The one-hour performance we do everyday

We always commit to the bit

Different parents have different strategies in the face of a stubborn, screaming child and an immovable deadline. Bribery. Aggression. Quiet defeat. My wife and I have employed all of these to get our child out the door for school. But our most common tactic has been to embody fictional characters and remain unflinchingly committed to them for years. 

It began with Kylie. 

Kylie is a thin-lipped hairdresser from the Gold Coast who started running a salon in our daughter's bedroom at 7 am each morning. At four, our daughter understood that this person looked like her mother but was entirely different. Over many mornings, we learned more about Kylie and her disgust toward anything that wasn't 'gorgeous'. 

The suite of characters that followed in that time (the 'original' generation, we may call them) all had one unifying trait. All of them were energetically UP. We focussed all our power on forward momentum and positive energy. It meant that the house and car ride to school became a circus filled with clowns. In reality, it meant my wife and I performing a Lofi two-person show for an hour every morning at maximum energetic output. 

Meet Greta, born from my wife. Greta is vaguely Russian and has an accent that only now appears slightly problematic to me. Greta's full name is Gretagofski Sofia Danger Salinsky (because Danger is her middle name, you see). Greta likes to do a ten k run every morning so that her thighs can 'feel the burn'. 

I guffawed at this phrase, and my daughter noticed, so it meant Greta was forever fanatical about 'feeling the burn', especially in her thighs. 

Greta doesn't like children or most other people. She dislikes Kylie, we found out, and Kylie thinks she’s weird. Greta snarls and is dismissive in a way my eldest daughter thought was hilarious. It meant Greta could get away with saying things my wife never could such as, 'why are you taking so long?', and 'you are so slow', or 'I’m bored of this'. My daughter would cackle every time and then take Greta's direction. 

As for my two guys, I can't point to a distinct difference in their voices. Their accents constantly slide into each other. 

But there's 'Hasa', an enthusiastic idiot. Sadly, for me, on the day Hasa was born I committed to a high-energy, unflappable, smiling persona that has haunted my mornings ever since. Hasa has a moderate intelligence, but the girls are often smarter than him. But Hasa most loves speed. Getting the uniform on quickly, getting out the door promptly, threatening too speed through traffic as my daughter squeals in elated protest.

Some mornings, Hasa wasn’t enough. Even Hasa had too much status. And so Silly was born (imaginative name, I know). Silly is gentler, but even more of an idiot. He looks to the kids for guidance, who swell with importance and knowledge. Silly doesn’t understand colour, counting or how to drive, and relies on the girls to instruct him.

I fucking hate Silly and Hasa, but they are part of the family now. Just like Greta and Kylie.

We haven’t seen them in a while. At the end of last year, the girls decided Greta and Hasa should get married. Hasa was very keen, but Greta was stand off-ish. She relented, eventually. When school holidays hit, they ran off together for a honeymoon. Sadly, that rendered them inaccessible to our family. Same with Kylie and Silly, who are God knows where.

Cut to 2024. Thank God, but getting out the door is no longer the battle it once was. But to cease fighting in the backseat on the way to school and to dispel feelings of melancholy about the day ahead generally, the girls and I invented Frank.

Frank is a week old, and his central personality trait is that he doesn’t know how to drive. He also doesn’t know how to get to school or back home, and the girls must provide instructions. Frank is an idiot and will regularly make the car windows go up and down or turn the wipers on by accident. He will press buttons that make the air-conditioning go nuts or the radio loud. He doesn’t require as much energy as Hasa and Silly (‘I’m sorry girls, they’re not picking up the phone lately, don’t know where they’ve gone…’), but he takes a certain amount of clowning energy.

A few days ago, Nu-nu was born. Nu-nu is an alien with little understanding of anything. Nu-nu is the weirdest creation, and he relies on the girls to teach him/her about Earth. My daughter asked about Nu-nu’s language on their native planet. And then, like a fucking idiot, Nu-nu launched into a long stream of energetic and explosive sounds for over a minute that translated as ‘hello’. Now, the girls always want Nu-nu to speak in their native tongue and teach it to them. And poor Nu-nu is stuck because even though Dad couldn’t be fucked growling, screeching and whistling like a nuff-nuff, Nu-nu is a character, and Dad can’t break the rule of drama and not commit to the bit.

No matter who’s driving them, we bid them farewell before we open the doors. The girls always prefer to say goodbye to Mum and Dad, not any of the bizarre crew. So we leave our characters in the car, then take our kids into the school, greeting other parents like we’re completely normal and beige. They have no idea we’re a bunch of nutcases, who have just come from an under-caffeinated improvised performance.