'Was that you?" my boyfriend asks. "Did you do that?" He's talking about an item on the radio. Something about Frozen and fisticuffs and parents who should just let it go.
“Was that me, what?” I say. I am playing a Moshi Monsters Guess Who-style game. It’s better than the real Guess Who, the new incarnation anyway, which is an awful piece of yellow and red plastic engineering which fell apart after a few goes. Not only that, but like the 1970s, admittedly sturdier version, it includes only a handful of female characters and is chock full of cartoon blokes. I enjoy the game better with the mostly gender-free monsters.
Playing the game is not just another example of my excellent parenting (one of my children is addicted to Guess Who), it’s research. I am planning to become a millionaire when I get around to making my women-only version of Guess Who featuring Mary Robinson, Malala, Michelle Obama, Amelia Earhart, Katie Taylor and assorted others. My daughters will think they are just playing a game and won’t have a clue that they are secretly being inspired by the bravery, intellect and derring-do of the world’s greatest women. It’s positive brainwashing. Or just plain brainwashing. Either is fine with me.
"Was that you? Queuing up all night for a toy? The Garda being called because you got into a fight over an Frozen Elsa Snow Glow Doll?"
“No,” I say. Although part of me is temporarily unsure. Did I queue up outside a suburban toy superstore all night and then just forget about it? It’s not the kind of thing you’d imagine would slip my mind but at this stage it wouldn’t surprise me.
“You’ve got form, in fairness.”
This is deeply unfair. By introducing my "form" he is breaking an unspoken code, bringing up a night we've agreed never to mention again. The night I unexpectedly queued up to secure optimum seats for our daughters' Variety Show performance. I might as well tell you now.
I hadn’t meant to queue. I only went to see whether it was true that people were actually camping out overnight to get the best seats. Then I arrived at the car park to find all of these women with folding chairs, and sun loungers doubling as camp beds, nursing flasks of tea and assorted midnight feasts. As I took in the scene, I got a sudden urge to join them. No greater love has a mother for her children than to freeze all night in a car park, sort of thing. What kind of mother was I anyway that would choose her warm bed over seats in the dress circle/parterre? A lazy, good-for-nothing one that’s what kind.
“I want to go home and get my sleeping bag. And a flask. And maybe some gin. And some of your flapjacks. A toothbrush maybe?” The father of my children sighed the sigh of a man who has lived too long with a spontaneous creature prone to flights of questionable fancy and susceptible to peer pressure.
It was a grim night, I can’t lie. I needed the gin. I thought there might be a kind of communal spirit, I imagined scenes of camaraderie like you’d have found in the underground during the Blitz. I did have some chats, but it was as though we were all faintly embarrassed to find ourselves there. I heard tales of other parental, although it was usually maternal, sleep out events. A rumour went around the car park of one school where parents had slept out all night to get their children’s names down for after-school activities. That is what I call hardcore.
Even though it was freezing, I think I did actually sleep at one point, on the ground, using my jacket as an undersheet. When eventually, at around 8am, my children’s surname was called, I almost missed my slot. They had to call five times. “I forgot their surname, it’s a different name to mine,” I tried to explain to the man with the clipboard. All the parental brownie points I might have accrued for sleeping rough had been cancelled out by forgetting their names. Oh well.
But Frozen Snow Glow Elsa. No. It wasn't me. The Frozen obsession seems to have melted like Elsa's ice castle. It has been replaced by a different obsession. I call this one: "The Entire Catalogue From A Certain Toy Superstore Except The Stuff That's for Babies." Who gave them the catalogue? Good question. That is a bone of contention that will still be carrying on in 2015. All I know is last year their Santa list had one thing on it: surprises. This year it has many, many more things on it including something called Barbie Endless Curl, that I know is going to fall off Santa's sleigh and into a ditch, never to be found again. Oops.
New parents: do not, ever, give your children a toy catalogue. Also: sleeping out all night does not make you a good parent. It just gives you the sniffles. roisin@irishtimes.com