A DAD'S LIFE:Now I understand the advice about wishing your life away, writes ADAM BROPHY
I HEARD MYSELF say a parenty thing last night, one that had been thrown at me many times as a kid, one I never understood. I told the elder child not to wish her life away as she lamented the fact that it was Monday, not Tuesday, because if it were Tuesday, she would be a day closer to her weekly riding lesson. Before that, I pointed out, she is going on a boat trip with her granddad and visiting her cousins. It’s not like she’s being detained in Guantanamo.
As the words came out I realised, possibly for the first time, I meant them. It wasn’t just the usual parental air-filler to shut a child up, it was genuine. Because if I could, I would freeze right now. Because about now, teachers, parents and kids start to get the Fear.
Teachers wake with a start at eight o’clock, look wonderingly at the silent clock radio and know the return is nearly on them, turn over and pray for prolonged slumber. Parents, finally acclimatised to a summer routine that involves 18 hours a day of skivvying and hunting down entertainment within an hour’s drive, see the arrival of routine on the horizon. And with it homework disputes, hunts for school ties, packed lunches.
The kids, well they feel the end of the world. No more sandwiches perched on rocks, sand in hair as salt dries on skin, wind and rain not deterring them from the next swim. That ends with the purchase of new books and a circular about opening-week half-days.
Right now, the sun is shining, there’s food in the fridge and a few quid in my pocket. Everyone that’s anyone to me is healthy and, I think, happy. Never before have I felt any concern about the status quo shifting because always, in a youthful optimistic way, I presumed the trajectory would be upwards. Okay, we’re all worried about jobs and house prices and global climactic conditions, but only because, in this house anyway, we don’t have anything underneath our own roof to fret about.
In the mid-1990s I spent many Saturday nights clubbing at the Temple of Sound in the Ormond Hotel on the quays in Dublin. It was hands in the air as one big tune after another banged in, the dancefloor bouncing, sweat dripping from the ceiling as staff pushed through with trays of fresh fruit for thirsty dancers. Every time, one particular buddy would appear at some stage of the night, grinning maniacally and roar in my ear: “It doesn’t get any better than this chief! It doesn’t get better than this!” Then he’d wander off with what he called his patented dance moves and try them on some House-loving lady.
I thought he was right, it was about as good as it got. And we were living right in the moment, looking forward to nothing else but as much of the same as we could manage. We were hungry and the Temple fed us. It takes an image as over-dramatic as that to confer the sense of drama we had about our own lives at the time, when really we were doing exactly the same thing as most other people our age throughout the country.
For years after, much of what happened seemed pale in comparison. The heightened hedonism of being twentysomething dispersed into a more manageable thirtysomething fugue where often the routes of the past were explored again but, without the freshness of the first time round, they felt dull and repetitive. And heads hurt much more afterwards.
Besides, there were things to do. Places to go, people to marry, kids to welcome into the world. Grown-up proper things, events that always seemed to be in quotation marks, as if they should be happening to someone else, a proper grown up as opposed to me who was still harking back to Saturday nights in 1995.
If I woke up now on the dancefloor of the Temple of Sound I would run screaming out the front door and dive headlong into the filthy Liffey water.
So, I tell the daughter not to wish her life away looking to the future, however close it may be. And I slap my own face for looking to the past like some sort of Technicolor dreamland which it never was.
The summer has been warm and pleasant. Our time together, without the bookends of school bells to tie the day, has worked. The kids need us but not 24/7 anymore, and we need them.
The quote marks have fallen away. I’m wondering now if it gets any better than this.