In the nearly five years I’ve been writing this column, I’ve sometimes been accused of making up the more alarming things that have happened to me. This is not the case, as many of my more incident-free columns should sadly prove. ‘Please,’ I say to family and friends, damning myself with every word, ‘if I made stuff up, my column would be a lot more exciting.’
It’s just that when something unlikely or horrifying does happen to me, I jump at it with both hands. The sad, obvious truth about parenting is that much of it is very boring. The sad, obvious truth about writing about parenting is that ‘much of it is very boring’ will not suffice. Knowing this cannot remedy the fact that there are simply weeks in which nothing of any interest happens to me at all, and I’m forced to tackle things from whatever angle I can. This was a problem when I had one child, who often did very little or, worse, did nothing but the one thing I’d already written an article about some weeks previously. I’ve so far avoided writing a column entitled: ‘Yet more adventures in potty training’, but I could have done for most of 2022. And now I have a daughter, I find she alternates between doing very little and doing things that her brother has already done. All of which means, to paraphrase Vivian Mercier’s famous review of Waiting for Godot, ‘Not only does nothing happen, nothing happens twice.’
I have even been known to secretly enjoy putting myself through unpleasant or stressful experiences simply for the sake of content. Was I perversely thrilled by the horror of having to make our elderly landlord smash in our window because I’d locked us out of our home one week after moving in? Yes. Was some deeply shameful part of me delighted that my son’s baby monitor was mistaken for a bomb by the kind and patient staff at Stansted Airport, which led to every passenger being marched off the plane by security men? I can’t deny it.
So, please take to heart what I say next. When, last week, I understood my son’s first day back in school to be on Monday and promptly dressed him in full uniform; when I then marched him to said school to find the streets empty and its gates barred up; when I quickly, but not quickly enough, realised it was clearly an in-service day that every single parent had remembered but me; when I deliberately zipped up my son’s jacket in a pathetic attempt to obscure his school jumper from the unseen eyes of my neighbours, at least six of whom have children in his year; when I took the opposite way home to avoid their houses, sporting, all the while, the rictus grin you’d see on any cool dad who just felt like taking his son on a relaxing 8.45am walk around the block; when I returned to our house, drenched in anxiety sweat, and called the school to confirm that, yes, I had committed the one faux pas every school parent fears the most. When I did all these things, I liked it. It was for the column. I wasn’t embarrassed at all, actually. Please don’t print that I was embarrassed.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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