My daughter is still not walking. We’ve tried everything which, in practice, basically amounts to standing her up against the fridge and calling on her to approach us. We’ve tried to incentivise her with treats and shiny things, even the promise of her most coveted object: the remote control for the TV in our sitting room.
I spice things up even further by clearly displaying that its batteries are still in place. Do not ask me why my 16-month-old baby, who cannot yet walk, speak, or reliably find her own mouth at meal times, has such intuitive knowledge of powered electrics, but suffice it to say she not only reserves preference for the one working remote control we own – discounting the other five or six scattered around – but knows that when I take the batteries out, it is useless to her.
Even this glinting bauble cannot induce her to amble forth. In perhaps my most abject display of desperation, I pulled the emergency cord; about two months ago, I wrote a column about her walking troubles. It was not my hope that she would herself be shamed by such coverage, you understand. But I have often observed something which I call the Column Problem Paradox.
Put simply, I have an eerily consistent record of writing about problems or phenomena which have entirely disappeared by the time they are published a week later. Ailments that come and go, passions that burn brightly and fade away. My son’s insistence on saying only the word ‘Deeto’ had evaporated entirely by the time the world read about it. His enthusiasm, too, for throwing the bin in the bath rang only the dimmest gong when readers referenced it to me on publication day.
Obviously, this is perfectly explicable; kids do weird things for short spans, and a week later you’re dealing with some other thing. Over time, however, I’ve given into magical thinking, raising this banal correlation to something like clairvoyance on my part. That is, until I tried to use my journalistic powers to make my daughter walk, and the attempt fell as flat as her own small bum on the tiles of our kitchen floor.
Her three other baby cousins have all started walking since we last discussed this, and it’s getting to the point where I’d be mildly embarrassed to share the video of her taking her first steps. As when a skincare brand announces they’re no longer partnering with an arms dealer, and you wonder why that ever happened in the first place, I fear showing footage of my daughter taking her first steps, when she’s old enough to legally drive a forklift, might raise more questions than it answers.
We return to the fridge. I have the remote in my hand. She stares, and laughs, and crawls vigorously toward me. Not that I should worry. There is magic in my fingertips and two columns ought to do it. She’ll be walking by the time you read this, I can feel it.
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 Twitter @shockproofbeats
