Drowning in a quicksand of daughters

It's a Dad's Life Adam BrophyMuhammad Ali has always fascinated me. I think his was the first sportsman's name that embedded itself in my consciousness as a child, but by the time I was old enough to take an active interest in sport, he was retired. At that stage he was probably coming to terms with the Parkinson's disease that has slowed him down so dramatically.

Recently I took another look at When We Were Kings (1996), the story of Ali's fight against George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. There's a point in the film when Norman Mailer is describing the course of the fight. Ali had gone into the first round and, to everyone's surprise, attacked Foreman. He had torn into him in a frenzy nobody expected because Ali was known as a brilliant defensive fighter. He would take people apart as they swung at him, and the consensus had been he would back away from Foreman. Not this time; in that first round he gave everything and at the end of it he realised he had barely made a dent.

Mailer describes Ali standing in his corner before the second round. He saw Ali realise here was a man he could not dominate. His head appeared to drop for a minute and then come up again. He shook himself and seemed to say "right, let's do it, this is what your whole life has been for". History records he went on to regain his heavyweight title that night in one of boxing's most magnificent upsets with a display of guile and guts rarely, if ever, matched before or since.

Of course sport is drama. And hindsight colours moments due to our knowledge of events that followed them. Maybe Ali did grit his teeth and determine right then to win that fight against all odds, then again maybe he just went ahead doing automatically the thing he had been conditioned to do all his life.

I am a bit of a quiet drama queen, myself. I wonder do we all face those momentous decisions at regular intervals in our lives. Sometimes we stand up and fight, and other times just mooch along on autopilot accepting how things play out. I say this because I often wonder how I wound up spending the majority of my time changing nappies and easing the sorrow of grazed knees.

Was it a deliberate course of action that brought me here? If it was a deliberate decision, what the hell was I thinking when I made it? The missus has been away for three days and I have found that time hard. To be fair to her she went off laid low by the flu, with the prospect of days of meetings and briefings in front of her. She would much rather not have gone. But she did, and although I don't want to be overly negative, the fact is my head is wrecked, melted, fried. To a crisp.

There have been no major dramas, we've all got on well, but I feel myself unravelling. I say no major dramas, but of course everything is a minor drama for the two monsters - from the kiwi I lovingly peeled not being quite sweet enough, to my not turning the pages at the required pace on the book I am reading aloud for the fifth time that day.

The younger has developed a knack of grabbing my legs and climbing me like stairs, refusing to countenance my walking away from her. Worst of all, there is no lock on the bathroom door so I can't even hide away for a quiet read.

It's like drowning in a quicksand of daughters. They refuse to go to sleep at night and insist on getting up while it's still dark. When they see me cry, like tear-hungry vampires, their strength is doubled.

And I chose this. Tracing back through time, there were a deliberate series of steps that put me in this position. This was the perceived better option and I went for it.

Excuse my melodrama but, by Day Three of single parenthood, I am having fantasies of my old bachelor life as often as an adolescent might have of Jodie Marsh. I made the equivalent decision of Ali walking deliberately into a Foreman uppercut. Now I regularly face the choice of either taking a further beating, or nose-diving into the canvas.

abrophy@irish-times.ie