IT'S A DAD'D LIFE:Adult lives are just as chaotic as children's, it's just that we try to hide it, writes ADAM BROPHY.
THE THEME today is chaos. Wikipedia, home of ambiguity in the knowledge-based society, tells me that chaos theory describes the behaviour of certain systems which may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect, see Ashton Kutcher’s diabolical movie for further info here).
Due to the system’s sensitivity, it responds to initial conditions with an exponential growth of “perturbations”, according the resulting behaviour of these systems’ apparent randomness.
Randomness and chaos adequately describe family life. Random because you can never be sure where the next demand will come from, chaotic because, no matter how deliberately you plot a day, irrationality will out and chaos will ensue.
Our most recent visitor stayed four nights. Just returned from Australia, he marvelled at the country’s downward spiral and his timing in choosing to rejoin it. He soaked up the rural ambience and considered it for the first time as a realistically viable opportunity.
We hashed this out. I gave him our initial reasons for the urban departure and weighed them against the reality of what had happened ever since. He hummed, he hawed. It’s unlikely he would choose to make his new life down here. Then he told me a story.
A friend of a friend had been growing increasingly worried for his own personal safety in the city. He became appalled at the random violence he witnessed most Saturday nights as he strolled through town.
Rather than curtail his socialising, and feeling at a disadvantage due to a disinclination to join in, he bought a can of Mace. But how to check his defensive measures were adequate?
Obvious really. On one of his drunken Saturday-night stumbles home he approaches a slumbering homeless person on the street and sprays his newly purchased poison directly into his victim’s eyes. Random.
Apparently the Mace was in perfect working order. Chaos. You no longer have to scour the streets in advance for potential perpetrators of physical pain, you have to take care to avoid crossing swords with potential victims.
This story didn’t cause me to celebrate removing myself from the epicentre of random attacks as I don’t think that’s possible.
Random will get you wherever you are, not necessarily in the traditionally confrontational way, but more likely as a sideswipe on a Sunday morning just after you’ve picked up the papers and a coffee in the local Spar.
And it will probably be the result of exponential reactions to minor situations in sensitive circumstances. Man feels fear on a number of occasions over a period of time. Man takes action to protect himself. Man causes exact incident that he feared at outset to random bystander.
Bystander, having only entered the ‘system’ at the last moment, has no understanding of the steps involved on the way to the acid burning of his corneas.
Still, our visitor saw this Mace attack as another reason to avoid city life so the upside may be that he comes to live near us. Every cloud . . .
Kids live in apparent chaos as opposed to the disguised version we inhabit. Due to the very new nature of their lives, every situation is an “initial condition”.
Each condition has far-reaching implications for future responses to similar scenarios. I introduced the younger to our local GP on the street. She screamed that she didn’t want him to cut her up because there was nothing wrong with her. He, I presume, wondered what sort of impression her parents had given her about doctors.
I had no such concerns; she had been screaming randomly and exaggeratedly at every possible opportunity throughout the day. If an ice-cream vendor had approached proffering a Cornetto she would have roared that he was attempting to destroy her hearing with an impending rendition of O Sole Mio.
In other words, the apparent reason for a kid’s behaviour can often be the wrong reason. The younger has no fear of doctors, she gets a kick out of stethoscopes.
That morning she had attended creche and her buddy had failed to attend as usual. The world had slipped a little on its axis and I was to blame. For a four year old there is no inconvenience too small not to be labelled a disaster on a biblical level. Their responses to events are as far from linear as possible.
Deny a child sugar sandwiches for breakfast and in some invisible cyclical way she will take personal umbrage at Newcastle’s relegation from the premiership. The connecting dots make no sense to you, but all the sense in the world to her.
I don’t think my job is to find or follow those dots, merely be aware they are probably there.