Wednesday 15 May 2013

The Fear

There appear to be a lot of perfect children out there. I regularly hear parents proudly detailing the expert ability of their four year old to read, or write, or solve quadratic equations. This used to annoy me when I was training to be a teacher. 

"He reads very well at home. When will he move onto the next reading set?"
"Well, at this point we're still focussing on trying to get him to disregard his own faeces. One step at a time, eh?"

I can understand why parents extol the dazzling brilliance of their kids. It comes out of a mix of love and pride. But it also comes from a little kernel of desperation that lurks in the back of every parent's mind. I think if you're parenting right (which obviously I am, the evidence in this blog alone speaks volumes) you find yourself pleading in the bleak hours of the night; "Don't let my children grow up to be bat shit mentalists."

I'm as guilty of this as the next person. Regardless of his idiosyncrasies, I harbour the not-so-secret belief that the Boy will stop singing songs about his bum and write an opera. The Girl will no doubt win a Noble Prize for her imminent discovery of cold fusion, just as soon as she stops lying under the table screaming because the cat won't fetch. It's just a matter of time.

This clearly runs against the vast wealth of experience I've had in the past six years of parenthood.

"You're meant to be getting changed, Boy. Stop getting distracted."
"YOU distract me, baby!"

This was accompanied by a series of dance moves starting with Gangnam style (AGAIN) horse riding and followed by the more disturbing pelvic thrust, whilst chanting;

"Nadgers, nadgers, nadgers.. oh yeah.."

Downstairs the Girl finally finished her dinner, a titanic blood-letting experience that she dragged out for over an hour. She gets this from my Ma, I think - who has been known to finish breakfast shortly after lunchtime. I suspect this is because my Ma is from Spain, a nation that sees nothing wrong with having dinner at midnight.

Exasperated, the Wife told her to go and get some grapes from the fridge for dessert. The Girl ran from room, returned ten seconds later with an empty bowl, sat at the table, looked at the bowl and said;

"Er... Oh..."

Funnily enough, this does nothing to ease my worries.

Wednesday 8 May 2013

The Sounds of Silence

I may be quite close to losing my marbles. Only yesterday I posted a load of pictures of a camping trip the family and I had been on. I titled the pictures "Edmonston, Essex" only to be told by my chortling Wife that we hadn't been in Edmonston or Essex , because that place doesn't exist. We'd been in Edwardstone. In Suffolk.

I don't feel bad about this for two reasons. Firstly because I once spent four days in Amsterdam with a friend who thought he was in Copenhagen the whole time (which at least clarified why he thought bacon was the Dutch national dish and kept constantly asking where the statue of the little mermaid was "because she's hot.")

Secondly; have you seen the shit I deal with? Take today, for instance...

A rare and wondrous thing happened when I got home fromon work today. When I opened the door instead of entering a screaming whirlpool of entropy, I was greeted with silence. The purest absence of sound. It felt like the start of your average apocalypse movie, as I wandered around the land marks of my house boggling at the vacuum the lack of my Kids created.

It was freaking brilliant. Right up until I looked up the stairs and saw this.

Is it...looking...right at me...?

I backed away slowly and went to the sofa. My arse had barely kissed the seat when there was a hammering noise on the front door, which promptly opened and vomited the Girl and Boy hollering into the quiet of the house. The Girl ran up to me, yelled ;

"Daddeeeeeee!"

And, wielding a bottle of water hit me squarely in the penis. I took this manfully by saying "Oof!" and slowly curling up into a ball before falling off the sofa. At this point the Boy arrived.

"Dad, I learnt what a baby swan is called today."
"Nnnngg..."

I replied. Unfazed, the Boy continued.

"It's called a maggot."
"...no...isn't..."

The Boy face palmed.

"Aw, man. I got it wrong! It's called a magnet."

So lets be clear on this. I have yet to write my name on the wall in my own excrement yet, and for that I should be commended.


Wednesday 1 May 2013

The Other New Normal

There's a story about the late French Premier Charles De Gaulle's wife that goes like this;

Lunching with English friends at the time of her husband's retirement, Madame de Gaulle was asked what she was looking forward to in the years ahead. Without hesitation she replied;

"A penis."

There was a pause before her host said;

"I think the English don't pronounce the word quite like that. It's happiness.'"

Now, I don't know how true that is (and yes, I checked Snopes) but it appeals to me because - to put it mildly - happiness messes with my mojo. Not my happiness, I'm not Eeyore for crying out loud. Other people's happiness.  It's not that I don't like people to be happy, I just don't trust it. I have a paranoid voice that pipes up when people laugh that likes to tell me people are laughing at me. Partly based on the fact that people laugh at me a lot.

Actually, that's a lie. I don't like it when people are happy. When I was at university there was a women in one of my classes that would always greet me with beaming cheery smile and the words;

"Morning, sausage!"

Which made me want to headbutt her. In fact, I roundly ignored her. Mainly because I'd come to the conclusion that to be that cheery every day she had to be either mentally ill or on a similar self-medication regime as Keith Richards. Turned out she was just a happy person. The bitch.

So yesterday really creeped me out as I cycled home and fell off my bike in front of a BMW. Being 40, bespectacled and rotund, I generate a moderate level of attention cycling through town, and regularly draw comments from people I pass. Most commonly that comment is;

"PEDAL, YOU FAT C**T!"

So on any other day the person driving the BMW I'd liberally spread myself under would have run me over. I know this because he was driving a BMW, and the only way he could have been a bigger arsehole would have been if he was driving a 4x4. However, as I clambered out from under his front bumper I saw the driver jumping out of his car with a look of concern.

"You alright, mate?" He asked. I nodded, not wanting to admit that I'd hurt my bum because I didn't want to sound like I was five. I cycled off somewhat baffled that someone I'd judged solely on the car they drove had been wrong to do so. I thought about this for some time and came to the only conclusion a right thinking individual could think; he'd clearly stolen the car.

As I was thinking this I passed a group of thirteen or fourteen-year-olds who yelled;

"Hello!"

Once again, taken aback that they hadn't held me up with a pair of scissors, marched me to an off-licence and made me buy them cider, I replied hesitatingly;

"Uh... Hello."
"Hope you have a nice day!"

We're through the looking glass here, people. This sort of thing doesn't happen to me. Ever. Clearly "Hope you have a nice day"  was some coded teen-speak meaning; "I'm going to stab you up" so I ignored them and cycled as fast as I could.

But as I've said many times in the past, home is my little castle of normalcy. As I walked through the door the Girl ran up and cuddled me.

"Daddeeee! I love you!"
"Thanks..."
"I want to be like you when I grow up."

To which the Boy said;

"What, fat?"

Later that evening, after tucking the Kids into bed, I went out to our shed to get something from the freezer to eat. As I was about to walk back into the house I heard the Girl's voice say;

"Does anyone want any fairy dust?"

I looked up to see her peering out of her bedroom window between the curtains, holding something.

"You should be asleep."
"Here's your fairy dust."

she said, ignoring me. And then dropped a can of hair spray straight into my upturned face.

It's things like this that keep me on an even keel. As strange as it is to say, it's the weirdness and abuse I encounter at the hands of my spawn that gives me comfort in an uncertain world where people say hello to you, and expect you to be cheerful. The main happiness I get is that thus far neither of my Kids have slit my throat in my sleep. Why do I say that? Well, because that same evening they did this;

That IS what you think it is and no, I didn't make it
The reason the Boy isn't in this photo is because he was making a Lego "mincing machine". 

I didn't ask. I was happy to be normal again.