A DAD'S LIFE:GETTING THEM OUT the door to school is never pretty. It's odd then that, in total contrast, the school run is often a laugh.
We don’t have much time. If the road’s clear, we’re there in five minutes, but when is a road clear at 8.50am? Average trip duration, 12-15 minutes. If the usual breakfast drama was carried over into the car, a lot of pain could be inflicted in that time in a confined space. Yet, usually, peace reigns.
Music has become core to this. The elder dominates the stereo and while she will occasionally accommodate her sister’s tastes and stick on some Christmas carols, our ears are more often than not bent to Beyoncé and the Black Eyed Peas. To a point. Then I get stroppy and all dad rock and insist on “educating their ears”.
There is a finite time that this will work because I have no musical relevance. It’s not my thing. My CD collection started with Queen and ended with early Radiohead and never took up much space on a shelf. The advent of iTunes meant I started buying more music and, ironically, listening to less. There’s no iPod connection in my old motor so, for tunes, we still wind up with Freddie Mercury in the car, which is the place tunes are listened to.
I am musically irrelevant, illiterate and indisposed. But they think, for now, I've got it going on. This morning, the elder was air-guitaring in the back seat to Sabotageby the Beastie Boys. I watched her in the mirror and thought to myself: "My parenting work is done." And I don't care what you say, if a kid gets a buzz out of the opening to that song, they're going to be okay. You know the force is strong in them.
I've quite enjoyed the position of rock guru in their eyes. When the elder was little more than a baby, I convinced her I had been the lead singer in Jet and wrote and performed the song, Are You Gonna Be My Girl?, just for her. It was around this time her air guitar skills and two-fingered salute, complete with tongue poke, developed.
Unfortunately, the younger has always been harder to convince. She looks at me, shakes her head and knows the closest I’ve ever come to rock god is spotting Lisa Stansfield in Dalkey. But she tolerates my ambitions.
This is a role I step into undeservedly. All friends and rellies are aware of my paltry music collection, my abhorrence of gigs because they're noisy and packed, my issue with musicians because they're flaky and don't have to work till night-time, but the kids can be manipulated. They think, because I know the words to most songs on Friday Night Eighties, that I know the words to all songs. Because I can tell them about the Jackson 5, I must be some sort of music historian.
This total misrepresentation is fun, not least because of how much it irritates muso friends. You know the ones, they’re always pulling off their headphones when they meet you but you still catch a drift of the tune they’re listening to. Just so they know you know it’s not popular and you wouldn’t have heard of it.
They hate this pretence.This total misrepresentation also cannot last. Soon, it will be music’s job to take my girls to a place of their own, a place where the singer, or laptop operator, understands how they are feeling and doesn’t nag them to pick their clothes off the floor. What they will want to listen to will, in part, be dictated by what I listen to because it will have to be different. And I already know how left out I’m going to feel, but jealous too because they’ll be making their own memories with their own personal soundtrack.
No matter how rubbish your collection is, songs pierce your timeline. Billy Idol, Rebel Yell, getting my ear pierced with an ice cube and a safety pin in a caravan in Galway; INXS with Tear Us Apartand I'm lovesick when I should be studying for my Leaving Cert; Liam Gallagher belting out Roll With Ithas me preparing for a night out in a house-share in Elephant Castle. Now Sabotage is no longer just the theme tune to playing pool in a Bondi hotel in 1997, it's also my eldest daughter headbanging on the way to school in 2011.
She’ll bang her head to her own drum soon enough, and some day, she’ll be encouraging my granddaughter to do the same.