It’s seventeen months since I became a father but it’s taken me this long to get my head together enough to write about it, so here goes …..
When I set out to have a baby I had no idea that there was an international conspiracy of parents who are all sworn to uphold the terrible secrets of parenthood. Once sworn in we are duty bound to pretend that all is rosy, make a few anecdotes about lack of sleep and say how wonderful our children are lest we put the continued viability of the human race in jeopardy by telling the awful truth.
I have however decided to break this silence and I think the best way to do it is to tell my own tale. Unlike the few vacuous books concerning fatherhood in bookshops (there’s usually about two stuck in the back somewhere amidst the 50,000 books on motherhood) I want to try and detail the internal processes that went on in my mind as fatherhood unfolded rather than just recount some tale like a story told down the pub couched in football analogies and bravado. This is what the few books I read attempted to do and they were useless to me especially given that I know nothing about football and comparing things to the offside rule just bewildered me even further.
So to kick off (damn thats a football reference isn’t it) I thought I ‘d go right back to the beginning ….
I just got back from a two week holiday attending various Science fiction conventions. Actually I got back on Tuesday but between being so tired and having to go back to work, its taken until now to be able to write about it.
I’ve been to lots of SF conventions before, but this holiday was a first on two counts. It was my first time attending a really big convention outside of Ireland, and my first time attending a convention with a child in tow.
Ron Paul is the best thing since sliced bread, the great new hope, the beacon of freedom for a new America. At least thats what you’d be led to believe if confined your political education to YouTube. Thankfully I haven’t.
For those who don’t know, Ron Paul is a Republican candidate running for the 2008 presidential elections. However he’s not the usual “I want to murder innocent foreigners to line my pockets and I hate fags” type of Republican. In fact he’s actually a “Libertarian” (using the grossly inaccurate American capitalist application of the word rather than the more accurate left wing application commonly used in Europe) who seems only to be in the Republican party because he believes there’s no way to achieve anything significant in American politics if you’re outside the two main parties.
He also different to most politicians at that level because I reckon he is actually principled and is not in it just for the power. He believes in something and wants to get people’s support so he can achieve it and he won’t dilute his beliefs just to win votes.
In line with “Libertarian” thinking he’s against America’s continual belligerent interfering with the rest of the world and isn’t afraid to say so and spell out what America has been doing to other countries.
All sounds good right? So what are my issues with him then?
Many years ago I was in a relationship that went sour. In the beginning it was great, it was what you might even call classic, all daring adventure and star crossed romance. I remember rushing home in anticipation to share our precious moments together and then sitting up late whistling our song.
But at some point things started to go wrong. I didn’t realize it at the time but I think it was around the time they moved into a new phase and changed their look, joined a new generation if you will. I never liked their new clothes even then but I overlooked it in the excitement of it all. Maybe it was me that changed or maybe it was the new people that they started hanging around with that ruined it. I knew it was going south when Rick and Brannon started exerting more and more control over them and referring to our relationship as “The Franchise” and in a way they were right, we had very little spark or creativity or originality left, it was just about mindless consumption and I began to wonder why I was still there.
And so I drifted way, although there was some good moments towards the end, especially when our mutual friend Ron Moore helped make that last arc of our relationship so deep. Once we went our separate ways I was happy doing my own thing and I heard the other half had gone off voyaging somewhere far way and I didn’t care.
But then one day they walked back into my life and promised me it could be like it had been in the beginning, that we could have a fresh start and it could be gritty and real and we could make it work. I should have known better but they were irresistible and I fell for them again. If only I’d been stronger I could have avoided the pain of that failed enterprise, which was more abysmal than I could ever have imagined.
When we broke up that time I swore it would be the last time I would ever go back with them. I’ve held to that promise, but today I got a video message from them and I can feel it happening all over again, the tingle in my skin, the warm flush, my mind fading into the night thinking “what is this thing you call love” and waking up in a haze to find myself putting my boots back on.
I know its wrong, I know it won’t work but… but.. you see there’s this new guy JJ on board and he’s really cool and he says it ‘ll be okay and he doesn’t say “franchise” every second, so maybe it will work, maybe we can be happy again. Oh please let us be happy again, I can’t go through this again, let it be like the old days before they started wearing lycra unitards, before the 80’s PC blandness and, and before they started dressing like they were characters rented from FHM. Let it be like our glorious technicolor youth when plots were cheesy and skirts were short, when… real.. men… spoke… dramatically… or had southern accents or pointy ears and real women had subspace antenna or were just simply green.
Oh please… let it be like I remember… let it be good… oh please…
It’s that time of year again when, if you’re like me, you are most likely bursting full of festive cheer and about to start humming some carols. It’s at this point when you can be guaranteed that some festively-challenged begrudger will try to spoil it for you.
These grinchy types come in many forms, such as the post-modern too cool for school “Too Commercials” who usually reckon Christmas is too tacky, uncool and generally beneath them. They tend to say “Oh Christmas has got too commercial it’s all about money and gifts drone blah moan….”. Yes I agree Christmas has become very commercial but do they have to keep moaning on about it, I wish they’d just ignore Christmas or make their own Christmas less commercial, you know don’t spend a fortune on presents or maybe get those charity voucher thingies instead, but whatever they do I wish they’d just shut the hell up and stop being such moaning bastards.
