It's a Dad's Life Adam BrophyIn the first of a weekly column, a book editor turned full-time childminder tells how he's gradually learning some tricks to cope with the high-level stresses of the breakfast table
It's 7.10am and I have two screaming kids at the kitchen table. The missus runs by on her way from the shower and shoots me a look that suggests base incompetence. I could quite easily kill them all.
They didn't wake up this grumpy - they have managed to incubate and bring forth their frustrations just when I am at the centre of their attention. The simple reason for the kids being ratty is that elder child wants to feed younger child, younger child only wants to be fed by her father, and elder child refuses to feed herself unless she gets to feed the younger. Missus rushes by again, shaking her head. It is 7.20am, and my blood is boiling. Now the younger will only eat standing up, turned the wrong way.
There is a long day ahead.
When I quit my full-time job four years ago to take on the role of child carer, I expected the pressure to ease. I didn't know what stress was then.
My last full-time position in a publishing company involved long deadlines and what I would refer to now as "medium level pressure" at peak times. I oversaw projects through to completion, projects involving rational adults performing tasks they are paid and contracted to do at a certain speed and to a certain quality. In occasional fracas with colleagues over the missing of deadlines, mine and other people's, the idea sometimes formed that "this clown is acting like a child".
The fact is, though, that nobody can act like a child quite like a child. If your temper gets frayed when you consider negotiating inter-departmental conflict while preparing marketing material for a promotional push, get ready to suffer eyeball-popping irritations on adopting the position of minder-in-chief.
In As Good As It Gets Melvin Udall (played by Jack Nicholson) says he writes women by thinking of a man, then taking away all reason and accountability. Add to this an ability to move into primal rage in a heartbeat, and you have the essence of toddler. It can be a sweet scent when bottled, but on spilling can burn through carpet, lino and even ceramic tiles. Unique cuteness can propagate into sheer violence in a demonstration of pure primal rage, and this is how we all begin.
All the parenting advice books say this, and they are right: "If you lose it, you have lost." But how do you not lose it as your veins turn to cords on your neck and forehead? All you want them to do is eat breakfast; their singular mission is to make your head rotate 360 degrees.
I realise younger has dropped a load in her nappy and is busily trying to squeeze back against her highchair to see if she can burst the offending article. Elder's head is laid in sheer despair on the table. My life flashes before my eyes. I breathe and move on.
Fifteen minutes later I am dancing around the kitchen to early morning radio, both of them in my arms screaming along, in joy this time. Missus bounces in dressed for work, takes younger in hand, shovels the girl's whole breakfast down her neck in four spoons and instructs elder to follow suit. Elder duly obliges. I stand there open-mouthed and empty-handed as they all chow down, my hips still jiggling to Christina Aguilera.
Roll with it, roll with the punches. Crises come every couple of hours and pass with the same ease and regularity.
The trick, I am finding after many years of ranting, is to remember to breathe and try not to burst.
abrophy@irish-times.ie
