IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:Knowing how to talk to kids is the hard part of 'managing' a household, writes ADAM BROPHY
I REMIND THE missus I’ll be gone overnight as I’m talking at a meeting for fathers called 21st Century Dad in Galway.
Her head starts shaking, she can’t help it. She thinks me being asked to speak or write about parenting is like her being asked to comment on sleeping or breathing. Just ridiculous. Everyone else knows at least as much about the topic, if not more.
But the fact is, I have to go and do this, and I’m sick with nerves. I ring me mammy for advice. She tells me to talk about communication, about how men will often find it easy to “manage” a household but have trouble communicating with their kids when they’re locked into a room with them for a prolonged period.
This sounds good. Still, I feel a terrible sap for getting material to discuss the changing role of the father in the home from my mother. The missus is obviously on the money in her disregard of my skills.
Communication is a killer though. When they’re babies you spend your days attempting to decipher what they’re telling you. “Okay, you’re pointing at your nappy and screaming. Mmm, you’re trying to tell me what?” It’s hard – they can’t speak and get upset at the smallest of things, like being left in their cot for two hours while you read the paper and wonder should you check on them.
Then suddenly, living under your roof you have two young girls. Girls who will one minute wrestle you and enjoy arm-to-arm combat and the next run screaming to their room because you made an off-
the-cuff comment about their hair being messy. I’m learning the nuances of this new dance, but I have big, clumsy feet.
For the first time in our relationship, the elder and I are fighting occasionally. Fighting is too strong a word, but we are winding each other up.
In the past year, her world hasbroadened. She has her nose in books, she overhears snippets of adult conversations and questions them, she sees things out on the street and wonders why they are happening. She not only has masses of new information available to her, she has no filter developed to grade the importance and relevance of stories, and their potential to impact on her life. She hears me comment angrily on a news story and worries.
Allied with a sense of a world beyond her home and her school is the development of a sense of herself being part of it. She is becoming aware that through learning to swim, dance, play guitar and ride a pony, she is learning skills that will take her further afield and she, for the first time, has concerns, perhaps unconsciously, at how she will fare out there.
As a result, sensitivity levels have skyrocketed. She wants to demonstrate how much she knows and can do, and at the same time she wants to stay tight to my legs.
There’s a sign on the wall of the men’s changing rooms at the leisure centre, stating that girls are allowed in up to the age of seven. This has caused her much consternation since turning eight. She has considered lying about her age if challenged, she has even pondered altering the sign itself.
But when I suggest she go and change in the ladies’, she becomes upset. She isn’t ready yet, and I’ll keep her with me until she is. On the one hand, she recognises that I have the power to make this decision and overrule the sign, but she also realises that I am not the ultimate power she believed me to be in her younger years, and so my decisions might be overturned by some superior, alternative adult authority.
This shifting reality is massive to her. As she realises I am fallible, she also realises she can challenge me on any pronouncement. “Because I said so” never held much water with her, but now I find myself having to have cogent realistic arguments at hand to back every utterance.
When tired or preoccupied I’ll become flippant or patronising, presuming that she’ll understand that whatever we’re discussing isn’t immediately pressing. She doesn’t. She takes my lack of interest as a lack of interest in her. She feels hurt. She gets mad at me and I react.
It doesn’t take much escalation for her to storm off. I’ll find her sitting, fuming somewhere and when I try to calm the waters she’ll inform me of all the horrible, awful things I do. But then she’ll want a hug and clamber on board.
Yes, communication is the key – it’s just figuring out in which language that’s tricky.