It's a Dad's Life:'It has definitely been the most challenging part of parenting for me. Without a shadow of a doubt." So spoke a friend of ours, her newborn baby perched on her knee. What froze the blood in my veins was that she wasn't speaking about birth, or interrupted sleep or inconsolable screaming; she was referring to her teenage kids.
Having made it through the kiddie years, she has chosen to re-enter the world of Pampers as her other kids are negotiating body hair and attitude. It's the latter she is finding difficult.
I remember my Dad laughing at me one morning as I tried to squeeze breakfast down a screaming child's throat. "Wait til she's 13," he said. "Then you'll know what it's like to deal with anger. The bodysnatchers will have taken her." I told him, as I had many times at 13, that he hadn't a notion what he was talking about.
But he probably does. So, following the same logic, things are only set to get worse.
To call the kids a challenge at the moment is like Tony Blair suggesting that his position has become precarious. I am having one of those times whern every request is a demand and every period of time spent together becomes a war. Nothing is getting done easily. They won't eat, they won't dress, they won't wash, they won't sleep. They scream and they roar, they want treats and they want TV. I am unravelling like a blanket that looked like a bargain in the Argos catalogue.
That is only the western front of the war. Stalingrad is myself and the Missus ready to claw each other's eyes out at who is to blame for their horrendous behaviour. Obviously it's down to her, yet she is of the opinion that I am at fault. Valentine's Day was a simmering armistice, the time in between has seen hostilities escalate again.
Both of us have teams of boffins working on something nuclear, whoever gets there first wins. Our house, the Somme trench that it is (if I can be permitted to mix my wartime metaphors), is a screaming pit of dysentery and anguish. It was in this environment that our friend dared to suggest the best is yet to come.
I know, as I know every time this level of domestic hysteria rises, that the current situation is not down to the kids but down to us, the so-called adults. We parents are both in pressured situations right now: work demands, college deadlines and financial worries all vying for top billing. We knew at the start of the year that things would be particularly demanding well into the spring. We'd been through it all before and figured we knew how to handle it. We have learnt nothing. As the pressure mounts and our anxiety rises, the kids, attuned to the smallest tweak in their parents' frequency, react in the only ways they know how. They shriek.
They don't care that I have deadlines looming. They don't care that the Missus has to bend like a contortionist, as that is what her work sometimes requires. All they know is that we are not spending as much time with them as usual, and when we are there we are tired and distracted and looking to put drugs in their food to make them unconscious.
Right now we are failing at the notorious "work/life balance". Any "life" is spent drawing quick recovery breaths before "work" starts to beat on us again. If there is any positive to the way things are at the moment, it is that life is not usually like this. If we learn anything from this time round on the busy carousel, it is not to adapt to it better, but rather to have the good sense not to engage with it ever again.
abrophy@irish-times.ie
