A DAD'S LIFE:But letting the missus decide the schedule seems best
THE MISSUS wants to have a “diary meeting”. A what? She wants to sit down, with our diaries out, so we can work through the summer, slot in childcare when we need it, weeks when I’ll be fully available, when she’ll be around, when the kids are in camps, when we’ll be taking holidays.
Really? A diary meeting?
I have a diary for 2011. A friend who works for a beer company gave it to me. It’s one of those substantial, fake leather-bound, single page per day volumes. It has all the usual guff: phone numbers, bank holiday dates, leap years from 1804 to 2048 and city centre maps. Very nice. It’s also empty.
Well, not quite empty. At some point in February, I thought it would be a good idea to remind myself to “get pork chops”. In April there was a day when it seemed I may have forgotten to “pick up kids” if I hadn’t written it down. Somewhere surely there is an exhortation to “go to bed” then “wake up”. The handful of regular weekly appointments I have bleep from my phone, other random arrangements seep from my brain.
I am good at remembering my own stuff. Work wise, once a deadline is agreed, it hovers near the frontal lobe until the job is done. It’s the same with the kids. They tend to hover near the frontal lobe too. My only problem is failing to account for their schedules in my arrangements.
I’ll see a mother approach me in the school car park. She’ll ask if one of the girls would like to come over some day soon. I will presume whichever girl is involved will be available, after all how busy could a six or a nine year old be? I will go home and announce, “Oh, by the way, you’re going to so and so’s house on Tuesday.”
At which point, I will be berated from all sides for forgetting that there is a long-standing arrangement for Irish dancing or gymnastics or swimming on a Tuesday.
For this very reason, I have cultivated what I call in my own head my gormless car park face. As a mother approaches, the jaw goes slack and I’ll maybe allow a sliver of drool to leak onto the tarmac. This is sometimes a step too far and can provoke accusations of harassment as well as gormlessness.
At the suggestion of a visit, I’ll smile a fool’s smile. “Nah,” I’ll say, “I just dunno when she’s free. I don’t really know much. I’m just here to drive them where they tell me. And how are you? You know, Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates . . .”
But by now they’re usually gone.
What wrecks my head most about organising children’s social lives (and I know by stating this I will make myself the subject of a fatwa by Irish mothers) are the nine phone calls and 16 texts each arrangement involves.
Make the plan with the dad, he’ll come with the kids at the arranged time and pick them up at the time he said he would. With the mother you have to hear about the rest of her life. Why she can’t make a certain time because she has to be elsewhere, possibly at an elderflower cordial tasting, and would I mind meeting her halfway instead, and bring some jump leads in case her car won’t start. It’s all very complicated.
And all the while, you have to nod like you don’t mind the best part of your day being occupied by listening to someone else’s ramblings, knowing they will be late at the point you’ve arranged to meet them that evening. Nod and smile gormlessly, so maybe they won’t bother you in the future.
So, here’s the missus with her diary, looking to arrange how we’ll manage kids’ requirements for the next two months. I want to create a closed system whereby everything we do will be influenced by, and accountable to, only those within the system.
But no. Already I hear other names, kids and adults, being mentioned and sense a loosening of the fibres holding this system together. No doubt there will be variables involved, much beeping of texts, waiting around and driving cars full of small girls.
I look at my wife and say with my best down-home accent, “I like to arrange things, Mama always said dying was a part of life.”
“Oh, shut up you fool. I’ll sort this out and tell you where you’ll need to be.”
“Cool. And don’t give anyone my mobile number. I wanna be a pick-up and drop-off ninja assassin.”
At that point we close the diaries, but not before I scribble in a reminder to “buy shoes”.