Sometimes your job as a parent is to sit on the bathroom floor on a Friday afternoon supervising bubble baths. If you are very lucky there is cold vodka and manga to read while this occurs.
Everyone exhales when it rains in the afternoon.
The wind rouses them from the couch, running into the yard to watch.
There’s a crack loud enough for them to feel in their heels.
The younger one, bare naked and afraid, looks to the older, who is dressed in a skirt she made herself.
It’s all right, she says. It’s okay.
They cling to each other.
A silhouette against the storm.
Having watched six episodes of Alone and having had a spiritual breakdown last week, I arrive in the lounge room at mid-afternoon and yell ‘Nature!’. I escort the children to the bushland reserve across the road.
With undeserved confidence I say we are going ‘off track’ so we may sit beside the creek bed and commune with nature.
The children are intrigued. We depart.
The eldest would like to bring her scooter.
No scooter, I say.
Why?
Because we’re going Off The Path.
What will I bring?
Just yourself.
A moment. This is unsatisfactory. And then:
What if I go for a jog? And that way I can bring my water bottle.
Allowed. Off we go.
The eldest sets out on her jog and the youngest follows, holding up her droopy nappy in two fists. I should’ve changed it before we left.
When the moment comes and I diverge from the path, the eldest is in disbelief. It is like we’ve punctured the sky at the end of The Truman Show. She is instantly excited.
I make the mistake of pausing by the thick underbrush and stamping my foot. Scare away the snakes, I say.
The youngest leaps into my arms and won’t leave for a long time. She is frightened.
In the end they are happy and dirty. I lose the lower half of my body to mosquitos.
As the eldest jumps from rock to rock I realise I am saying be careful too often. Resisting the point of the exercise. Let the wild be wild.
Later we are at dinner and talking with the eldest about her upcoming role as Angel in the school nativity play. She has lines to learn.
Gifted in the skills of script analysis, I watch as my wife attempts to deftly explain the concept of Christ, Christianity and religion to our five year old. She only gets a fraction, but pauses to consider my wife’s final instruction.
Everyone gets to choose what they believe. You choose whatever makes your body feel peaceful, warm and calm.
Then the five year old says: I like nature when it’s all quiet. And I find a creek and I can sit on the side and put my feet in the cold moving water and it’s quiet. And I can lie back on the ground and watch the birds in the trees and everything is quiet and calm.
We tell her, we really like that too.
And that makes her happy.
It is one of the first days I have to myself in a long time. But the youngest is sick, so here we are.
It takes a few hours to shake the resentment. My hips are still sore from sleeping on her bedroom floor for an hour last night.
But soon we are on the couch and eating strawberries and watching football together and all will be well, all will be well, all will be well.
Today is the final day in a long season of burnout for our family. Tomorrow, things change.
I plan a project for the afternoon that may be ruined by rain. We go to Bunnings.
Turns out Bunnings slaps on a Saturday afternoon. A sensory play station. Free snow cones. Kids are almost as happy as I am at the free stimulation. I consider moving in.
I maintain my decades long stance: when the zombie apocalypse comes, go to bloody Bunnings.
At home we have a hot chip break. I have mine between two slices of soft, white bread.
I was eight and staying with my grandmother when she offered me a hot chip sandwich. I was confused. I’d never heard of one.
You haven’t LIVED until you’ve had a hot chip sandwich, she said.
Since then, hot chip sandwiches have taken on a kind of existential gravitas that some would say is undeserved.
Those people are wrong.
This is living.
We go to the garden for the project. The children instinctively take off most of their clothes and take to the trampoline. I light incense, put on classical music, and approach the revitalization of the garden bed.
That’s the dream, but of course, within minutes it’s turned to crap. There is a poo, a fight; there’s a sudden lust for gardening gloves that THEY CAN PUT ON FOR THEMSELVES THANK YOU I DONT NEED HELP WAIT I NEED HELP.
I fill the sand pit with fresh sand and they are content, for now. So we shall see.
She is five. We have played a few video games from time to time. But today she asked for Mario. Her sister wanted to watch Shrek. She conceded happily, but then I said ‘don’t worry, both can happen’.
And then I took the Switch out and put it in her hands. She plugs in headphones, giggling with delight before anything had even happened. She sits and plays, occasionally gasping with joy.
I know technology is problematic and there’s a timer on as she plays. 430 to 530 is screen time.
But in the moment I feel like Mufasa standing next to Simba.
Everything the light touches will be yours.
She puts it down after ten minutes.
Calm down Mufasa.
No one talks about the fact that when you’re a father to small children you have to pee sitting down because your children will want to visit you in the toilet and will be fascinated by the entire process.
I gave up on standing after I spent the entire time peeing yelling DON’T TOUCH and thought I was screwing them up forever.
In five years of parenting, it’s the first time I’ve been in a public parents room and changed a nappy at the same time as another dad.
I want to lean over and whisper: ‘Let’s start a revolution’.
But we maintain the patriarchal bro code by barely acknowledging one another lest we accidentally connect.
The morning starts at 445. She wakes me by collapsing into my side and nudging me with her head. I am in her sister’s bed. I swapped at 2am. She tells me she wants to watch TV.
