It's a Dad's Life Adam BrophyWill someone please send out a search party for all the confused Irish stoners traversing the globe in a hydroponic stupor attempting to find what was never lost, namely themselves.
They were never lost because all the time economist David McWilliams had the answer and finally he let the cat out of the bag in The Pope's Children. I know I'm way behind the posse on this book, that it's been doing the rounds for about a year now, and I'm gutted. If I'd had all the answers 12 months ago a lot of anxiety could have been averted.
I challenge anybody to read this and not find themselves in there. I'm claiming to be a "HiCo", "the aristocracy of the Pope's children", a very poor HiCo but one none the less. This is a mixture of a Hibernian and a Cosmopolitan, and as I have lived in London and know members of a moderately successful (particularly in Japan) trad-band, I demand membership. Chuck into the mix that I'm a bit of a simpering New Man by virtue of writing a pseudo-parenting column, and I may possibly be accepted.
But forget me, I want the predictions on how my kids will survive in our brave new Ireland.
McWilliams tells me I have two "Destiny's Children", and by God he's right. They are my soldiers of fortune going out to fight a guerrilla war every day to prove their greatness, and by proxy, mine. If "Destiny's Child" does not exceed, ascend or make the grade, there is something wrong with her as an individual, according to our not overly sympathetic society.
My two little DCs are having a hard enough time of it at the moment proving their worth out in the world. A couple of days a week they go up to the Little Rainbows creche in Fairview. The elder is only there for afternoons having walked the plank into Junior Infants. That of course was the major drama round our way in recent weeks, and it masked the fact that the younger was having her own little trauma; heading off anywhere for the first time, without at least her sister for company.
My new bible tells me that Destiny's Child is measured and graded from the moment she peeks her nose out the front door, and if she doesn't exceed at least brilliance then it is a reflection on me. Yeah, I know I'm in trouble. What my economist guru neglects to mention is all that we pack them off with when they go out that door. They may appear sparkling, shiny and brand new, but they are actually grubby with our anxieties and past childhood experiences that we have skilfully implanted into their psyches from day one.
No matter how easily we, as parents, slot into a social stereotype and conform with the outward appearances of that tag, to the monsters we are simply the trough on which their minds feed. The elder doesn't care if I'm a "Breakfast Roll Man", she's only concerned that I give her breakfast, Now!
That's where the labels run to threadbare, whether we aspire to them or have them thrust upon us. When we get inside the front door and chuck away the cloak of urbane, contented gentleman Jim, or ruthless, ice-cold, boardroom Brigitte, whatever role we're into, it's the kids that see us raw and struggling. They don't see the label, the classification, all they see is their Dad and how he's behaving towards them, not the inconsequential other adults who flit in and around his world.
No matter how hard I try to project a positive spin on their future - the You're a Star phenomenon, McWilliams calls it - they still sense my fears based on my experiences. That's what makes them personalities, not figures in a survey. It's only later, around my age, that you give up the weight of personality expectation, pick a category for yourself and embrace it.
abrophy@irish-times.ie
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