A DAD'S LIFE:My children need less of the time I freed up for them, writes ADAM BROPHY
WORK HAS an awful lot to answer for. No matter what time it starts at, it makes you get out of bed at an hour you don’t quite want to. No matter how much you get paid, the payoff is time, and even if that time is fabulously compensated (in general, it really isn’t), there is forever the niggling thought that just having the time may be better than the cash.
Work also shapes identity, and mine is forged in the fires of avoidance. I remember my school careers guidance counsellor sitting me down, looking at my Leaving Cert subjects and advising a career in engineering. Nothing I could say would convince her I had cocked up in my subject choice and the only engineering I would be successful at would involve my own downfall. I hedged bets, applied for and was accepted into Arts. Woohoo. Four years of bad clothes, bad hair, questionable hygiene and blackouts, followed by a lifetime of unemployability.
At least that’s how it would appear looking back. But if I could have verbalised my dream job back in 1989, my aspirations would have been for a job where I dictate my own hours (in the main), where I get to spend most of my time by myself and where very few people are in a position to bug me. That was all I wanted, but I had an expectation that this was something I would grow out of. Even as a teen, it felt particularly teeny to be left alone. Surely, at some point, other people would become attractive to mix with.
Not so. If anything, the need to avoid people has intensified as my curmudgeonly persona has taken shape. And it would appear I have found, have actively created, my dream job as a freelance editor.
Money wasn’t much of a factor at 17, and it doesn’t feature a whole lot in the present day. If I could tell my 17-year-old self anything, it would be that this is an issue to consider. Dream job with cash in pocket trumps dream job with bailiffs at door. Still, I’d take broke and no boss over most things most days.
The reasoning behind a conscious decision to move towards penury was to make myself available for the child, when there was only one child. One became two, and having moved down the path of arranging work around the needs of the first, it would have been rude to disregard the second. For a while their needs were all-consuming, but they ease.
And now, despite the fact that they are still young, they are remarkably easy to facilitate. There are plenty of parents of friends among whom the load can be shared, and even when you are shouldering the burden of other people’s kids, the demands are lessened because they have each other and that’s always preferable to spending time with a parent.
This, in itself, is slightly disconcerting. The role in which you placed yourself, as central to the needs of the children, just dissolves. You still do the key tasks – the feeding, the delivering, the monitoring and disciplining – but the need for omnipresence is gone. Focus can resume to what you might like to do yourself, what you might like to achieve for yourself.
Consider the suggestion I faced over the dinner table recently: “Dad, why don’t you get yourself a proper job? Like a vet or a shopkeeper? Go to work like other dads?” What I do has never seemed real to them.
For the first time the reasons for not quitting the career path when the choice was in front of me come into hard focus. Self-assessment points to where I may have been had I not jumped ship and the inevitable comparisons to where I am. This isn’t a financial exercise, it’s a realisation that at 39 I’m not required by my brats at the lengths I once was, and at 39 I’m too young for semi-retirement. But I’m too old to start again.
Working hard to free up time is a good thing, especially when kids are small and time is the most precious commodity. Sooner than expected, they need time of their own and yours is returned, mainly because they regard your time as being up. A friend’s 11-year-old son recently told him his life was over, he would never be a pro footballer or a rock star, he should give up. We all chortled at the story, but there is a rub.
Older and gnarlier, rubbing my eyes, I’m coming blinking into the light. What the hell am I supposed to do with myself?