ADAM BROPHY IT'S A DAD'S LIFEIf your child's tantrums begin to reflect your own, it's time to grow up
THE YOUNGER child has a buddy across the road. They were born within weeks of each other. They became friends when they both began to attend the same creche and, on learning that they lived so close they could smell the rashers frying, they achieved a sort of ecstasy.
They are strangely gentle with each other. From the outset they were content to share, they exchange roles in the various games they play without complaint, and neither seems to dominate the other.
They're a little old married couple, mumbling on about babies and dinners and TV together, each seeming to be aware of the other's needs before they are expressed, possibly because they have the same needs. A pair of wizened Yodas, three years old, changing nappies on dolls and swapping Dora the Explorer stories.
The younger, when you take her outside the house, often assumes the role of deaf-mute. Even entering the creche on the mornings she goes up, she twists the lips shut on crossing the threshold.
She could have been gabbing to me right up to the door on topics ranging from what treat she'll demand when she gets home to what other treats she'll expect from me later, but once the door opens she shuts up. I don't even get a goodbye.
When I pick her up later in the day she immediately becomes mine and whichever carer brings her out is not granted a departing adieu either.
I'd worry if she was sullen inside but I'm told she's not. She eats well, she plays away with the toys, she hangs with her buddy.
But neither she nor her sister are overtly sociable, preferring instead to slowly assimilate into any situation, carefully checking boundaries then cutting loose only when they feel secure enough to do so.
This is in stark contrast to the kid who can't button it for more than a nanosecond at home, who talks to people, places and things, who believes she has a divine right to interrupt you at any moment and be responded to immediately. In a way it's a relief to know that her God complex leaves her when she's elsewhere - or at least it did until recently.
I'm picking her up from the crony's across the road. There's the usual palaver about where she's stashed her shoes and socks but we find each item and prepare to pull out. Military terms seem appropriate - getting kids to leave somewhere they like often requires the assumption of a Stormin' Norman demeanour.
She's on the brink of departure when she decides to turn dastardly. She marches to her friend's mother and demands her dinner, specifically soup. When she's informed that soup is unavailable, she issues the order that soup be made.
At this point I intervene, astonished that this brute has adopted the body of my placid child. The mother laughs it off, noting that when the younger comes out of her shell she bursts out. To show there's no hard feelings, and to compensate for her lack of soup, she offers the younger a mini chocolate egg and one to take home to her sister.
The younger replies: "Give me the whole packet. I want them all." Stony-faced, chin out, mule-like. I start to worry. I have seen the dark side before, but thought she saved it for me, that she realised in some primal way that to unleash her inner beast out in the world was to cross a line, that somehow she knew the only people who could accept her usually discreet bloodletting behaviour were blood relations, because they have to.
I also know the next stage in this behavioural spectrum from bitter experience. She goes from nice to nuclear in a fleeting, spectral moment. I know because she learned it from me.
I think, well I certainly hope, all parents and not just me suffer this cringing moment when their children's behaviour sucks the earth from under them. You see it in every public place - supermarkets are a favourite - when tempers fray, tantrum erupts, parent pleads and cajoles, before throwing hands in the air and manhandling the offender, kicking and screaming, to the car and beyond.
There is no shame in the tantrum (unless the kid is 16, then you have a problem). You recognise it as frustration at an inability to express what is truly bothering the child and often just wait for it to subside.
It's when the tantrum develops into something more calculated, something that could only have been developed at home, something that you recognise with shock as your own, that you realise it's time you stopped throwing tantrums yourself, stopped demanding inappropriately for your own needs to be met at the expense of everyone else's and just grew up.
The kids will always out you.
abrophy@irish-times.ie