IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:The kids are coping with the sense of dislocation better than me
THERE'S AN ancient auld yoke of a graveyard across the road. The last time a body found a home there seems to have been around 1950.
I'm wondering have I dug my own hole nearby, the first new addition to this fragmented boneyard in over half a century.
This is of course an overblown and hysterical response to our current position, but there seems no way to avoid it. Whenever a new situation presents itself I can be guaranteed to face it logically and maturely, assuring all around me that the only way to deal with things is square on and to keep moving forward.
For some reason, after a week or two, I will invariably don a frilly tutu and start hissing and squealing and feeling hard done by. I will then look to blame my wife and children for whatever has changed in our lives, even if I am blatantly 100 per cent responsible for the alteration.
It happens on holiday, when I start a new job, when I make friends, buy clothes, paint a room, change car or, worst of all, move house. I wake up, 10 days in, resenting the fact that fairies aren't dancing on my bedspread and there is no pot of gold under the bed.
The children still need to be fed and dressed and brought to school. The toilet doesn't flush properly, the rubbish has to be brought to the dump, the dishwasher needs emptying.
I don't respond to these actualities with a shrug, a determination to just "get on with things" even though winter's coming in.
No, I respond as if this is God's own personal joke, at my expense. As if he's deliberately pushing me to the limits of my coping mechanisms, what with the dishwasher-emptying and all, and I pout around the house like a teenage goth denied the opportunity to meet Marilyn Manson in person.
I flounce in despair that my life isn't perfect. I stamp and blame it on my family, in particular my in-laws because they're so bloody positive.
I hate my friends because they conspired to convince us that this move was a good idea.
My father never understood me and my mother didn't love me. In fact, everybody just beyond the realm of my sound and vision is currently laughing at our predicament and high-fiving at their skill in putting us here.
It's always around day 10 that this mood of despair ensues. In the 18th century I would have been labelled an hysteric and lashed into a sanatorium - for the good of everyone's health.
Now, in these enlightened times, you can air your paranoid thought processes, happy and safe in the knowledge that they will be accepted as the very things that make you unique in this bright new world, safe in the knowledge that most other people are having similarly crazy and irrational responses to whatever is thrown up in the course of their own lives. Or maybe that's just my madness attempting to normalise the situation.
Because all that's happened is that we've moved house. The kids seem happy in school and playgroup - and not in a spacey, disbelieving way.
They spend their time telling us what they miss, carefully balancing it with what they enjoy about the new. The elder has stormed off on a number of occasions screaming, among other things, that she wished we weren't her parents, that I am the worst father to walk the planet, that her mother is a buffoon and that she wished we'd never come to this godforsaken place.
The younger, without such a creative vocabulary, usually stamps off behind her sister - unless it is her own interventions that have invoked such wrath (in which case she will giggle at her own dastardliness and stay within safe range of her parents for fear of repercussions).
Ten minutes later they'll be found playing something dangerous and inappropriate in their bedroom, happy again. All perfectly normal.
Except they are seven and three and I, with my irrational and disproportionate outbursts, am 36. When I huff off to my room shouting, "I wish we'd never even moved here. I hate you all!'' because my toast is overdone, I have no one to blame but myself. And it has nothing to do with blame and, instead, has everything to do with feeling like a seven year old and wanting the comfort of familiarity, above all else.
What's worse, the kids are coping with the sense of dislocation better than me.
Maybe one of them will lend me a blankie and show me how it's done.