“We must undergo a hard winter training and not rush into things for which we haven’t prepared.”
A maniacal twenty four hours. I don’t remember a lot of it. Probably for the best.
Hazy.
Sleepless.
Loud.
Children trying to break the sound barrier. The neighbours got involved.
Flashing lights. Sirens. Strange noises from the future.
A thousand toys, batteries charged, flashing, beeping, singing,
shouting in unison, pleading to be played with.
Homo Sapiens. Programmed to run, pick berries from tundra flora, chase or be chased, kill or be killed. The subconscious reptilian brain didn’t evolve to fight a war of attrition with Fisher Price toys.
Bargaining and negotiating techniques are a man-made construct and are – when faced with a four-year-old armed to to the milk teeth with an armada of boats, trucks, cars, robots and spaceships and re-enacting Mad fucking Max in your living room – feeble. Woeful qualifications with zero purpose. Left-over relics from the Old World, designed to sell consultation, more consultation and email marketing. I’m a business consultant. Get me out of jail.
Helter-Skelter parenting from the bowels of a pandemic.
I woke up on the bathroom tiles, my lip glued to the floor, only one eye working. The air was cool. A distant memory from a long forgotten holiday sidled up from deep within my reptilian brain. A theme park, men dressed as mice. A calmness enveloped me. The transient calm only parents with toddlers can understand. Both exquisite and terrifying.
An animal scuttled past.
It was a sign.
Alice screamed into life and came running into the bathroom eating a pen.
“Daddy,” she said, the blue ink standing out vividly against the stark whiteness of the bathroom. “Why are you asleep on the floor?”
I asked her if she remembered the night?
“I was asleep Daddy,” she said, hopping.
She wasn’t. Oh sweet Jesus, she wasn’t. “Bring me coffee.”
It took ten minutes before I saw her again.
“I could only find beans,” she said.
“That’ll do.” I ate a spoonful of coffee beans.
And school started.
It was exciting because now we had the rules.
1st RULE: Ask as MANY QUESTIONS as you can. 2nd RULE: ASK as MANY QUESTIONS as you can. 3rd RULE: If someone says “I’m tired” or needs a nap, nap. 4th RULE: Only ONE teacher per class. 5th RULE: Multiple SUBJECTS MUST be taught at any one time. 6th RULE: No PHONES, no tablets. 7th RULE: Do NOT read LESS THAN 5 books a DAY. 8th RULE: Regardless of what day it is at APOCALYPSE DADDY SCHOOL FOR ADVANCED LEARNING, you HAVE to be creative.
It was time to put them to work.
“Daddy,” Alice said, clutching the broken remnants of some object which didn’t matter any-more. “When will the trains come back?”
Rule number one in full effect.
Bring on the awards ceremony, father of the year.
We were running laps around the garden, looking for questions, looking for answers, looking for inspiration.
“When do you think they will come back?”
Reverse parenting psychology. I’d seen it on a Ted talk.
We ran backwards, strengthening the calves, quads and shins, adding balance to the muscle groups, adding harmony to the physical make up, confusing the twitch fibres.
“When the strawberries and the raspberries come,” Alice said, losing herself, stumbling then re-aligning, laughing at the lack of control. “Can we have strawberries for lunch?”
It was a question. But irrelevant.
“When the trains come back, can we go to Paris? I like Paris, I was born in Paris. When were you born Daddy?”
I told her. She laughed.
She changed the subject and asked how you win tennis. I told her.
We ran sideways, firing up the glute medius, stabilising the hip-flexors, building the thighs. Building a cyborg for when the Hunger Games start.
“How do spiders make webs?”
We looked it up. She laughed.
“Why do people move very slowly?”
I said they don’t move slowly, we just move fast.
“Why is Granny in the phone?”
I told her she wasn’t actually in the phone, just temporarily transmitted there via a complex system of mirrors.
She looked at me and laughed.
“Everyone is in the phone. What’s for dinner?”
“Strawberries.”
“What colour is blue?”
“That’s an interesting question.”
She said, “Pink is pink, it’s all pink. Pink pen, pink balloon, blue pen, black pen, purple pen. Pink world.”
She asked when her birthday was.
I told her it was next year.
“I want a phone.”
A piece of me broke.
It was 9.41 a.m.
I am Alice’s overflowing heart
We finished running, went inside and read six books. Obliterating Rule seven.
Rule three came and went. It was understandable, she’d ran seven miles, which is like a dessert ultra marathon for a four-year-old.
Later in the afternoon Apocalypse Mommy and I did shuttle runs to the other room because of rule number six.
The rules were working.
It was time to break them.