A DAD'S LIFE:They don't want us around, but they want us around
‘THANKS A million for coming to stay with us, Dad. Not.” What I love about sarcasm from my 10 year old is her belief that she, or at least her classmates, invented it. It’s like they have a new toy, one that I as a parent couldn’t possibly fathom, and it turns out to be Scalextric.
She is dripping bile due to my no-show at an extended in-law family gathering. One of those things. No weddings for years, then two plump little invites for the same day land on the mat. Whichever one we chose we were going to offend somebody, I just didn’t reckon on it being the eldest daughter.
She and her sister were parked for the weekend at the family wedding, the one her parents didn’t go to. She had grandparents to do her bidding, cousins to play with and a rented country house to explore. Not good enough apparently, if I’m not there.
You’d think I’d get a fat head, being in such demand. But it’s not for my witty repartee, or to be doted on by my loving offspring. They’ve reached an age where they don’t want us around, but they want us around. In other words, in an ideal world, we would stand in the shadows while they did as they pleased until someone got hurt or hungry or needed a body to give out to. At which point we would be summoned and issued with instructions. Once the necessities were dealt with we would be waved away again to a reasonable distance. Close enough to call, far enough to ignore. This relationship between parent and child seems the 21st century version of Upstairs Downstairs. I’d have made a fine butler.
Apparently their accommodation was a Brothers Grimm style house deep in the dark woods of Wicklow. All shady corners, with a garden of shadowy boughs, fat ripe apples and its very own babbling brook, babbling dementedly away for all eternity. They went walking and half expected to come across a cottage made of marzipan inhabited by a wart-nosed witch with a double child-sized oven inside. One of the mornings they awoke to find a deer in the garden.
It was a weekend they will take into adulthood, one they’ll look back on with fondness and the enjoyment they shared will increase as the memory eases into the middle and long distance. I know they had a wonderful time because they told me about it in intricate detail, partly because they were enraptured by the trip and partly to berate me for my absence from such an experience.
And of course I regret not being there, but I’m not beating myself up over it. Maybe a few years down the line, when they go through that ferocious teen period and regard me like smallpox, I’ll look back and wish I had spent every waking moment with them when they actually wanted me around. But occasionally it is nice, for both parties, to separate for a minute or two.
I don’t get away with it often. For a while we had a nice deal in place. On rare Sunday afternoons we’d take off to the local multiplex for movies and popcorn at caviar prices. The missus would escort the pair of smallies into whatever Pixar was thrusting down our optical pipes at that moment and I would slide off into another screen for a dose of proper entertainment. Well, that was the plan anyway.
It usually transpired that I would emerge dissatisfied and confused at why anyone paid Tom Cruise or Colin Firth to play themselves, as far as I could see, in every movie they have ever appeared in. Nachos, dripping in melted cheese, would have spilled in my crotch with the Jumbo Gulp of Coke following close behind. We would all reconvene and they would regale me with the brilliance of their movie while I seethed at Cruise’s astronomical fee and prayed the cheese burns wouldn’t blister.
But even that isn’t a runner anymore; they have rumbled my slip away and can’t understand why I would bother. I don’t fully understand it myself except to say I like the silence. I like the empty house, and the solo car trip, and the bathroom door with the lock on it. Being able to shut the door makes it all the more sweet to re-open and engage again with all the furore. I like my own stink, not as much as I love theirs, but enough to need to go off every now and then and inhale deeply.
abrophy@irishtimes.com