Joseph: “What’s if I was a real superhero?“
Ian: “Then you’d be out fighting crime, not sitting in your pyjamas playing videogames. Sitting in your pyjamas playing videogames is what students do.“
Joseph: “It’s what Batman does!”
Today, Joseph has been mostly asking for metal things, so that he can test their ferromagnetic properties. With a magnetic giraffe. He has already discovered that things the giraffe attaches to are always metal, but that there are some metals to which it will not attach.
To put it another way:
My son is doing the science. There are the beginnings of real, actual scientific method there.
This is the same kid that has previously tried to teach me about gravity and the water cycle.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever been this proud.
My parents were, if nothing else, organised at all times. I don’t recall at any point realising that they had no idea what was going on, or that they weren’t absolutely in charge of what we did. In contrast, Eric and I muddle through day-to-day, just about keeping it together — sometimes we forget to brush Joseph’s teeth, or can’t be bothered to wash up, or leave the laundry sitting in the washing machine for a bit too long.
Which is why the fact that Joseph is starting pre-school next week is all the more scary. We’re used to a life where, assuming it’s not a work day, what we do just doesn’t matter. If Joseph doesn’t wake up until 9am, no problem! If we can’t be bothered to get dressed before lunchtime, nobody cares!
But as of next week, Joseph has to be places. Regularly, on time, washed and breakfasted and bussed across town by the same time, three days a week. And picked up at a certain time, no matter what else might be happening. It’s a wee bit scary.
I wonder if having a school-age child will suddenly grant us powers of organisation — but I doubt it. I once hoped that having a child at all would do that, and clearly it hasn’t.
Hopefully being a disorganised parent is okay, because I don’t seem likely to turn into my parents anytime soon.
With Joseph now spending a week and a half at his grandparents’ house, our lives are even more bereft of the enforced routine of being parents to a toddler. It’s not that I miss this routine — god knows, I hate routine more than most — but how strange it feels when it’s no longer present.
Eric, who’s been at home all day, now sits in the corner reading a book, listening to music that my brain parses as depressing regardless of its actual content. She’s not hungry, I’m not really hungry, as the clock ticks onwards long past what would have been Joseph’s dinner time. I was instructed not to buy food for dinner on the way home, so we don’t have enough ingredients to make an actual meal — not that I can be bothered to cook anyway. I contemplate going out for fish and chips, though I can’t really afford it and can’t even be bothered to stand up from the sofa.
A four-day weekend and a fragmentary reminiscence of University life have thrown my work life askew as well, and it feels odd to be there, like it’s a transient thing.
For all that I normally yearn to be free from the yoke of parenthood, it sure as hell feels weird when I temporarily achieve it, as if I’m no longer adapted to a child-free life.