It's a Dad's life:In the spirit of positivity I salute the stinking winter. I thank it for having the decency to scurry off, down to those Aussies with their deep tans, perfect teeth and surfing soap operas
EVERY YEAR it happens. The sun sticks its head out for a debutante appearance of its spring colours, frosty winter gear cast aside, and I realise I’ve been holding my breath for four months. Every year I vow the next winter will be different, that it will not seize up muscles to bone, tendon, sinew. That I will reach its end without shoulders at ear level, held there in a grey tension.
Winter is a sinister master. It slips silently into your make-up at the deadbeat end of each year and causes you to work hard to tread water. The maintenance of normality is at a cost – the hitched breath, chapped skin, aching joints, dark-holed eyes – all results of keeping the boat afloat in the face of a prolonged ice storm.
Those flying shards seeking to propel your limbs at those around you who do not share your irrational disintegration in the face of a single season. Your muscles clenched to maintain status quo, released only at the sight of a blooming tulip.
And now the year accelerates. These eight months last half the time of the bottom four. In that time the kids, all of us in fact, sprint. Their years change in the rush through warmth. Each passing anniversary caught in the snapshots of that particular summer, smiling faces showing fleeting landmarks in the beach picnics of that year. Gap teeth, a particularly jagged haircut, a lurid attachment to a fluorescent tanktop, all caught in time in the gathering pace to the return of the cold.
Suddenly they are there, a year older, as if from nothing. They appear fully formed in their new year’s clothes as if the last quarter had been shortened to a commercial break. Four from three, seven from six, the genesis into these newly changed creatures forgotten, soaked and absolved in a curtain of winter tension. Winter blues.
Ahh, the relief of letting it go, of seeing it pass, accompanied by the annual certainty that it won’t happen again. That the sun won’t rise, the seasons shall not pass, time will stand still at this wondrous place. This starting point, this place of perennial hope. Ireland with a Grand Slam in its pocket.
Money worries are for the dark days of December. How can we pitch on any further into the abyss with a change of this magnitude upon us? How can the world not recognise this and not fail to come to a shuddering halt, to smile and have some sense?
Family life seems ever thus. Swan’s legs under the surface, maniacally maintaining equilibrium. Every now and then something serving to remind us to notice where we are. Sometimes that thing shocks and hurts, and as the pain fades we swear to acknowledge how good we have it the rest of the time. But that resolution fades faster than any anguish and we return to getting through, shocked at the height our kids have grown to.
So, in the spirit of positivity I salute the stinking winter. I raise my glass to its dreary rattle. I praise it for its development of my stubborn, weary persona. I encourage it to come again with its dull pitch and slush-strewn streets to remind, if anything, that the constant humdrum is not so bad.
Even within its greyness it serves up the occasional sharp, biting day. One with a palette of reds and blues instead of shades of black. For this, I thank the dirty season. But most of all I thank it for having the decency to scurry off, down to those Aussies with their deep tans, perfect teeth and surfing soap operas.
I like the kids in spring, no more than in winter but I remember to tell them around about now. I like that they can play outside. I like that they can run themselves out without the burden of 16-tog duffles. I like that they want to walk now, and bike and swim and chase each other down the road. That they’re not forever shouting for another DVD or an hour on the Wii. I like the way that they move differently as another year comes into focus, that they become comfortable with the changes the winter has brought.
The elder comes into the room and asks me does her hair look nice. I tell her she always looks pretty but would she mind easing off the lipstick until she’s at least 10. She says she will. She tells me I always look handsome too.