A DAD'S LIFE:When self-deprecation is the wrong tool
‘I’M GOING to write about us fighting over who is the most tired.”
“No, you’re not. You’ll just make yourself sound like superman,” she says. “You think you’re being self-deprecating but actually you sound like a tool.”
“You can’t tell me what I can or can’t write about. Just because you’re tired. I’m tired too. Bloody clocks going forward, takes about a month to get used to it. And as usual, even though I am more tired, I am up first, which is a nightmare because I have to wake them up and they will claim to be even more tired than me.”
“Oh shut up. Write whatever you want.” She rolls back under the covers for a few extra minutes and I go to face the girls. Five minutes later I’m back.
“They won’t get up for me and I’m too tired to deal with their crap. You’ll have to go and shift them. I’ll go down and start the lunches and the breakfasts and everything.”
I’ll take anything over the act of dragging them out of bed. In the top 10 of thankless tasks, it is Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do, it’s been number one forever. I can have the lunches made and breakfast on the table while she attempts to coax them into vertical positions without losing her mind. By the time they are dressed, someone will have melted down, and I will have so much work already done I will be able to assume the role of mediator from the highest of moral high grounds. Even though I’m really tired.
Two hours later they have gone to school. A swim bag was lost, and then found. It was found near the tie that was also lost, but the school coat stayed lost. Probably near the water bottle that was lost and not found. Maybe the dogs are stealing these things. Can’t say for sure because one of them is also lost. But he always comes back. Unfortunately.
“What are you doing now? Are you busy?”
She sighs. She is so tired, she tells me, but she has to write a press release for a client. I sympathise and then press on.
“What am I gonna write about if I can’t write about us fighting about being tired?”
“Write about that thing they did, you told me about it last week, y’know . . . the thing.”
I sigh now. Deeper than her sigh, because of my tiredness. “What thing? I can’t remember, it’s all just a blur.”
“When they made you do all that stuff that you didn’t want to do.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down.”
“Well, what about the kiss in the willy?”
“The what?”
“Remember. When the younger tried to kick you in the balls and you told her never to kick a boy in the willy. Except you said, ‘Never kiss a boy in the willy.’”
For the record, that is a phrase, if at all possible, you should avoid saying to your pre-teen daughters. Which, on reflection, shouldn’t be hard. It opens up doors that every father wants to keep closed. The hilarity lasted a full hour right up to bedtime as the pair of them made comments and suggestions on how this particular practice could work out.
The general consensus was that you would want to be crazy to engage in such an act but, worryingly, there were probing questions from the elder as to whether anyone had ever actually done this in the past.
No, of course not.
Surely someone must have. Even by accident?
No, never. At this stage I am almost willing to suggest the younger tries to kick me again, just to distract them, but the elder loses momentum. Instead the two of them rush off to play for a last half hour before lights out. I hear them discussing how dogs are fond of this procedure but the topic is losing its lustre. For a long time, I hope.
“That might work,” I say.
“As long as you do it tastefully,” she says, “You don’t want to be all icky about it.”
“I know. It’s just it’s really hard not to sound bitter and grumpy about everything when you’re as tired as I am all the time. Maybe if I didn’t have to do everything around here I could sound more upbeat.”
“Everything? You’re crazy. You’re actually delirious if you believe that.”
“Okay, maybe not everything. But a lot.”
“Oh God, I am too tired to listen to you.”
“Not as tired as me.”