IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:She glows with pride and the sight of her father struck by her ingenuity, writes ADAM BROPHY.
SOMETIMES THE beauty of your child’s growing up is the very thing that leaves you choked. It can be her smile and chuckle when she gets a joke, where before she wouldn’t have, and cared not a jot as she went on stuffing a Barbie into a Sindy-shaped hole.
It can be her visible manipulation of words and objects to manufacture a pleasing scenario where before she would have crashed ahead and demanded what she wanted.
It can even be her figuring something out that had previously baffled you. First, for you, there’s wonder and surprise. Immediately, she realises she’s thought of something you haven’t and a light goes on behind her eyes.
She beams with the notion that she’s contributed, independently, and events have altered in a way they would not have without her input. She glows, struggling to cope with her well of pride and the sight of her father struck by her ingenuity. Her father near bursts at the potential this girl has.
Here’s the scenario and it’s no big deal. Except for me. The curtains in the kids’ room are rubbish. With the sun only setting for a couple of hours at the height of summer, the kids were struggling to sleep beyond 4am some mornings; 4am is a time no man wants to be conscious, unless tearing one up. And those days should be gone.
Anyway, impractical mothers of invention that we are, the missus and I had taken to hanging a dark bedsheet over the offending curtain rail every night after the small yokes are in slumber. Our version of a blackout blind.
All very well and good but for the fact that the sheet tends to slide off the rail, thus resulting in my waking the kids on many occasions with an expletive- laden monologue on how typical this situation is of us as a rubbish and disorganised family.
For me, that sheet has taken the form of a metaphor for our lives. It works occasionally, but it’s impractical and not being used for the purpose it was intended. It’s slovenly, mis-shapen, haphazard. It lurks there, in the room, half necessary and half irritating. It bugs the crap out of me.
Also, because the rail is quite wide it takes two of us to hang it. The missus and I spend our pre-bed time attempting to balance one end before the other slips off and my tirade starts again. This is neither good for chances of a relaxing sleep or any sort of matrimonial togetherness. Everything is suffering because of that damn sheet.
The missus takes off for a couple of days. I note the sheet has fallen from its perch and think, right, that’s it, the kids will be up at the crack of dawn while I’m solo parenting and I’ll once again revert to Charles Manson dad due to lack of sleep.
But the first night I decide to at least try the precarious balancing act by myself. The younger is asleep but the elder is watching my efforts.
“Do you want me to help?” she asks.
“Go on then,” I say and she bounces onto the desk under the far end of the rail so she can reach high enough.
“Dad, do you have a hair bobbin?”
I hand her one from my back pocket stash. She reaches up and, in a deft double movement, has her corner of the sheet tied firmly to the rail. She instructs me to do the same at my end. I do so and now we have our home-made blackout blind firmly in place for the first time. Tied like this, it falls symmetrically, smoothly even. It looks like it might well be meant there.
She jumps from the desk to her bed and snuggles back under the covers. She is smiling so hard I can see the broad white stretch of her teeth in the murk of the bedroom. She wriggles in positive delight. I half expect her to hold the pillow on her head to stop her floating towards the ceiling.
Two things. First, the grown ups in this house are not very practical. Anyone who can mix paint with a stick, we view as an artist. Our level of practical expectation is not high.
Second, if I could have frozen that moment and infused it in her I would have. So she could keep on doing what she had just done from here on out. Strolling up to problems and attempting solutions.
And whether they work or not, continuing to look at things in a way that suggests the world is hers. Because, in that moment, the world was hers and I saw that my daughter could reach out and take it.