Chav Solidarity author D Hunter: 'My violent childhood left me without role models for parenting'

D Hunter labels himself ‘an ageing chav’. He’s the author of Chav Solidarity, a searing read that centres around his childhood of growing up underclass, drug abuse, prostitution and how the liberal left absolutely fails in its aims. Here he talks about the terror of becoming a parent.

I don’t want to alarm you or anything, but I’m dad

(Toby Ziegler to his newborn twins, in The West Wing “Twenty Five”, 2003)

In the run-up to the birth of mine and my partner’s first child, I was told that it is wise for new parents to have come to some acceptance of their own childhoods and relationships with their parents. The basis of the wisdom is that at each point of your child’s life your primary reference point will be that same age in your own life, and whatever hijinks were going on.

Being the generally smug twat that I am, I nodded sagely and thought that the hundreds of hours of therapy and the two books I’d written which spend a good portion of their time unpacking events of my childhood put me firmly in the got-that-covered gang. 

Despite my childhood being a fairly violent affair – dad hit me with baseball bats, mum put cigs out on me, grandad sexually assaulted me, and strangers were partial to giving me a smack as well – and my teens and 20s being a cavalcade of unhelpful coping mechanisms, I had reached my 40s in fairly good mental nick. My most self-destructive behaviour was limited to getting sucked into playing Football Manager for too long and not exercising enough.

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Sure, most of my nights I’d be woken up three or four times with some grim little nightmare, but I felt that those wake-ups would prove to be a useful training ground for the early years of my kid’s life. I didn’t feel invulnerable to my past, but I certainly didn’t think it was the albatross around my neck that it would have been had I become a parent in my teens, 20s or 30s. 

I didn’t have clear role models for good parenting. Apart from the baseball bat and other nonsense that usually ended in some form of violence, my dad was mainly absent from my life. The men who came in and out of my mum’s orbit were far from saints, and my childhood friends were blessed with similar paternal experiences. Then when they became parents, if they remained in my field of vision there was not a lot of wisdom to absorb.

I did know parents in my contemporary social circle – a far more relaxed and genial bunch – who had generally become parents in their 30s. But their upbringings belonged in a Sally Rooney novel, not a Hubert Selby Jnr one, so they had different tendencies to navigate. Despite those differences, I did try and take a few hints and tips from them, but quite often those boiled down to relax and be yourself. 

Now I’ve got pretty good at relaxing, or at least giving a good approximation of such a mood. Being myself on the other hand, leaving aside my cynicism as to whether a true self exists which one could be at all times, well I wasn’t sure of the intrinsic parental quality of that self. If I am made up of the events and circumstances that have shaped me, with a small mix of reflection and response thrown in, it could be said that I am around 25% violence.

The first half of my life had as its structure and grammar me being hit or me hitting someone else. While the second half at that point had been a far more gentile affair, my nocturnal interruptions suggested that Willy Faulkner was right, the past is never dead. It’s not even past. 

Just to put your mind at ease, I’m going to tell you the end of the story now. My kid is 20 months old, and the thought of hurting their feelings, never mind their body, makes me nauseous. At times it’s gone so far the other way, that sometimes I wonder whether I’m not preparing them for the vague meanness and cruelty that they are likely to encounter when they enter into the world on their own. 

I have to say your vulnerability is really freaking me out right now. Is it real?

(Dr Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga) to William Costigan Jr (Leonardo DiCaprio) in The Departed, 2006) 

It happened almost immediately, leaving aside the physical vulnerability of a newborn baby, their emotional vulnerability unsettled me from the beginning. There was of course the fact that it takes a few years for humans to be able to develop ways to understand, cope with and manage their emotions. A baby or toddler is experiencing a whole host of shit for the first time, and is constantly adjusting and incorporating new experiences into their schema of the world. 

The adults who are supposed to be looking after them have a significant amount of power and control over what these new experiences might be and the manner in which they arrive. Of course, there are huge cultural and structural elements to this, most human adults do not have 100% of control in the context they exist in.

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My parents’ influence on the social, economic and political context was extremely minimal, and while mine is significantly greater, it’s still restricted. Nonetheless with the boundaries, we can shape how our child might come to first experience a whole host of things, and the safety they might feel in doing so.

Thus in the middle of the night when I’m rocking our kid to sleep and they’re staring up at me, I am often freaking out. The responsibility in and of itself is one thing on day-to-day parenting level, but if you get the mood lighting sorted and some ambient noises that are supposed to lull the kid into sleep. I have the look on my face similar to Bruce Willis’s when he realises he’s dead at the end of The Sixth Sense.

This though, is dwarfed when in conversation with my beloved partner I am reminded that I want to support my child to not only be able to understand and articulate their emotions, but to feel them deeply and not to feel the need to repress and deny how they’re feeling to themselves.

To know deeply that, joy, fear, sadness, agony, anger, love these are all legit responses to what they might experience in the world, and I want our kid to be able to navigate them all with a level of serenity and assuredness that while they won’t always be responded to by others, to feel them adds to the richness of life and their relationships with others. Thing is, I don’t feel like this. 

Despite all the therapy in the world, I feel those things a little bit, a smidge, I’ve generally coached myself to hold them at bay for the most part, trying to remain at an emotional even keel whenever possible. Whilst I’ve processed a lot of my childhood trauma, there is no certainty I have safely locked it all away. Free running emotion, experiencing all of life’s emotional richness deeply, is the Semtex to blow open the door. 

When our kid was born I felt myself oscillating between joy and terror, and held both back as best I could, letting them in and letting them out in moderation. The depth and breadth of love I hold for others in the world is very limited, my partner and my kid get most of it, a small group of friends a little more, but I am closed off and distanced from most.

Anger which was a driving force of my 20s and 30s and was only really managed by political activity and reckless drinking, has been neutered in a variety of ways. A kind of permanent low-key sadness is present, mainly in regard to the state of the world, but my expressions of this even to myself are limited. This is all a trauma response to some extent or another, we all know this with a solid dose of 1980s hegemonic masculinity thrown in.

It’s me at 45 imitating what the 45-year-old cis men in films and TV did when I was a traumatised nine-year-old. To be honest, this is the greatest decade of my life in almost every sense, so I’m good with living like this. But when I think about our kid, the openness they have, and my responsibility in making sure they remain warm, and supported as they experience the array of emotions they’re going to have. When I think about how fucking vulnerable they are right now, I do freak the fuck out.

I can do steady, I can do consistent and I can do calm. I believe and I hope this will be beneficial to them, but when it comes to feeling, when it comes to emotionally connecting to others, to themselves and the world around them, I worry what they will take from me.  

I take them to toddler groups, parks and other spaces where other little ones and their parents go. I have not started a single conversation with another parent. I just want to be left alone, but I see my kid as they learn to navigate interactions with their peers and whenever they’re standing alone, whenever they’re looking at other kids playing, I’m hit with the possibility that they’re not getting the example they need from me.

My coping mechanism is to keep people at a distance, our kid doesn’t need a coping mechanism or doesn’t know one is, and certainly doesn’t know the way I’m acting is rooted in one. They just see one of the two people they know the most, keeping themselves alone. 

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