The most common form of these spiritless Christmas-phobes however are “The True Meanies”. These are the people who like to say in pious tones “Now, let us remember the true meaning of Christmas…” and proceed to drone on about baby Jeebus or human goodwill, or whatever their fascistic one true meaning happens to be. Read the rest of this entry »
Occasionally people ask me why I don’t drive, especially here in Galway where I think most people are given cars instead of legs at birth.
Growing up not far from inner city of Dublin and living there most of my life I never really needed a car. My father never drove and my mother tried for a while but gave up after two cars in a row were stolen. Most of my friends families didn’t have cars either and all my friends and I walked, cycled and used buses without thought, practically no one in my school was dropped off in a car. Effectively I grew up in a culture that was not car dependent, all the facilities we needed to live were easily accessible without a car. Thats not to say Dublin is car free utopia, it’s not, especially so in recent years with American style suburban sprawl and population growth with little or no matching investment in public transport. Dublin has become a car culture but due to its density and the legacy of having some sort of bus system its still possible to live there without a car if you live somewhere within the city proper rather than the sprawl into Meath and Kildare. More importantly in a way car culture hasn’t fully infected the minds of a lot of people there, there are still lots of younger people who don’t have cars and don’t consider it to be a extra limb.
Today I was lost in the rhythmic way Makka Pakka was precisely laying out his stones and polishing them with his sponge before delicately re-stacking them like some kind of zen gardener sitting in the womb like cave entrance to his home.
I could only tolerate the inevitable end of this bliss like state knowing that I would get to see the Piny Ponk fly into view and dream of climbing aboard and slurping my Pinky Ponk juice with the Tomlyboos before getting off to sing with Uppsy Daisy or count the Pontypines. And whats more I knew I could repeat this same mediative journey every day with only some slight alterations, and if I’m lucky maybe tomorrow Makka Pakka will be cleaning his ogbog.
Am I entering a second childhood or going mad? Perhaps both, but what I’m talking about is “Into The Night Garden”. My daughter has started watching TV but only this show keeps her attention. A year ago I would have dismissed it, but in the last few days I’ve found myself spellbound by it. “Into The Night Garden” is like a bubble of calming repetitiveness that seems to soothe some part of my brain with its safe melodic world and leave me feeling very blissful just in time to sing the autumn song at the end of cbeebies.
If you’re a parent with a brain fried from looking after a toddler who thinks she’s a mini-godzilla intent on destroying everything in her sight as if its Neo-Tokyo then “Into The Night Garden” is just what you both need to chill out!
Last night I dreamt I was on the Ninky Nonk and it was the best dream I’ve ever had. Mmm.. mmm.. da-dee-da-dah-da…
Samhain, it’s the time of year where death often slinks into my brain, nestles in the corner and sits there quietly irritating me until I’m forced to stare into its cold mouldering face. I’ve only had three significant deaths occur in my life and the last was my fathers nearly five years ago now. It was hard for me to deal with at the time, not because of the emotion but more because of the lack of it. I wrote this poem a few days after his death, after I rushed home from across the world: Read the rest of this entry »
Unable to sufficiently express my general sense of happiness and wellbeing I’ve decided to coin a new word:
Wiisabi : happiness derived from unforeseen events
So what am I talking about you say. Well as I mentioned before I woke up one morning feeling generally excellent and decided that I’d book lots of holidays for our little clan for next year. I didn’t think I could get much happier than this.
Well the same day I get notified that I don’t have to go to work on Thursday, instead I’m required to go to fluffy seminar on “Web 2.0″. Excellent I thought, a day of generally relaxing and listening to marketing guff I already know and a free lunch, happiness +100. Even better its on in a hotel around the corner from me so I can sleep in late and get home early, happiness + 200.
I was away at Octocon, the Irish national SF Convention at the weekend and had a great time. Its been so long since I was at a con or any other kind of intense fun and socializing that I forgot how it skews your perceptions of time.
What I mean is that your perceptions of how long you’ve been away are exaggerated and when its over you’re left slightly disoriented. I’m back two days now and I still feel weirdly high and removed from the world around around me. Its as if the whole weekend gets encased in some kind of reality excursion bubble. Instead of popping when you leave you slowly squish up against the side of the bubble as you make you way home on various transport systems and bump into other people from the con here and there and go to some some post-con drinks the day after. Then finally the bubble slowly dissipates and your left bleary eyed sitting at your desk in work back in normal (albeit subtly altered) reality.
It’s seventeen months since I became a father but it’s taken me this long to get my head together enough to write about it, so here goes …..
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Attachment Parenting, Fatherhood, Meditation, Parenting | Tagged: Birth, Suffering | 
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Posted by monkeylogical
Ron Paul is the best thing since sliced bread, the great new hope, the beacon of freedom for a new America. At least thats what you’d be led to believe if confined your political education to YouTube. Thankfully I haven’t.
Samhain, it’s the time of year where death often slinks into my brain, nestles in the corner and sits there quietly irritating me until I’m forced to stare into its cold mouldering face. I’ve only had three significant deaths occur in my life and the last was my fathers nearly five years ago now. It was hard for me to deal with at the time, not because of the emotion but more because of the lack of it. I wrote this poem a few days after his death, after I rushed home from across the world:
