MY COUSIN’S DAUGHTER celebrated her fifth birthday recently. In the weeks beforehand, the only item she expressed any interest in acquiring was some pink stationary glue. As social services might have something to say about a five-year-old who received nothing but glue for her birthday, my cousin and his wife supplemented this with some excellent non-adhesive gifts.
After the wrapping-paper blizzard subsided, it was noticed that the birthday girl looked thoughtful. When asked, she conceded that she was, in fact, a little disappointed.
“But why?” her parents asked, discarded puffs of paper drifting past like tumbleweeds. “Well,” she said sadly, “I was hoping for a stuffed peacock.” An excellent example of why parenting is a sitcom scripted by Kafka: stuffed peacocks will be requested when absolutely no mention has ever been made of peacocks prior to their not turning up.
When my cousin passed on this story, my mum pointed out that in her experience, life is full of stuffed-peacock moments. “You know the ones,” she said. “Everything is lovely, everything is fine, but secretly you’re thinking, really? I know I didn’t exactly say I was hoping for a stuffed peacock, but honestly, I just sort of presumed there would be one, and now there isn’t, I’m feeling kind of let down.”
“When was that?” I demanded, taking things not at all personally. “What were these stuffed peacocks we didn’t provide for you, when?” “Oh, that’s the whole thing about stuffed peacocks,” my mother said sagely. “Most of the time you don’t even know yourself what you’re expecting, but it doesn’t stop you feeling disappointed. It just stops you having a leg to stand on when it comes to complaining.”
She has a point. Most of the time, I’m grateful for everything, from not being trapped alive inside a paralysed body, like the guy in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, to the existence of frozen peas, but I can’t say there aren’t moments when I am obscurely disappointed in ways quite tricky to justify.
Take summer, for example. Now that we’ve nearly reached the calm, pencil-paring-scented harbour of September, I can acknowledge that every year, without fail, I feel faintly aggrieved, usually around about, oh, August 7th. On that morning, I wake up, unwrap summer all over again, and finally admit that lovely and all as ripe nectarines and brown legs might be, I have, in fact, been hoping for something more.
I used to put this annual pique down to the genuine injustice done to the Irish people, who laboured for years under the yoke of oppression, only to finally win independence and discover it wasn’t the British who inflicted the crap rainy summers on us – it was God. And us so religious. But now I live in Berlin, where you can leave the house during the summer months without checking your bag for sun-block, swimsuit, umbrella, light knit, heavy down jacket, thermos, sandwiches, distress flares and a sense of adventure, and still I suffer the gut reaction that, once again, summer has not delivered.
Yet what could this missing element possibly be? More delightful lake-swimming? More cold beer on a hot day? More cycle rides through green, sun-dappled forests? Truth is, I have absolutely no complaints with the summer I’ve just had.
I know how lucky I am. I count my blessings, if not daily, then at least once a month, when I also count the wonderful new laugh lines forming in the most unexpected places. But sometimes, even in the midst of all the sun-dappled loveliness, I do wonder who was in charge of ordering the stuffed peacock and exactly how bad their hand-writing might be.
Looked at one way, this could be seen as common or garden dissatisfaction, otherwise known as being a spoilt little madam. But looked at another (oh, the delights of a degree in history and English literature), it’s a form of extreme optimism. To be aware of the existence of total perfection even when in the presence of pretty-damn-near-perfect, is surely one of those elements that makes us get out of bed every morning.
Humans are narrative creatures, believers in around the corner and the twist in the tail. On some subconscious level, we need to believe that what is coming up is bigger, better and more peacock-y than what came before. If this results in occasional moments of irrational disappointment, it’s not all doom and gloom.
Occasionally, just occasionally, things turn out exactly as you wordlessly, instinctively thought they might. Consider this: not long after “birthday-gate”, my cousin and his family went to Dublin Zoo. There, in the gift-shop, was a beautiful, stuffed peacock, on sale for a sum of money just about equivalent to the sum received by a certain five-year-old who had just had a birthday.
Sometimes in life, it is no bad thing to expect the unexpected.
Róisín Ingle is away