It's a dad's life:I SOMETIMES stumble onto those family dramas on Living TV, Eight is Enoughand the like. The dad reads the kids to sleep, tousles their hair, snaps off the night-light and leaves the room unassaulted. Occasionally he may be held up for a moment for little Johnny to whisper, "I love you Daddy", just before sleep claims him.
I read to the kids every night. We start with a row over who gets their story first, then one shouts while the other is being read to and they trade roles. I work my way through a Dora exploration and a couple of chapters of The Worst Witch before extricating myself from the room. It's a subtle, ritualistic dance, but we all know our parts and it works pretty well. Now it's changing: the elder can read.
This is a good thing on the whole as she will probably benefit from such a skill as she moves through life. However, it also raises the inevitability of her at some point becoming aware of being written about. I wonder if she will take kindly to my documenting her first trysts at teen discos or how much time she spends squeezing blackheads in the mirror before college every morning, should my editor allow me to ramble that long. That all seems a long way off but in the two years I've been writing this column our lives have already changed immensely.
At the outset one was a baby, the other a pre-schooler. My primary concern was sleeping for more than four hours a night and providing a diet that resulted in palatable nappies. (No matter how hard I tried, that never worked out: there is no good to be found in a soiled nappy.)
One went to school, the other graduated to Montessori. Priorities adjusted and the intensity waned. Having a baby in a house brings warmth to the place. There is a sense of newness and a period when you slowly uncover a character that appears to have come from nowhere. It is also demanding beyond anything I have experienced.
It passes. Suddenly the baby is gone and a chunky child stands before you, holding a bowl and demanding more. You come out of the haze and only then realise quite how bent out of shape you have been. You miss the baby but on examining photos of that time you see a gurgling mass of pink flesh accompanied by a pair of hollow-eyed survivors. New parenthood is not a good look.
Not that our current parenting "look" is going to be snapped up by Vogueanytime soon but we do, once again, look human. The elder is already at a stage where she feels qualified to comment on our attire; apparently her mother is rather chic, but I need work.
And therein, I think, lies the biggest change. We are no longer the source of all knowledge. Where before, any queries about themselves or the world around them were fed to us and our responses accepted without question, now there is a multitude of information channels, all of which are tested against us. We have moved from Oracle to sounding boards, no longer deities in our own universe.
And like them, we as parents are new to every role as it is thrust upon us. Just when you think you have it all clear in your head some new challenge exposes you for the charlatan you are.
Under duress I revealed the non-existence of the Easter Bunny. On hearing this, a relative with five more years parenting under her belt smiled knowingly, shook her head and said: "Ah, you're still new to this."
I suppose I am. And I hope the kids will forgive me for documenting the mess I make of it.