It's a Dad's LifeMy younger child is fierce. She has spent this whole morning wandering round the house being a lion. Everywhere she goes, "Rarr, I'm de lion". It doesn't matter if anyone else is in the room, she's announcing it to her own psyche.
I thought after 10 minutes she'd get tired of "rarring" but no, she's kept it up for about two hours now. She's blonde and fierce. She has learnt the power of a violent roar which is all the more shocking as it goes so blatantly against her demure nature.
Never trust demure: beneath lies a fiercely passionate heart. Right now, that passion is aimed at mothering her collection of tiny babies and pushing mini-prams with vigour, but I have a feeling that whatever she engages in as she moves through life will be invested with the full force of her will.
Watching your kids grow is one of the true wonders. Noting how they differ from each other having been grown in the same earth is an ongoing source of intrigue. Mine are black and white in looks and personality, yet more obviously sisters in their natural fit than many whose physicality screams it.
The pressure is coming on, not from me or (overtly anyway) from my wife, but in the casual questioning of friends and family: "Well, will you have another?" Every sinew in me strains against it, my skin crawls at the thought of two more years of nappies, my head sags at the possibility of the sleep deprivation saga being extended. It's not going to happen, not ever.
The Daddy doth protest too much. Why is this question even surfacing in me when there is no sweet way on this sorry planet that I would voluntarily squelch into the mire of babyhood again? The prospective mother is working me in an unerringly subtle and probably unconscious way. Whenever the question arises, from whatever corner, she answers with something along the lines of, "No, we won't have any more, we're happy with what we've got." It's done sotto voce, then her words tail off, she smiles absently, tugs at her shirtsleeve, stares momentarily into the middle distance and continues on with her conversation.
Every man out there knows I'm being worked over as unequivocally as if she were beating me senseless with a Le Creuset casserole pot before plundering the required seed from my prostrate form and doing with it what she knows she wants to. This benign acceptance . . . it's the most cunning plan of all. It strikes me as demure, and reminds me of another blonde with a penchant for babies.
The prospective mother's verbal response was conditioned through months, if not years, of my repetitively uttering "Never again" while stumbling from the pit to quell some caterwauling. It was a primeval need in me to know that this ordeal would not last forever. Her response acknowledges we've done the hard yards, we should be happy with our lot and crack on with our lives with no further additions.
Her physical and emotional response says: "Shut up you fool and impregnate me now." She is blonde and fierce and I am afraid.
Her employer will read this and curse at having to stump up for another maternity leave. I can assure him he need have no fear. I will survive this barrage of oestrogen-driven, psychological arm-twisting. Because if there is one thing we, as men, can attest to, it is that the desire to have sex has never influenced our behaviours nor affected our long-term living situations. I may not be blonde or particularly fierce, but my belt is firmly buckled.
