"It is not the man who has too little that is poor, but the one who hankers after more."
Time compression.
Blink and you miss it.
Only you mustn’t because the rapid closing of eyelids has painful consequences. Blink and your toddler is falling down the stairs or impaling their eyes on the corner of a table, an upturned chair, a door handle, a dolls house, a cake tin.
So much choice.
So little time.
Herding Schrödinger’s cats would be a respite.
Half of the time.
Luca can find weapons of mass destruction in the living room. George Bush should have sent him to the dessert.
They grow up so quickly.
“Luca,” I said, my heart already racing. “Luca, where did you go?”
I stood still and listened for sound effects.
Toddlers can run long before their tiny reptilian brain can articulate the inherent danger of their new gift. Nature played a hideous game when she gave movement before speech.
“Ha,” she laughed inwardly as she worked tirelessly with evolution to make life as tough as possible. “Toddlers. Idiots.”
Baby proofing the corner of tables wasn’t in the evolutionary rip-tides of early swamp life.
Imagine the callousness of that decision.
I heard splashing from the toilet. Reckless toddler, he’d given away his location. The swine had dragged a bedside lamp and plugged it into the murky water at the bottom of the U-bend. I found him with his mouth on the side of the toilet bowl, stirring the water with the upturned lamp.
Luca had started to run at 4 a.m. He had woken up in the middle of the night and decided now was the time. Behold my toddler death-wish.
Power is nothing without control.
The Eagle has landed.
The first steps of a toddler are a total body drug. Startling savagery. The mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. The hands flap crazily above their head as they stumble through the turnstiles and into the realms of childhood. One moment they are crawling around the house eating dead flies, the next they are floundering around looking for ways to kill themselves.
Garbled laughter bubbling from their excited mouths as they bash around, opening doors, looking for bleach.
I pulled Luca away from the toilet. He licked his fingers. Animal. I wedged myself against the wall and used my foot to fish the lamp out of the toilet, grabbed Luca with my left arm and used my right elbow to remove his fingers from his mouth.
After that it was a quick fall into the bathroom. I threw him into the bath, slammed on the shower, put the lamp down and grabbed the soap in one fluid movement.
Even Luca was impressed.
He was like, “I’m gonna try that,” and fell out of the bath.
The race was on.
It might be early but I wasn’t tired. I had spent the previous day doing high-interval heart training.
13,000 steps. 70 floors. 11 km.
Fitness is one thing, but you need to adapt your spatial awareness to compete with a toddler who has just started running. Your lifetime of predicting the velocity and trajectory of objects has left you at a hideous disadvantage. Toddlers don’t obey the laws of physics.
You need to recalibrate, and quickly.
I wasn’t up to the task at 4.37 a.m. The strafing threw me. Luca ran sideways towards the kitchen like a wobbly crab. I knew I had to intercept him. Luca misjudged the distance to the door frame, bounced off it and slammed into the opposite wall. He was doing it on purpose, using the walls like NASA using Jupiter to slingshot a satellite to the Sun.
Goddamn son of a bitch.
He was moving too quickly. I had sleep in my eyes. What’s happening here? I thought…Why me? Knives on the edge of the table… Was the kettle on? I wasn’t boiling an egg on the ring nearest to the counter edge… Was I?
His arms were above his head as he raced into the living room, his bendy chubby legs almost buckling under the excitement. God knows what he was shouting about, it was all condensed dribble and pouring down his chin. Garbled nonsense from the dawn of creation.
His was distracted by a fleck of dust, dancing in the lamplight. As he stopped to admire it I caught up. He was like a fucking fly: he could feel the air moving before I got close.
How he kept himself up I have no idea, he was wavering like a ship in a hurricane, swaying left and right, waving his hands around, screaming.
I’d come to find the parenting dream and now I was in the vortex I wanted to get off. This was the main nerve, the pumping heart of raising children. Lockdown fatherhood. Lord of the Flies.
Changing tact, I raced across the living room in the opposite direction, approaching Luca on his blind-side. Unsuspecting toddler. So naïve.
I dived across the carpet that separated me from him. His body buckled under his weight, he did a Pacific Island limbo trick, his head bending back to the ground, his knees almost touching the floor in front of him, bent back 180 degrees on his little toes. I lost balance and gravity threw me into the bookcase, almost taking my eye out on a hardback edition of The Hungry Caterpillar.
Luca laughed. And started blowing bubbles. I watched one pop in his eye as he breeched the kitchen again, the knives and the boiling water glinting in the brightening dawn as the sun rose over the horizon.
There was a pink marble on the bookcase. An escape route. I grabbed it and threw it into the kitchen. It slammed off the wall and smashed into the toaster. Luca watched it, mesmerised.
“Daddy,” Alice said, appearing like a fucking Velociraptor. “You owe me an ice-cream.”
What the fuck? Where had she come from?
Now there was two of them. Out of control quarks in some misguided parenting adventure.
Alice had been woken by the splashing in the toilet and seen an opportunity to play wicked games on her brother. As we had been juggling in the bathroom, she had slipped unnoticed in to the kitchen and taken up her position behind the counter.
Children can be still if they are trying to fuck their siblings over.
“Where did you come from?” I said, working out the angles and advanced geometry needed to keep them safe.
The marble stopped bouncing and Luca came back to his senses. His calibration reset, he now had no idea what he was doing in the kitchen and instead ran towards us, like a cannonball.
Alice stuck out her foot. He crashed down onto the floor, unable to steady himself any longer.
The fire alarm went off.
Apocalypse Mommy came into the kitchen.
“What’s everyone having for breakfast?” she said as she flicked on the kettle, put some boiling water on the stove nearest the edge and took a Japanese sushi knife out of the drawer to cut peanuts.
Alice dropped a glass and it shattered into a thousand tiny pieces all over the kitchen floor.
It was 6.12 a.m. “Nobody move,” I said. “I’ve got an idea.”