A DAD'S LIFE:I like to blame everything but myself. For everything
I’M WRITING this at a 45 degree tilt to the left. The back hasn’t clicked out of place in a long time which is a good thing. The bad thing is you forget how severe a shock it is when it does go.
It’s been worse. Once I spent three days on the living room floor with daytime TV and an empty bottle for company. That wasn’t pleasant but being horizontal and immobile is a decent barometer for a relationship. She started out bringing me soup and sandwiches but by the third day she was talking about a winch system for delivery so she wouldn’t have to hear my moans.
That time my collapse was the result of having taken a swing on a tee box without warming up properly. If I were any good at golf, or even had a passing interest in the game, the punishment might have fitted the crime. The truth is I took my back’s uprising as a sign of good sense and have not lifted a club since. So something good came from it.
Other causes have included sneezing violently, tightening a dressing gown cord with vigour and stepping off a curb with some abandon. Once your back goes once, it’s a lottery walking around afterwards as to when it’ll launch a surprise attack.
This time I was scraping a dinner plate into the bin. Click. There it goes. That’s all it is, a little click and suddenly you can’t bear weight and you’re clawing to get vertical against the wall before your head follows the discarded carrots and parsnips into the refuse sack. Once upright, you hobble straight legged to a safe point and gauge the severity. And figure out who is to blame.
I had just completed a 112km cycle by myself, bent double on a tri bike. The day before I had run eight miles and swum for half an hour in the Atlantic.
Obviously none of these things was a factor. I was blaming the couple of minutes spent bouncing on the trampoline with the small girls while they clambered on board my back and instructed me to buck.
I had asked for a pass, claimed old age and decrepitude and been beaten into submission. Oh yeah, they jeered, you can run off and play with your own friends but you won’t play with us. They’re good, my girls.
They have the mastery of guilt. I relent and hit the trampoline, saying five minutes is all. I tell them these things kill my back. They’ve never seen me laid low. They think I’m strong.
We bounce and bounce some more. They take it in turns to hop on. I try to leave. One claims the other had a longer “turn”. There is shouting and accusations. She always gets more. No, she always gets more. I relent once more and provide another couple of spins.
A car pulls into the driveway and discharges more small girls, I had forgotten we were creche for the day. The elder daughter waves them up frantically. Suddenly there is a queue for me. I can’t leave now, they’ll never forgive me, their personal seaside donkey.
Eventually I disentangle myself and escape through the hatch. As I walk inside I am smugging right up. I am definitely the best dad in town, no one else goes the extra yard like that.
The back waits until night time to take its revenge but it sends warning signals all evening. There’s been an achiness, it’s been saying, “Hello! You ready for me?”
It goes and I slump. I’m not a silent sufferer, I moan and curse. The elder runs into the kitchen and catches me hanging on to the fridge, turning the air blue.
“What’s wrong?” she says, “Are you okay?”
“That bloody trampoline. I told you it’d wreck me. Now look.”
I lurch to a kitchen chair, hoping I don’t slide off it. I stick, eyes bugging. She is miserable.
“Is this because you were bouncing?”
I like to blame everything but myself. For everything. This, now, is a true test of adulthood, being able to pass something off so as not to bother a child who only wanted some fun. I fail abysmally.
“Course it’s because of the bloody trampoline. I warned you but would you listen? No. You had to have me out there. Nothing would do until you got your way. Well, thanks. This is me, on me back for a week. Happy?”
So I sit, a day later, at 45 degrees, chewing anti-inflammatories and full of remorse. I’m a bouncing, crippled dope with no one to blame but myself.