IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:It's a gorefest and the living room floor has become a killing field, writes ADAM BROPHY
THE OLD fantasies are getting violent. Not mine, violence would demand far more energy than I’m willing to commit my imagination to. Mine involve baths, massage, time, TV, sleep and being Brian O’Driscoll.
They’re simple and warm in general, apart from the odd rout in Twickenham. It’s the young animals in the house who are getting souped up.
I’ve been earwigging. Most popular games for the younger involve dolls and playing mummies and daddies. Without daddies. “How can it be mummies and daddies if nobody is the daddy?” I ask. “We don’t need a daddy, he just gets in the way.” That’s me told.
The elder has built a cardboard stable in which her toy ponies reside. Alongside mermaids and fairies. They have a strange Splash meets Unforgiven existence.
Both games seem naive and innocent, but more and more a gorefest element is creeping in. It seems that, for a game to work properly, somebody has to die. We’ve made the mistake of letting our girls hang with boys in recent months, now baby is no longer fed and soothed – she is garrotted and drop-kicked for daring to soil her nappy.
Meanwhile, the mermaid SWAT team is locked in battle with the crack commando unit from Saddle Club. No prisoners taken. The living room floor is a killing field.
We’re not worried. So far, the spiders are being left with legs intact. No smouldering cat corpses have been found in the rubbish.
My delicate children seem able to maintain the distinction between reality and fantasy, or reality and good, clean homicidal fun.
Good news for me as I am obviously surplus to requirements. Outnumbered by women three to one, I am painfully aware that even the most X-rated war games being played out feature all-female casts. Sometimes I catch them whispering together, hushing when I enter the room. Sharpening their hunting knives and mumbling about “a useless, spare wheel”.
At least they’re getting technical, I worry what might happen should a tyre blow when they’re all out together.
They are very calm about violence in a way I can’t remember from my own childhood. Back then there was lots of fake gun shooting, maybe a bit of wrestling, machine gun noises and arguments on who had the better flying style, Superman or Captain America.
Okay, some throwing of rocks and blood flowing, but these were rare and the byproducts of attempts to develop surface-to-air missiles for the Ministry of Defence.
It was the physical embodiment of comic book violence rather than a violent reality. Having said that, it’s more than likely that my memories are sepia-tinted and we were just as calm about the possibility of mass murder back then as my offspring are now.
Surely psychosis can’t have seeped into a whole generation in 30 years, half a blink in evolutionary terms.
The elder has a boy nemesis in her class. He sounds like a wonderful wind-up merchant, intent on pushing her buttons until she cracks. I think, though, he may have underestimated her ability to wind back.
She tells me they were arguing recently, probably something to do with who had the better pencil sharpener or how gross her sandwiches were. Things meandered on until he informed her he was going to cut her head off with an axe.
“He what?” says I, a little perturbed at how upset tuna fish was making our new hero.
“He said he was going to cut my head off with an axe.”
She’s looking at me with an eyebrow raised, an expression straight off 90210 although I’m pretty sure she’s never seen it. One hand is on hip, the other has a finger raised, waving, as if to say no way, boyfriend. “I looked at him and said, ‘Yeah, right! Like your father would let you take an axe to school.’”
So, it would appear, by my powers of deduction, that she had no qualms about his ability to separate her head from her shoulders. Her difficulty lay in accepting the possibility that this young chap’s father would allow his son wander into school trailing an obvious murder weapon behind him.
Knowing fathers as I do and how little attention we pay to anything early in the morning, I think she was resting her chances of survival on rather shaky ground.
Still, even under threat of her life, she was able to tap into the inbuilt female ability to emasculate. Not only did she dismiss his threats, she pointed out that he’d need permission to off her.
She’ll be undermining men in this way from here on out which, combined with these new homicidal impulses, makes me worry in advance for any poor boys stupid enough to cross her or her sister’s path.
abrophy@irishtimes.com