IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:Stories can give a child a portal to another exciting world to inhabit, writes Adam Brophy
AT SOME point in the recent past I figured it would be a good idea to up the ante during the bedtime process, and not only read stories but also begin to make them up. That particular night the younger was yelling, neither The Gruffalo nor The Gruffalo's Child was working its magic, I appealed to her vanity and it worked.
I told her a story involving herself and her bestie, Gracie, sneaking off to the circus one night, befriending a lion and saving the day by convincing the lion to allow them put their heads in its mouth when it was having an off-day in the ring.
In the story, the crowd went wild. Back home in bed, the younger beamed, rolled over and went to sleep. This proud dad crept smugly downstairs and bragged that once again he had staked his claim for International Father of the Year 2008.
The circus story worked for the guts of a week. But I should have recognised the law of diminishing returns and instead of reinforcing the habit, reintroduced an alternative. I should have gone and bought new books, not basked in my own glory as newly self-crowned baby whisperer.
The younger looked at my swollen head and decided there was a library of Amazon proportions stored there, each book starring the same protagonists: a pair of reckless three-year-olds with gombeens for parents who never miss them as they slip away for adventures around the world.
The pressure is on. I have to come up with fresh goods every few nights. If I crack it and strike gold, one tale will stand up to a few tellings. If I pull a lemon, my harshest critic, the protagonist herself, will pull a face and consign it to the cutting room floor.
"Next," she says.
I've started taking notes during the day, wondering about character development, plot devices and story arcs, all so that I can appease this audience of one.
The elder looks on bemused. She doesn't think I'm much to write home about. She thrusts Roald Dahl into my hand and tells me to let the master take control. Her issue is that her sister's friend is the co-star in these hot off the press tales. The big sister appears only in the occasional cameo.
That's when it clicked. Sometimes I think I've got a great one rolling and the younger waves her hand disdainfully as if to tell me to give it a break. On other occasions I vaguely mumble about the two girls strolling off somewhere while I distractedly pick up dirty clothes from their bedroom floor and she's all ears.
In the former I think about the story, while in the latter I concentrate on her. She's only interested in being the hero of her own story, everything else comes a distant second.
It's hardly surprising - she's doing explicitly what the rest of us do implicitly. As a kid, the world revolves around you.
As you get older, you recognise that unfortunately this is not the case, and you adapt to your adult acceptance that you're but a minuscule cog in the big, slippy machine.
But, in my head at least, there's a video projector playing the movie of my life on an ongoing basis. In there I can edit out the bad bits, add some special effects to the good ones, go into slo-mo for the interesting stuff, and fast forward through the mundane, ie 90 per cent of my waking time (and even that might be an optimistic figure).
Every night before sleep, I check the reel and see what I need to bring into the next day's filming to maintain my own self-image as Indiana Jones biding his time in Ballybough.
If it did happen, and a camera followed my every move, EdTV-style, for a period of time, I imagine there'd be a lot of sitting round and scratching to report, with long bouts of staring blankly into the fridge. Not the stuff of a summer blockbuster.
But that's okay, I'm big and hairy. The kids, on the other hand, need to be assured they're special.
Which brings me back to an eager three year old anticipating the next instalment of her alter ego's action-packed life. The greatest flattery, I suppose, is that she has begun telling these stories to other people in the first person. I have had friends and relatives turn around and ask me about the younger visiting New York with her little friend having attached themselves to the wings of a jumbo jet.
A story told by her to them with absolute sincerity. Oh, that she has such a life.