A DAD'S LIFE:It gets harder to relate to your kids as they get older, writes ADAM BROPHY
SOME THINGS I like about my kids. They’re funny. They’re smart. They love me. Most of the time.
I am also regularly told I am hated. These bursts of vitriol don’t require any major event, rather the denial of a lollipop or an expression of exasperation at asking a child to put her shoes on for the fifth time while she continues to sit there stroking the dog’s ears. That’ll do it.
The elder tells me she hates me, but struggles to keep it down. The force of guilt is strong in this one. The younger uses it as a ploy, knowing it will result in her being hung upside down and shook until she admits she loves her dad. The force of nature is strong in that one.
I don’t remember telling my parents I hated them until I was at least 12. It may have been uttered under breath or mouthed silently at their retreating backs, but it was not vocalised with any volume until adolescence began to dig its claws in. At that stage the statement of hatred encompassed the belief that they just didn’t bloody understand. It was a purebred teen flounce, storming from the dinner table, choked on the anguish of youth.
Returning, eventually, I experienced being properly patronised for the first time; that I understood. My mother and father raising eyebrows and whispering behind hands to each other. I knew then old people didn’t get it. Only Morrissey and Robert Smith got it.
So far in the parenting stakes, I’ve tried to relate to my own pair by remembering how things felt to me at their age. It helps to remind yourself that walking into the classroom occasionally felt daunting, or that the teacher asking you to speak in front of the class in junior infants was more terrifying than the monster under the bed. By doing this you can sometimes manage to avoid blindly pushing them into the same dark alleys you found yourself in. But only sometimes, because really those dark alleys are required learning. Feeling the fear is part of being a kid.
What worries me is that already I’m beginning to “not get it”. There is a built-in gender difficulty there. They like ponies and dancing and dolls and make-up which, if I’m being honest, make me snooze. I presumed, however, that I’d get by just relating to their enthusiasms, their level of interest or disinterest in things, no matter what those things are. I figured the teen years would come and they’d hate me then for a while, but up to that point I’d be a cuddly confidante.
I used to hear the line, “Kids grow up so fast these days”, and look with disdain at the person responsible. My thoughts were that kids grow up no faster than they ever did, it’s just that you’ve got old. You’ve forgotten your kid experience, your own time back then. I vowed to retain what I call my kidness. I’m not stupid enough to think they’d view me as a peer, but they don’t need me as a peer, they need me as a parent. I just figured keeping the kidness there would make the parenting stuff a little easier.
Now this fugue is setting in. Already, I can’t quite relate to them. I don’t always understand why they do the things they do, why they like the things they like, and why they won’t just do or like the things I tell them to do or like. I still don’t think that kids grow up any faster these days, but I do believe a sort of parental Alzheimer’s kicks in around the same point your eldest child starts to constantly question you. It just may be that they start questioning you a little earlier these days.
Suddenly, you can’t stop seeing your father’s face every time you look in the mirror as you realise those hairs in and on your nose and ears are going to require constant attention if you want to avoid being recognised in the neighbourhood as hirsute facial orifice man. You hear him say, “Quieten down and take it outside”, and realise the words came out of your own mouth. When you hawk and spit in the mornings you make the same sound you used to hear emanate from the bathroom as you lay in bed for those last cosy minutes before school.
The childhood memories are still there, it’s just that they are ones of what you are becoming, not what you have been. That’s probably a good thing – after all who pays any attention to Robert Smith anymore? My girls have Amy, Britney and Lindsay as role models. Phew.