A DAD'S LIFE:Why is there silence? There should be screams
WE APPROACHED Ballinascarthy from the west, on a minor road, about to join the N71 heading for Cork. I knew what was coming and braced myself for the barrage. Cars lined both sides of the road. I slowed behind a family, three generations, walking along the middle of the road. Nobody hurries on their way to a carnival. The Big Wheel loomed on my right, bumpers bumped away in front. To the left something called Meteor scooped teen girls into a frenzy travelling in circles at 90mph and 45 degrees. Dummy that I am I had forgotten the festival was on and our route would bring us through. I braced again for the barrage. And braced. Not a dickie bird.
I grab the rearview, adjust and scope the back seat. One child with her head stuck in her colouring, the other reading the pony book of the day. I sneak a peak left and the missus is texting, concentrated crushed eyebrows suggesting deep thoughts being massaged into non-vowelled words. The strolling family parts and the car can lurch on, past candyfloss stalls, punchball machines, ring throws and pony rides. Pony rides! Surely the screams will come. Silence reigns, punctuated by the whisper of a page turning. I make the turn and accelerate, free.
It’s an escape of sorts. Usually faces pressed to the window and pleas to stop would have been met with my grumbles. But we would stop and I would lighten my pockets. Getting through without forking out handfuls of fivers for Taiwanese tat, processed sugar and hazardous spins on death machines would seem like a victory but it seems I like my Meteor rides more than I knew.
It’s only the past few years I’ve had reason to seek these places out again; from 14 to parenthood you can’t enter Funderland. The sense police stop you at the gates and check you for sanity. But when you get to go again, in a non-ironic way, you remember what the fuss was all about.
This silence has me worried. It’s been many years since we travelled in a peaceful fugue. At the outset, driving with babies is something of a relief as the movement has an immediate soporific effect. But you drive in a crazed fervour knowing that when the child wakes, all hell will break loose and if you haven’t made your destination by then the final miles will be set to a Marilyn Manson soundtrack.
As they age a little they learn to stay awake when the wheels start turning. It becomes important to plan: all routes including stop-offs, entertainment (music and games) and topics of conversation. Any break in travel riff can result in the ever-repeating “are we there yet?” and a sense of journey time being cubed.
Then they become more independent and begin to banter among themselves in the back seat. All well and good but war is never far away. Games, dolls, comics and colouring materials, while ostensibly designed to maintain harmony, are just as often hoarded and used to create outrage and/or occasionally as weapons.
Whichever way you look at it, car travel changes when kids are born. What was once a pleasant interlude between stops, a time to listen to a new album, catch up on phone calls or just shut down and shut up, becomes peace maintenance.
Car travel is a battleground. A self-contained, isolated unit of mobile family trauma. The driver’s seat is the scene of my greatest knuckle-chewing moments, those times when I have bitten down in an attempt to control my temper and maintain dignity. In that seat I have been affronted by infuriating acts of irrational kid logic: the demands for the toilet moments after you’ve stopped for the third time on a 40-mile trip, kicks in the back for increased legroom, the accusation that you are evil personified because you promised a journey would take only 20 minutes and it’s now 22 and so what if there’s a crash ahead, you promised!
Now. Silence. Peace. Children engaged in whatever they’re doing to the point that we can shuffle past a funfair and nobody screams for a toffee apple. I see a long orderly road in front of me; one on which we travel together, listening to each other, paying attention, enjoying the journey as much as the thrill of the destination.
I’m not having this. I brake and do a U-turn. Everybody wake up and get out. Who wants some candy floss?
abrophy@irishtimes.com