This year, for the first time in a while, I’ve written down some resolutions. Traditionally, I’ve considered such activities beneath me. But this has been a year of learning and humbling, of discovering my faults as a parent and a person.
I’ll be better at both things if I improve my mental state, so I’ve started running again, and even bought some vitamin supplements to aid my cognition and energy levels. These have duly achieved their desired effect, externalising all the actual things I can do to improve my health into some shiny placebo pellets that turn my piss so luminescent it glows in the dark.
I will endeavour to stop swearing so much, as investigations into my son’s potty mouth have firmly established me as the source. I didn’t think of myself as a particularly sweary person, until I realised my son’s brain was, like carbon paper under a betting slip, receiving a hefty imprint of every oath I uttered.
It’s inexcusable that I didn’t know this already, given that I wince when I see other parents swearing freely around their kids. I figured that it’s charming when I do it, like a lovable toff in a Richard Curtis movie, but when others do it they’re bad people, like mean toffs in a Richard Curtis movie.
This is merely symptomatic of wider biases I shall seek to correct this year. Consider my reaction when I see a parent in the park, never lifting their gaze from their phone as their child ambles round the obstacles unobserved. ‘Tut tut,’ I think, never once observing that I do the same thing reflexively myself.
When I use my phone around my kids, it’s because I’m doing extremely important work that can’t possibly be delayed, like looking at memes or sharing funny, horrible things people have written about UK politicians. But when others do it, they are neglecting their children while indulging in pointless nonsense, like looking at memes and writing the horrible things about UK politicians that I’ll subsequently share.
Being ‘more present’ – lifestyle magazine for ‘would it kill you to put your phone away for five seconds?’ – is on my 2024 agenda. I pledge to become more invested in my son’s school activities, rather than harassing our school WhatsApp groups with messages like: ‘Is today a fancy dress day?’; ‘How can this be happening?’; ‘Seriously, how many of these do they do a year?’; ‘Minecraft guy outfit make at home’; ‘Sorry that was meant to be a Google search’ and ‘Can someone tell me how to fake a sicknote?’
Most of all, I will practise gratitude for the good things in life, great and small. My children are happy and healthy; we live in a wide, beautiful world filled with treasures best seen while looking up; we have a community around us that I can, and should, lean on for more than last-minute favours. And now that my piss glows in the dark, I no longer have to switch on the bathroom light at 2am. Truly, I am blessed.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on X @shockproofbeats
