IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:My daughter now wants a pony and the problem is . . . we could get one
‘BUT WHY can’t I have a pony?”
I resist the urge to say, "Because we're not in Gone With The Wind." I have all the standard answers: can't afford it; nowhere to keep it; don't know what to feed it (do they like chips?); can't afford it.
Kids don’t get money. Can’t really blame ours for that, their parents don’t get money. We possess the basic premise that to survive and maintain a level of composure it helps to spend a little less than you earn and yet find it near impossible to live by that same mantra. The elder’s negotiating ploys highlights her innocence: “If you get me a pony I won’t ask for a DS.” Followed by: “You can take all the money out of my purse.”
Little does she know I already take all the money from her purse whenever I need a pint towards the end of the month. Nah, I don’t. That would be very 1950s. Although the sight of the blue note peeping a corner out has, on occasion, tempted me.
The money is an issue, but if I were keen and had a vision of my little girl leading the pack up the home straight at Aintree on Grand National day I reckon that could be overcome. The real problem, for her anyway, is that when she says “pony” I hear “tap-dancing shoes”, “GAA Club membership” and “drama classes”, everything launched into with massive gusto only to be forgotten within weeks. Ponies won’t be forgotten, they’ll turn that haughty lengthy face on you and demand, if not affection, at least attention.
I should never have let an animal through the door. I blame my mother. On a birthday she came equipped with two goldfish, a tank, a bagful of gravel and a watery pump. What harm? They’re only fish. They swim and eat and turn their water an eerie brownish green.
Within weeks the kids have stopped seeing them. Not only because of the congealed water but because their own goldfish attention spans have turned elsewhere.
Enter the puppy. For a time all life stops to admire her coat, her chocolate-drop eyes, her stuttering gait, floppy suede ears and irresistible demands to be loved. She bounds through our lives leaving a trail of breathless carnage and the missus bent double with a pooper scooper and disinfectant spray.
But even this ball of canine cockahoop can command juvenile focus for only a limited time. Now her bounciness is considered the norm, her incessant face-licking post- bottom cleaning a desperate downer.
Now the demand is to move up the mammal scale in the belief, it would seem, that true happiness can only be achieved by increasing the size of the animal in harness. Mmm, does that make a fully grown example of homo sapiens the final pet on every girl’s wish list? Are we husbands mere successors to a childhood pooch? At least we’re toilet trained.
If a pony poos in your house you don’t just whip out the wipes and work on the stain. It’s time to don wellies and get shovelling. There is a little more work involved in a pony than a puppy.
But that isn’t the issue at the heart of the matter. At a push I could learn the ropes of mucking out and all those other odd sounding verbs that people of equine inclination perform around stables. I would insist the child would muck out, saddle up, shorten her stirrups (and so on) herself.
It’s just that I can’t get my head into a place that sees us as the sort of family that has a horse, even a little one.
I see the horsey girls of my youth. The ones who lived in ‘jods’ and always had their hair plaited. They were slightly breathless and rosy-cheeked, and as I write this I realise I never knew any girls like this but may have a memory of a Mallory Towers book, read on the sly, seeping through my synapses. How can we be a horsey family if I have no frame of reference?
You can’t have a horse if you live in a mid-terrace, inner city cottage. Well, not unless you’re a bona fide urban cowboy and have no designs on befriending your neighbours. You can, however, get all horsed up living where we do.
You can spread out, become one with the beasts. With that, my heart quickens and I have a sharp urge for confined spaces and the smell of exhaust. To procure a pony would be to admit that this is it. That they really are going to grow up . . . become . . . how do you say . . .
Rural?
abrophy@irishtimes.com
