The random meanderings of a Dad trying to make sense of it all against a backdrop of second chance and Anxiety and Depression
What are your Sunday mornings like?
Jenny’s out shopping and Wonderwoman has her friend Ladybug over to play. Batman’s at his Nan’s, so I can capture my morning pictorially. Just a little moment in time in my mind that the dog (Baskerville) captures pretty well.
Here is one of those life moments where there are no rules, no right or wrong answer. For me, it sums up the contradictions of being an Other Half, doing your best, and talking and listening properly. And, I suppose, just thinking in the heat of the moment.
Last night I had to pop up the supermarket for some razors. Jenny asked me to get Oreo Ice Cream for the superhero sproglets. Now you wouldn’t have thought that I could get something so specific, wrong. But it turns out that I did.
I went to the freezers, and there it was, shining like a beacon in the darkness. A tub of Oreo Ice Cream, ready to be descended upon and devoured by a slavering, raging pack of hungry Alligator-esque 5 year old twins. So in the basket it went, and I set off for home, revelling in my Hunter Gatherer success. I had sprouted very long hair and would return to my cave, where I would invent the wheel. Or knowing myself, reinvent it.
This morning, it transpires that opposite the freezers that contain the Oreo Ice Cream, amongst the children’s Ice Lollies, are Oreo biscuits filled with Ice Cream, which are different. And are the ones I should have bought. So even though I did exactly as I was asked, and got exactly what I was asked for, I was wrong.
Now we are a great couple, who are nice to each other, respectful, and look out for each other. Neither of us mind being wrong. It’s a drop in the ocean, non problem in life, but it is intensely annoying when you do your best with something so simple and are still wrong.
That’s life though, isn’t it? Go back to the start, do not collect £200. It’s a good lesson in observing how life is, obviously it’s bound to happen again as I am unlikely to ask for confirmation about something seemingly so finite and exact. So don’t sweat the small stuff. Inwardly roll your eyes, shrug and move on. You can’t win them all.
But then again, maybe I have. Because, if the kids don’t eat that lovely yummy ice cream, guess who will?!
In 2006, just as my Mum approached retirement, my Sister died. She had been ill for almost 11 years, but her death at that point was still quite unexpected.
In the months that followed, having given almost the whole of the previous 11 years to nursing my Sister, ( she was 23 when she sustained brain damage) my Parents found themselves grief stricken and lost, mired in a sense of failure and loss, in which they still paddle about in today, on a good day.
I was walking my dog with a lady who introduced me to the University of the Third Age, which to all intents and purposes is a big youth club for pensioners. She gave me a leaflet and I gave it to my Parents, who discounted it straight away.
I found my Mum looking at it days later, at Watercolour classes. It turned out that, when she was an 11 year old girl, she painted a picture at school. She liked painting. The teacher took a look at it and told her never to pick up a paintbrush again. So she didn’t.
I said to her ‘Look. No matter what you were told in the past, just do it. Give yourself a break and for once in your life, do what you want to do, for yourself. Sod what anyone else thinks. If you like what you’ve done, and it makes you happy doing it, fuck it. It’s no one else’s business. Just give it a go.’
So she did. I went round there today, and she showed me this, that she painted the other day. I think it’s lovely. And also, my Dad started bowling, photography, playing the banjo and tapdancing. Not bad for a fascist bastard Thatcherite ex copper, eh?! (My Dad, that is!)
So I’m here typing away with my sausage fingers and down comes Wonderwoman from upstairs, where a tired and flagging Jenny is trying to get her and Batman into bed. You might as well try cutting water with cutlery sometimes, it would be easier.
It turns out that, while I have forgotten the password I set up not 3 minutes ago for my G Suite email, Wonderwoman has a painful mouth ulcer. Patience time. I took her hand and we went upstairs whilst I gave her explicit instructions on how to sloosh out her mouth and not to drink the Corsodyl. She wanted a drink of water first from the tap, of which 90% went down her pyjama top. Then Batman arrived to see what was going on.
She slooshed and they wanted to be carried downstairs. Now they are 5 but they have taken after me height wise (I’m 193cm or 6’4″ in old money) and it’s getting harder to hold both of them at the same time. But I managed to totter downstairs like a pissed girl on stillettos and put them to bed. Whereupon Batman wanted me to sing ‘Long Black Train’ by Richard Hawley to him before he slept.
I was desperately trying to remember about DNS settings and long strings of passwords – and the happy helper was waiting for me on the other end of the chat. But I sung.
Because one day, all I will get at night, or in the morning for that matter, will be sullen silence, or if I’m lucky ‘Oh God Dad, you’re sooo embarrassing’.
And it felt like magic, and I felt like a King.
Well here we go. I have myriad things to say, share and postulate upon. Perhaps you’d like to join me. I am a 49 year old Dad of three, Zak 20 and twins Batman and Wonderwoman, 5. I am 2 1/2 times married: Jenny and I have done the Nikka in a Mosque and will do the Civil ceremony…. sometime soon. (She doesn’t know I have started this blog, so I won’t get in trouble for being vague.) We are not Religious, even though I just typed the word ‘Mosque’. I’ll type it again just to be edgy. Mosque. There you go.
I was diagnosed with Anxiety and Depression last year and am currently on Sertraline to even out my peaks and troughs, which generally works. I have been having counselling since last June, which has been really hard at times, but even though I feel (and probably smell) like I have been wading through shit and treacle for 9 months, it’s bloody brilliant and the journey is incredibly liberating.
All this (and more) has led me to a multi exit crossroads in life. There seem to be more than three exits, which would make the word ‘crossroads’ wrong. It’s more of a Cathedral full of doors, none of which are the right or wrong door to walk through.
So as this blog unfolds, and I open various doors and have a peak, you can come with me. I hope you will laugh, and if you need it, that it helps you along your journey too.
Mod Dad 