A DAD'S LIFE: BLESSED AMONGST women, they say. As if it's a good thing. Growing up in a house with two sisters and no brothers you get used to certain simple facts. Soap operas and nothing else will be tolerated between 7pm and 8pm. Live football is permitted if it's an actual World Cup finals match and Ireland are playing, or if a new South American teenage sensation in possession of rippling tanned quads is scoring for fun.
And, of course, the obvious place to store sanitary towels is in the fruit bowl. I came of age with a practised shrug of despair born of years of dealing with the shock on new friends’ faces who, on their first visit to my house, went to help themselves to an apple.
But it was normal, I knew no different. I would go to other houses populated by men, where the walls resonated with bass (voices and music) and all talk was of fighting and women. Where dinner time was a rush to the trough, and if you didn’t battle your corner for a pork chop, you went hungry. I liked going to those houses, but I liked going home after.
Nick Hornby has a realisation in High Fidelityabout the home truths of living with women. The main character Rob is lamenting his girlfriend moving out and thinking back over their time together. He recalls how as a youth he had presumed when he finally had the privilege of a lady sharing his bed permanently, life would be an ongoing parade of Victoria's Secret lingerie and sex hanging from chandeliers. The reality is grey knickers drying on radiators. That sums it up.
I had none of those false expectations, having lived from the age of 16 with only women, and this sense of getting to know the opposite sex better than your own was compounded when I hooked up with she who would become the missus a few years later. Her father sat carefully atop a pile of six daughters, the eldest of which I paired off with.
I used to watch him back then and wonder how he coped. The noise that this battalion of girls generated was phenomenal. Ranging in age from two to 19, you had every possible scream tone represented: baby, child, pre-teen, teen and young adult. And they all screamed at the same time. All the time. Not in disharmony, more a constant dialogue where everybody was constantly aware of everything else that was being said, even as they contributed themselves. It was as close to a New York Jewish family scenario scripted by Woody Allen in 1972 as you were likely to get in Dublin 6W in 1992.
He would come in from work, grab a bag or crisps and relax into his chair while the 6.01 news tried ineffectually to compete with the babble around him as that day’s grievances were aired and he was looked to for resolution.
He rarely resolved, but when he did pronounce he was generally listened to. To a point, at which usually all six daughters would turn on him and, between mimicry and mock pronouncements of their own, mock him into submission. He would return to his Tayto and they would remove him from their lazer sights.
In the midst of all this, and my own sisters and their friends, I tried to retain some sense of my own masculinity. I probably wound up going too far and, in an attempt to deny my upbringing and existing living conditions, spent college trying to develop a laddish persona impervious to any emotional displays fuelled on Scrumpy Jack alone.
The thing is, you get what you deserve, and here I sit, much like my father-in-law 20 years ago, once again surrounded by women despite all attempts to the contrary. All right, my brood is smaller than his, but throw in the cousins and the friends and the situation is becoming more and more Woody-esque as time passes.
The younger, with typical insight, must have become a little concerned at the gender inequality that reigns here. Armed with a new-found education from the Discovery Channel and what our bloody dogs have been up to in the past year, she suggested to the missus that we “mate”, so she could have a little boy for me.
I said, no need. It is good to be blessed amongst women. And for future reference, when the time comes, all Tampax to be kept in bathroom cabinets.