It's a Dad's Life: Girls and boys. Have you noticed they're a little different? I don't know much about Mars or Venus, but in my few years here on Earth I've picked up on some notable discrepancies in perspective and behaviour.
That way, of course, lies madness. For if you are to point out difference, you will necessarily have to favour one side over the other. That decision will be arrived at with no mind to any rational thought, but will instead be based on the chromosome lottery that dictates whether your facial hair is acceptable or a candidate for laser treatment. You can't win - unless you're a man and the whole of society is skewed in your favour so that you have greater access to education, welfare, the top jobs, Afghanistan and certain dark bars in the city centre which still operate a single-sex policy. So, hurrah for my widow's peak and burgeoning nasal hair, I have truly lucked out in the lottery of life.
And not only that, but my children are girls rather than boys. When it comes to kids, everyone knows girls rule. They are sweet and funny, they play with dolls and try to write poems, they learn songs off the radio and make up dances to go with them. They pretend to cook you dinner, then serve you a bowl of toilet water and insist you drink it because "Daddy, I made you soup!"
Boys are smelly and they fight and break things. They break everything. They seek out your most precious things, things you have placed in a high-density safe for safe keeping, and they break the safe and then they break your things. They cut up your old love letters and your wedding pictures. They will eventually, if you don't sit on them, burn down your house.
My friend's son is in junior infants. On Monday of last week he fell in the schoolyard, smashing his forehead into the tarmac. By the time he got home he had a cracked egg growing out of the front of his head. On Tuesday he fell again, this time slamming his newly grown appendage into the same piece of ground. You may be thinking "Ouch!" but my friend knew then something was up, some sort of brutal plan was being hatched.
Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday. The son rolls home from school, his fresh open wound daubed with ashes, chuffed.
The parents spend the evening cleaning dirt from raw flesh while the victim of this clerical attack struggles and squirms having achieved his ultimate goal of causing his folks maximum annoyance.
Only a couple of weeks previous, the same boy had managed to locate his father's clippers (conveniently left plugged in by his bed) and shaved his own and his younger brother's heads. Entering their house is like waking up in a Mike Leigh movie crossed with a Roadrunner cartoon. You know disaster awaits and an anvil could drop on your head at any moment.
It has been said to me that, when it comes to kids, boys wreck your house but girls wreck your head. I suspect that the perpetual guilt I have felt in the six years since the elder girl's birth may be down to some sort of psychic manipulation she exercises over me.
Her power was only reinforced by the arrival of her sister three years ago. I spend my days acquiescing to their demands and convincing myself that I am in charge.
Having two sisters and five sisters-in-law means I have been subtly manoeuvred for most of my life. What is astonishing to witness is the birth and speed of development of that power. At the same time our male offspring are rushing around bashing things with their heads.
Lads, we haven't a chance.
