I’VE BEEN READING a lot about hipster parents lately. Yet another thing to worry about in this parenting adventure. Just when I’ve got my head around the keeping-them-alive part, now I’ve got to search my soul, my iPod and my wardrobe to see if I am a hip enough parent or if, as I suspect, my addiction to leggings and penchant for Gilbert O’Sullivan is going to scar them for life.
Before I do even a cursory search of all the above, I know I am failing the hipster test. In fact, it kills me to confess, but I think if any label applies, it’s squarent. I’d like to tell you that my two girls only listen to Bob Marley and Sonic Youth all day long – “One Love is their absolute fav tune, honest” – but the reality is a song called Roly Poly, Roly Poly sung in an annoying English voice to the tune of Glory Glory Hallelujah is on my most-played list. To qualify as hip, we should, of course, be playing them a mixture of The Ramones and obscure 1990s techno and dressing them in Sex Pistols T-shirts.
The extreme version of this phenomenon are the hipster parents who reside in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the undisputed world capital of hipster moms and dads. These guys hit the headlines earlier this year because they feel it’s only right and proper to be able to bring their babies into the pub. Single hipsters are in uproar about the trend and I can’t say I blame them. The child-free hipsters say they don’t want to be under pressure to play peekaboo while they are out for a drink. And if anyone’s going to be spitting up in the pub, they want it to be them.
Sadly, I know that we are not now and never will be hipster parents. You can only be a hipster parent if you were a hipster to begin with. I do try to offer the children something more than Roly Poly to widen their musical experience, the culinary equivalent of sprinkling Chinese Five Spice on their salmon, if you will. This usually involves Beyoncé. They will happily jig around to Single Ladies for a few minutes before demanding to hear about Simple Simon and the Poxy Pieman for the 60-billionth time.
I’m not saying I don’t have hipster tendencies. I have bought my children Stevie Wonder and Velvet Underground tops and hoped that their cute coolness might somehow rub off on me. (It doesn’t. Nothing can cancel out the leggings.) And a couple of months ago I did something that in pre-child days I thought was at best selfish and at worst bonkers: I brought them to a music festival.
Even on the drive down to the Body and Soul festival at Ballinlough Castle in Co Meath, I questioned my motives. Was I really doing it for them? I hoped so; sure children love camping and it would be an adventure. If I wanted to go camping, couldn’t I have just borrowed my sister’s back garden? Well, yes, but it would have been cheating. Was I secretly hoping my boyfriend would agree to babysit in the tent while I got lost with like-minded revellers in the festival forest, drank cider and celebrated the solstice in an outdoor hot tub under fairy lights at 4am? Quite possibly.
In the event, it was all about the babies. The family camp site became a field of new friends, the walled garden just for children was a secure haven where they could roam around safely – it was harder to get in there than the backstage area. The soft play toys, the arts and crafts and the bubble machine in a tree created a magical, sun-splashed wonderland.
Oh, it was exhausting. We all crashed, man, at 8pm.
The babies slept soundly through the night while we woke every couple of hours to blasts of surreal music and festival raucousness. At 7am we bought scrambled eggs, beans and toast for our breakfast, walking past scrambled-looking people who were just going to bed.
So despite our non-hipster status, we are now seriously considering going to the Electric Picnic next month. All the “Soul Kids” are catered for with dance, singing and fairy and – oh, joy! – pizza-making workshops, while “Soul Babies” have their own tent full of sand pits and squishy things as far away from the main musical mayhem as it’s possible to be. About 1,000 children are expected, some of them, controversially, not the offspring of hipster parents.
Not being hipster parents ourselves, if we do make it to the Picnic, we won’t be secretly wishing we were off watching Hot Chip, The National, Imelda May, Seasick Steve and Mumford and Sons at the main festival. Well, one of us might be. But she’ll get over it.
THIS WEEKEND
Róisín will be selecting holiday reading from a massive pile of unread books by her bed. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and Guernica by Dave Boling are on the ever-changing shortlist