the one who wants a new patio. But I’ve never done an iota of manual labour in my life. As for my DIY skills, I still revel at a picture I hung all by myself three years ago, which speaks to the upper limit of my abilities. So there was no real choice: some other people were going to have to come and do it for us.
I prepare for their arrival by clearing some things out of the garden and clearing space in the garage where they’ll be mixing cement, cutting tiles and other dark arts of manliness that I have no idea about.
Already, I’m getting in my own head about their impending visit. I look around at some of the stuff in my garage—there’s an old desk with a monitor and some old PC parts. If they ask, how am I going to explain that I’m the kind of nerd that builds gaming PCs from time to time? Hell, just the state of my garage is getting me nervous. If I’m not the kind of man who has all his tools and stuff arranged and organised, then what kind of man am I?!
Before any tradies (I’m borrowing that term from Bluey) get offended by my characterisation, this is nothing to do with you; this is all my personal baggage. My dad was—and still is—fairly handy, both with DIY and in his career. Therefore when I was a kid I’d find myself on a few occasions either with him in his factory around lots of big machines and blokes who knew how to work them. To me, it was like I’d walked into the Mos Eisley Cantina.
All these guys were big, gnarled and scary looking. They all shared blokey banter with my dad which completely went over my head whenever I was caught in the crossfire. It was the same story with a lot of my dad’s friends who I’d encounter from time to time. They’d look at me strangely, even as a child, as if they knew I wasn’t a man’s man like them. Even at that age, I knew it too. I knew I was different from them.
That speaks to why I get so weird whenever tradies have to come to my house. I always feel like we’re speaking a different language.
It’s gotten more of a problem in the past few years, as now I work primarily from home. I always sense this lingering judgment from anyone who comes to the house, as if they’re thinking, Why the fuck aren’t you in work? Worse would be if I had to explain that I work in social media, writing tweets, for fuck sake.
Most of the time, these visits from tradies would be quick in-and-out jobs: checking the boiler, fixing the dishwasher. I’d feel a slight bit of guilt, as surely these are jobs that real men can do themselves, but the encounters are over fairly quickly.
This time though, these guys are going to be in the garden for several weeks.
On the morning of their arrival, I open the garage door and am greeted by Terry and Geoff (not their real names). I utter my awkward hellos and scurry back inside before they realise I’m wearing Crocs (they’re my garden shoes, alright?).
I make myself busy getting the eldest’s bag ready for school, which distracts me from the discomfort coursing through my veins. I’m going to have to make them a cup of tea at some point, I think to myself. What if they think the tea bags I have aren’t good enough? I get Yorkshire Tea—surely that’s good enough, right? Shit, what if they ask for coffee? Neither of us drink coffee—we only have a small pot of instant decaf that’s for my mother-in-law whenever she pops round. Will they notice it’s decaf? WILL THEY?!
In my mad rush to get out of the door and onto the safety of the school run, I’m looking for my eldest to put her school cardigan on. I look over to the sliding doors that lead out from our back room into the garden.
She stands there, having opened the doors herself, staring and waving at both the blokes as they set about ripping up our old patio. Her eighteen-month-old sister is standing by her, at first with a look of utter bewilderment etched across her little face. Then, in her adorable little voice, shouts “HIYA!” at them both, waving her little hand as she does so.
My first instinct is to rush them away like that mum does when her kids barge in on her husband as he’s been interviewed on the news. But, in a moment of clarity, I pause for a moment.
Why would I do that? Because it makes me feel awkward? They don’t feel awkward—it’s the most natural thing in the world for them to say hello to these people—fellow human beings.
My kids—hell, most kids under the age of five—are in a unique position where they don’t have the same emotional baggage that most other people in the world do. They’re not weighed down yet by old feelings bubbling up that remind them of past negative experiences. It’s not right that I push that on them by making them feel as though they can’t express themselves and talk to them—just because it might make me feel a bit uneasy.
So I leave them to it, marvelling at the two men pulling our garden apart. In fact, over the past few days, my eldest has struck up a little friendship with them. She showed them her Halloween outfit. One of them gave her some money to put in her sweets bucket.
It’s not their job to teach me lessons and to help me reparent myself, but they do a damn good job of it sometimes.
Oh, and I’ve made them plenty of tea—most of it decaf, as we’d run out of regular. They didn’t notice—and maybe, neither should I.
What lessons do your kids teach you?
I think there’s infinite wisdom in observing how unburdened people, like kids, interact with the outside world. It gives me new perspectives on things all the time.
What are the things that you’ve seen from your own kids that have made you rethink long-held beliefs or behaviours?
Hello