Without Reason

Friday morning, the pre-school bunfight. Things had been getting too easy and well-ordered, so last week I decided to make everything a little bit harder by cooking them breakfast, and finally acquiescing to Two of Two's demands that he'd like a packed lunch, rather than a couple of quid to spend in the school canteen, because obviously my cold pasta is better than their warm stuff. "While you're at it," chipped in One of Two, "I wouldn't mind some sushi in my lunchbox. Min Hyun has sushi."

Min Hyun has sushi...Of course Min flippin' Hyun has sushi, Min Hyun's mum has been making sushi in her sleep from the age of eight. Possibly Min Hyun even makes her own sushi. I'm from the west of Scotland. I make toast.

The hell with it, I thought, I'm going to make sushi. I'm going to make a tuna pasta sweetcorn dish. I'm going to fry them up some French toast. (I'd always wondered what the French called French toast. Did they just call it 'toast'? I checked on Wikipedia. Wikipedia says that they call it 'pain perdu', which is slightly disappointing.)

So, there I was on Friday morning, doing all these things at seven a.m. Now, I'm not making myself out to be some Dad Supergenius. I'm not wearing my pre-school-sushi-pasta-French-toast-making as a badge of honour. It was just what I was doing at the time, and even though I thought I'd be nice to the kids, they don't appreciate it for a second, and never will. Even when they're older and have kids themselves, they're not going to look back and think, 'wow, how cool was dad!' They'll
look back at their mornings before school and think, "I remember there was some guy there who used to do stuff. He shouted a lot."

Two of Two, who I'd just let watch tv for half an hour, such was my general feeling of benevolence towards my spawn, came in and sat down at the table to his pain perdu. TPCKAM said, 'Let's have a quick run over your spelling words before you eat anything.' Well, by God, the wee man went bananas. Partially bananas. He didn't go the whole way of denouncing us for having the temerity to ask something of him and stepping outwith our roles of People Who Are There To Serve. He just growled and then stomped out the room with a screaming huff on.

TPCKAM and I looked at each other with a raised eyebrow or two. (TPCKAM can't raise one eyebrow without raising the other and is consequently jealous of my eyebrow abilities. On the other hand, she can do the Vulcan greeting, separating your third and fourth finger thing, which I've never been able to do, and my jealousy of that is all-consuming, but I guess it really just sets her apart as some sort of alien.) Then I thought, flippin'-hell-here-I-am-standing-in-the-kitchen-cooking-blah-blah-blah. So I went to retrieve the errant wee man. Grabbed him by the collar and hauled him into the kitchen. I started off mad, then decided I'd be better to be cold. In the ensuing five minutes, during which he bungled his way through a spelling practice, I removed his French toast, and then pitched his pasta into the bin and told him he could eat from the canteen. ('That's a waste!' cried One of Two, 'What about the starving children in Africa?!' which was a minor words-coming-back-to-haunt-you moment.) After the pasta in the bin, Two of Two, his spelling test complete, stormed out of the kitchen and cried hysterically for the next forty minutes. Then I dropped him off at school.

Skip forward to Saturday afternoon. Two of Two and I played baseball in the back garden. His idea, as a change to cricket or football. In lieu of a bat, we used a cricket stump. He insisted on playing the full rules, balls/strikes/walks etc. Two innings in and I was leading 4-0 and he was getting grumpy. He started using the cricket bat and began beaning the ball all round the garden. Going into the bottom of the third in a three-inning game, trailing 6-4, I loaded the bases (we were using an imaginary runner system), and was within one smack of the tennis ball over the garden fence of victory. In the end I lost, but not before Two of Two stomped around and got huffy and pouted and threatened to walk off because he thought he was going to lose.

We came in and sat down in the kitchen where TPCKAM was muddling around. It was time for a chat. So I settled him down, now that he was in a good mood, for the full father-son thing, with mum there for backup. Gave him the whole spiel about how wonderful he was, but that sometimes it wasn't a lot of fun to play with him. Tried to sound reasonable, even confessed to my own parenting faults. We all get mad etc etc. I think it was an ok speech. If I'd written it down, I could probably use it some time if I ever do the kind of true-life mince you get on True Movies channel or, well, True Movies 2 channel. Not too heavy handed, I hoped. A decent pitch to the wee fella, intended to insert some sort of Reason button. A new dawn, a new beginning. His sister was away for the weekend, he had his parents to himself, and this was the moment when he would realise that we all have to do things that we don't want to, and that stomping off with a bottom lip the size of Boris Johnson never does anyone any good. There are some things in life that you just have to suck up. I wasn't spinning the 'no one said life was fair' line, because life can be fair. But it can also be testicle-crushingly rubbish.

I finished my bit. To be honest, I reckon it transcended True Movie channel quality. Al Pacino would have made a decent job of it.

The wee man looked up at me and said... 'Can I have that piece of bread?...'

And I, like a million parents before me, thought of Gary Larson and his 'what dogs hear' cartoon.