A DAD'S LIFE:Kids can begin to fret when you're not paying attention
I WOULD like the kids to grow up and be sporting superstars but lack the motivation to drive them on. You’d have to get off the couch for that, and they have inherited my love of a chilled-out afternoon with nothing but the remote to hand and a tube of Pringles.
I still dream, however, of some magic stick I can wave that will catapult them to the forefront of a particularly glamorous field, thus allowing me to live the life of luxury and riches I missed out on vicariously through them. The pragmatist in me knows that I’ve already missed the boat by not focusing them on a particular area, seeing as they are at the ripe ages of five and eight. Tiger was shooting under par by five (and who knows, may have already been a hit with the ladies) and Maradona was practically assured of a place on the Argentine squad at eight.
Without our pushing, I would have figured a life in the stands, roaring the fanatically committed on, beckoned for them. But in the past 18 months the elder has developed a fascination with horses and riding, and slowly my hopes rose once more. She might become Cian O’Connor under her own speed.
Every Wednesday’s lesson was anticipated from the moment the previous one finished. Every game with her sister or friends had to have some element of equestrianism in it. If they were playing school, they were studying horse history, if they were chasing, it was on horseback. Every Christmas and birthday present requested in the past two years has been horse themed. There has been nothing but horse love in our house for a long time.
Which was why it seemed so strange on a night recently that she slipped out of her bed and came to us and said she couldn’t sleep. She was lying awake fretting about the horse riding class the next day.
This had us baffled and alarm bells immediately began to ring. We asked all the questions: had anybody been bothering her at the stable, was her instructor treating her well, were the other kids in the class giving her a hard time?
She answered positively about everything. There had been no change. She went with her friends and they had a good time.
It began to occur to me that she was appearing a little stressed. She’s active, she likes to keep moving, but it struck me that the constant movement had a touch of anxiety to it. By the next day she had gotten over her fears and gone to her lesson, but the worry remained that she was concerned about something and it was affecting the way she was feeling.
We spoke to her teacher. No change there. She’s carrying on fine. But there has been a tendency for her to get worried before all extra-curricular activity of late, Irish dancing, music lessons and even the beloved horse riding. We probed the child herself and she had nothing bad to say about anything, well nothing beyond the standard school complaints we have at that age. Here the eye started to turn inward. Are we, her parents, causing her to fret?
She is verbal and creative and well able to express herself. Yet, an eight year old struggles to have the vocabulary to define how she is feeling beyond excited or sad or bored. They express concern more bodily than vocally. I think she’s worried about us, I think for the first time she doesn’t feel completely secure.
It's not The War of the Rosesin our house, but it's not The Waltonseither. We're busy and we're both carving out new careers after shifting the family to a new part of the country. We're tired a lot of the time and a little snappy. We don't regard our behaviour to each other as anything out of the ordinary, but before anything else has signposted it, up pops a child shouting her concern.
We never pushed her, we took what we regarded as the relaxed approach, allowed her to pick her own pastimes, and she managed to use her feelings toward that hobby/obsession to let us know she was worried about us.
She has nothing to worry about, we’re not filing for divorce, just a little distracted. And she’s saying we can’t do that, we can’t prioritise anything else above the family because when we do that she feels marginalised and less than important. She hasn’t said that out loud but it’s become quite apparent that’s what she is saying. She’s right. There isn’t room for timeouts in a child’s life, you have to be there all the time.
It took horse riding to remind me of that.
abrophy@irishtimes.com