How my son's sketch put everything into perspective
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Picture this: Charlie and his BFG of a dad.
The picture my son drew was rudimentary, as pictures by five-year-olds tend to be. He was the little figure on the standing chalkboard, and I was the massive roundish blob, coloured between the lines in a sea of scratchy blue, edges in yellow and green, islands of white and the occasional red burst. As an afterthought, my son gave me thin arms and legs, the correct number of fingers and toes, a small head with sparse hair, but no neck to speak of. This makes sense, for this is all he can see from his usual vantage point far below me, craning his tiny head up in my direction.
Nothing about this picture is extraordinary. But still it formed a lump in my throat. My wife has been away, you see, visiting family abroad for three weeks, and in that short time Charlie has grown closer to me, more dependent and reliant upon me and my rhythms, and I his. In the drawing he seemed to sense this. I looked like the earth, and he a small body caught in its orbit – as if I were his entire world. This, too, makes sense.
I recently wrote a story about what men can do in the wake of the death of Eurydice Dixon, raped and murdered in Melbourne not long ago. I wrote about various techniques men can use to intervene in difficult public situations, and about how men can – and should – offer silence or quiet admonishment when a friend makes a casually sexist joke. I offered other tips, about being aware of your surroundings on dark nights on the street, about understanding what it feels like to be a woman in that space. I noted the sheer maths involved – the physical differential at play between being a 193-centimetre man of 108 kilograms versus the average Australian woman of 162 centimetres and 71 kilograms.
“That means,” I wrote, “if we switched places, and I were that woman walking down the street from the train station at night, then the big stranger walking behind me would be a giant. He would be around 231 centimetres, in fact. And 144 kilograms. He would be the height of the tallest basketball player in NBA history, and weigh as much as an eastern lowland gorilla from the Congo. And there would be versions of him everywhere, some benign, others clearly not.”
That comment seemed to touch a nerve with readers, and so these past few weeks with Charlie I have found myself considering a completely new differential: the one between me and my son. I’ve been imagining how it must feel to him, looking up at me. I’m basically twice his height, and about four times his weight. That means if I were the son in the equation, the father would weigh 450 kilograms and stand four metres tall. Imagine, right now, what that would be like. Picture it. Close your eyes.
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