A DAD'S LIFE:Entertaining the kids is not my responsibility, is it?
RIGHT, I know there are parents out there who have the summer holidays sorted. You have camps booked, holidays arranged, childcare in place, plans for craft mornings, visits to long lost friends, trips to the seaside and sports days on the road. I want to come live with you.
We have this marital dialogue most days: “If you give me a dig out, I’ll probably give you a dig out.” This for a contented work/life balance does not make.
The mornings go like this: “Are you busy?” “Yeah, course I’m busy, I’m always busy.” (Never admit you’ve got basically nothing to do that day because 1. That’s it, you’re child-responsible for all daylight hours, and 2. She’ll know nothing’s getting paid off the credit card this month.) “Is that busy working or busy updating your status on Facebook?” she asks.
“How dare you!”
Indignation is a core tool in the ongoing fight for child responsibility equality. So is a shut door to the home office. But no matter how often I insist I actually have things to do and deadlines to meet, there are a 10 year old and a seven year old in the house with limited attention spans, a desire for activity and utter disregard for my pressures.
To distract attention from the limited organised activities we have arranged, we are encouraging self-sufficiency. We are selling domestic duties as fun, summer time interludes. Yay, today you get to empty the dishwasher, vacuum the house and hang up the laundry. Fantastic.
But the curse of the modern child is that he or she is utterly useless. They would be fired from the most basic southeast Asian sweatshop position. And this is all our fault.
We have continued to wipe their backsides long after they should have started to fend for themselves. I could try to school them in the merits of cleaning toilets, but they are already so far gone in the primadonna stakes that the effort of changing their mindsets before attempting to teach them the practicalities would be greater than taking care of everything myself.
I apologise to anyone who has to share a house with them in the future, I hope you’re skilful with a toilet brush.
So, instead we have to mingle their entertainment around our work schedules. My solution is a steady dose of Nintendo, trampoline and Nickelodeon but the missus has crazy ideas about variety and limiting screen time.
I don’t understand the furore about kids looking at screens; they’re all going to grow up and spend 40 years staring at them for 40 hours a week anyway. Shouldn’t they be prepared? No, she says.
We have a pony camp booked, but that’s four days in August. What’ll we do before then? The weather refuses to play along. The beach is only an option if you enjoy sandstorms and hypothermia, and about a week ago freak rainfalls attempted to wipe out the whole town.
This, while disastrous to local trade and the living arrangements for hundreds of people, did at least provide some excitement on an otherwise typically drab Thursday.
So, thus far I’m relying on housework and climate change to keep them occupied for the summer. It doesn’t bode well. In fairness to them, they are proving more patient than I expected and even nice to each other for prolonged periods of time. They do seem to have realised that to provide them with summer camps every week would require mortgage-like borrowing, and that there’s nothing we can do about their friends being away or the weather being rubbish.
At this point I feel like rolling out the old line that in my day we bailed out the door first thing in the morning and didn’t return til the mammy howled for us to come in for the dinner that evening. But I’m not sure that’s accurate. For a start, very few mothers in the estate I grew up in were working, and I do remember driving the poor auld dear mental on a number of occasions by dragging myself round the house muttering incessantly about being bored.
Maybe the only difference is she didn’t feel responsible for my entertainment and somehow we have been conned that we are.
It’s not true. It’s good to let them mope a while. Managing boredom is something we all have to learn; there are times when there will be nothing for them to do. Like right now. They need to walk away from my desk and deal with it. “You’ve got camp in five weeks. Between now and then . . . figure it out.”
abrophy@irishtimes.com