I say ‘ watch TV please.’
She will not say please for the next three hours.
This is because she is the terrorist and I am the hostage.
I will consent to her requests with no resistance because a tantrum will wake the house, and if I play my cards right, I may be able to sit on the couch for ten minutes with a coffee and a comic book.
We sit at the TV, both squinting at the brightness. Outside there is birdsong but no sunlight. Dawn is coming.
She requests Aliens first. I say aliens please. She watches for a minute while I pee. Then she wants ‘pants pants’, which means SpongeBob SquarePants. I say SpongeBob SquarePants please.
Now cereal.
I make a bowl.
No, not cereal, sandwich.
No toast. And she will HELP MAKE IT.
Cereal please. Sandwich please. Toast please.
She plants her stool directly in front of the dishwasher. She screams when I move her to get dishes out. I promise I am moving quickly. She holds a gun to my head and tells me not to try any funny business.
Toast. I boil the jug (coffee soon). I get a butter knife, and hand her one too. And then we spread peanut butter and margarine on the toast, our knives clashing like swords. She doesn’t spread it on the toast, she attacks it.
She squeezes enough honey on the toast to feed five people. I wipe some off. The toast is done.
She says no. She would like cereal.
I deliver cereal. I make coffee. I read Aquaman. I am sad to finish the coffee and wonder how soon I can have my second cup.
She is talking to me now.
Dad. Dad. Daddy. Dad.
And each time I respond.
Yes?
But she has no request, only the feeling of reaching out, wanting more of anything and nothing at the same time.
Beckett is writing her script. I’m in a Tarantino film. She pats the bomb next to her occasionally.
I take them to the movies.
No, not the Kung Fu dog one, I insist. The superhero dog one.
Because I want them to buy in on the same franchise that my father insisted I buy into at the same age. The entire film is marketing a brand to children. It’s funny and exciting and fine. But there’s only two female supporting characters, and I feel guilty afterwards.
In the car, my eldest asks why boys and girls don’t play sports together.
This is unprovoked (except, you know, provoked by society at large).
I say, I don’t know. A lot of the time it’s a bit silly.
Do girls play sports on TV?
Yeah, all the time.
Why do you only watch boy sport?
I try not to let on that she has wounded me.
I don’t know. I should watch more.
Then they’re running around a playground. By all accounts, a brilliant day with Dad. I am contemplating how I’ve made them submit to patriarchal capitalist ideals.
Guilt is a big part of parenthood.
Tonight I’ll put on a bell hooks lecture before bed. I’ll read the Communist Manifesto to them as a bedtime story.
Meanwhile, the Kung Fu dog film felt like straight-up racial appropriation to me. So, you know…what are you gonna do?
Sometimes it’s 7 on a Saturday and you’ve been up since four and lived a whole life already so you take the kids to a playground where the only other people are teenagers high on having been awake all night.
The teenagers yell something about weed, shooting me a side glance to test my reaction. My five year old gets a book out of her backpack, crosses her legs and starts reading.
Teenagers are more scared of the children then the other way around, and they disappear. The youngest begs for a cookie from the closed cafe and is close to abusing the young staff who are starting to open it. I side-track her with the promise of chasies. The five-year-old continues to read.
There is a cafe open but it requires a sojourn and for a while we are the hobbits of Middle-Earth. I am Sam to my eldest’s Frodo. The toddler is Smeagol bouncing on my hip. When we get to stairs she will walk, thank you. She welcomes a challenge.
Life is hard.
And good.
Now is the hard part.
Wife long gone to work. Grandparents have left from their special visit and all are warm and drowsy in their wake. We are all exhausted. My eyes cannot focus and I am dizzy.
Naps now risk a problematic bedtime. Bedtime must be protected at all costs.
There’s an hour of unregulated screen time before the guilt is too much. I plead with them to return to nature for revival. They object at first.
Then it’s naked skin and bare feet in long grass and a sprinkler and all is well.
Time for coffee number five.
Sometimes I lose myself in my own introverted activity and they will echo me, and we will all be content in our private bubbles for an hour.
I attempt this by taking to a garden bed that has enough parsley in it to feed a restaurant. It smells fresh as I rip out all but one plant.
I discover a family of snails. I pause and silently apologise to them before I call my daughters over.
Poor bastards. They’re about to get fucked up.
I’m surprised. The snail molestation only lasts twenty seconds.
All retreat indoors to the parental bed for ‘dad tickle’, a loose game that is played between two to twenty-seven times a day.
Fifteen minutes of tumbling and giggling. The smallest one hurts herself, howls and recovers. The eldest one becomes nonverbal for a while and becomes a cat.
I am kicked in the balls twice.
The youngest points at my chest and says, ‘boobs’.
All of this is normal.
I will remember very little of this and so will they. But we will remember the feeling and miss it.
Hi there, thanks for reading. I just wanted to let you know that in a couple of weeks I’ll be posting responses to readers questions. So if you want to ask me anything, simply make sure you’re subscribed and then reply to any e-mail from me. Questions can be about anything, but I’m particularly interested in questions that are impossible to answer…however you want to interpret that!
Beautiful, David. Thanks for sharing!