IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:My little girl is turning four and there's a riot of emotions in full flight, writes Adam Brophy
IT'S THE younger's birthday. I'm sulking in the office while she runs amok with her sister and cousins. I'm feeling underappreciated and disrespected. I'm mid hissy fit and don't know how to get out of it.
It always starts innocuously. Over breakfast I had the temerity to query the missus on her recently developed habit of sweeping the floor but not picking up the resulting pile of filth. I dug my hole further by suggesting that the not picking up of dirt is not new, rather sweeping the floor at all is.
It would just be all the more impressive if she didn't expect me to finish the job for her. I acknowledged that marriage was a partnership but there were some tasks we could manage solo.
Right now there are men out there cringing in anticipation of the wrath they know is coming. I insulted her housekeeping. I mocked. She didn't engage in banter, she went straight to nuclear. "For Chrissake, you don't do anything at all."
It didn't help that I was at that moment bent double, sweeping up her pile of remaindered detritus. Nor was the situation aided by the fact that both kids were engaged in battle over the birthday presents we had been daft enough to present before breakfast. Neither of them had eaten but the elder had spread porridge over her school skirt as the younger used her newly acquired Barbie to blend expensive, organic banana soy yoghurt into her "washed for the birthday" tresses.
Their rising pitch piqued my shortened temper, shortened due to the fact that I had been up til one the night before assembling a "Rose Petal Cottage".
The situation had incendiary stamped on it. Over-tired parents, hopped up kids, and bad kitchen maintenance protocol. On hearing I contributed nothing to the familial situation, I left the room around the same time the dustpan hit the far wall.
For some reason throwing utensils and storming out of rooms does not calm children. Surprisingly, they went from bad to worse. After a prolonged bout of wrestling I had them in the car and off to school and creche before returning to lock horns once more with my domestic nemesis.
We circled, we engaged, we broke, seethed, and finally calmed. We spoke peaceably, we addressed the themes. She decided to take a walk while I worked. On her return I went for a run. I asked her to leave the back door open should she leave the house again before I returned.
Whether she deliberately locked up and left, or whether it was a passive aggressive act of defiance, I will never know. Either way, I found myself out in the cold, shivering, smelly and exhausted after a gallop I was not fit enough to attempt. Grumbling into town, on foot, shivering in shorts and T-shirt, far too hairy and exposed for public consumption, just to find my fair wife and arrange admission into our house.
Finally re-entry was gained, as I noticed my earlier running sweat had frozen into a thin crust all up my blotchy thighs. Mad doesn't do it justice. Enraged? Maybe. Livid. Consumed. Incensed. And on the younger's birthday.
I can picture her working her way through childhood birthday memories in later life, possibly in the presence of a nodding, bearded therapist, and this one rearing up above all others.
The one that started with the toy of her dreams, hand-built and waiting for her on rising, but was quickly interrupted by a parental sweeping conflict and topped with one screaming match in the centre of town featuring an oversized father in running garb. Semi-bearded and foaming at the mouth.
Birthdays . . . oh the stress. All that pressure for it to be special. It's worse than Christmas, because it's just her with the spotlight shone down.
As I note her sister's tendency to get bolshy when the younger is in full receipt of attention, I also catch a glimpse of similar, disquieting personality traits of my own. Why isn't anyone paying attention to the intricacies of the house I stayed up half the night to build with my own sweet hands?
Why am I not fêted as the father of the birthday girl? Why is my contribution not eternally recognised?
They're sticking candles in the cake. I have to go out and sing Happy Birthday, take pictures and not shoot snide looks at the child's mother. I think the excitement of the day gets to me. I should stick to milk at the party and lay off the fizzy stuff.
When the games start I'll play fair. It's not my party, it's my four-year-old daughter's. We'll try not to fight. We are her parents after all.