mad rush

So singleness is an interesting thing.  There's a reason I got married at 20, it was so that I wouldn't find myself as a 30 year old single male thrown into the raging hormonal tempest that is modern dating with very little hair.  So, here I am balding with 4 kids.  That's right, single dad of 4 bundles of joyful sex-terrorists.  I mean, how much sex am I going to have in a house littered with plastic Barbies, plastic Babies, toy diggers, party-dresses and pre-teen music – such as Avril LaVigne?

So, I'm 10-years out of the loop and the loop seems to have been tied all wrong.  So there's at least 2 lives I live in terms of singleness.  There's my day-to-day life with 4 kids, school-runs and cuddling babies on sofas till they calm THE FUCK DOWN – you can tell a single parent because they use the F writing indiscriminately around polite, ie. Adult, society – call it the counter-balance of daylight hours filled with self-censorship and clearly pronounced instructions.  Single-dad-ness is filled with awe-struck single-mothers, or anyone for that matter, and people marvelling at your beautifully well-adjusted children.  The reality is, of course, that my default parental setting is "catastrophe aversion" with light spatterings of something to smile about.  On a good day there is cooperation and jokes, on a very good day we have thoughtfulness and playfulness.  Admired by passers-by and close friends.  It's a bit weird being measured as a potential date for someone by my fatherly qualities.  To be honest, I'm not very keen on the whole thing.  Then there's the other type of singleness:  This happens when you get a baby sitter or you drop the kids off to their mum for an afternoon or whatever.  Now that is the really weird singleness.  Cos it's not about the opposite sex, it's about being alone and suddenly being able to fit into small shops, think without explaining everything clearly and patiently, it can be about walking to my MP3 Player, reading alone in a coffee shop or drinking with grown-ups only.  And suddenly I realise, the more I talk and laugh and walk and breath, I'm my own person.  Unknown and unneeded sometimes, even!  Just able to sit and relax without having one eye open or sitting poised to run at any sudden scream or suspicious silence!  To allow adults to talk to me, talk about art and philosophy and food and what love is and why relationships begin or end.  Or God.  And then there's texting.  While writing this I just got a text, predictive texting means that some writings when typed become other writings before you select the combination of letters you require, for example, "inspiring" comes up first as "gossiping" and "coal" can also be "anal" or "cock" which is quite ironic in its way.  As a single person you should never let your children read your text messages.  Never. 

I was awoken by a text message one Monday morning.  What I shant let my children read, I certainly shall not read to a public audience, not till someone buys me a few beers anyway.  After smirking at the message I checked the time on the phone.  Damn.  So here I am 8:17AM on a Monday morning, a school-day morning with 4, that's right,. 4 children to get dressed and out the door for the school and nursery run by 8:25AM.

So what essential task do I find myself racing out of bed to accomplish?  It has to do with a 4 year old girl yelling indignantly at her 6 year old sister, "I'm scared of that top" (she does this a lot, "I'm scared of going to

bed, I'm scared of walking, I'm scared of eating that dinner, etc).  I hear her sister verbally rolling her eyes, exclaiming, "I'm going to find my jumper".  There she stands expression stale like last nights bread on the floor, pouting, "This top is hurting me, Daddy".  "Why?", I ask – seeing that it has none of the tell-tale threads of barbed-wire, broken glass or even jellyfish-lining.  Her simple factual obvious explanation is, "It's got too many stripes." 

So what, I hear you say, is my very first step in getting 4 children out of the door in under 8 minutes?  Counting the stripes on a 4 year-olds top.  9, by the way.  Establishing that the top she wore previously had 12 stripes on it and it proved to be most unremarkably comfortable.  She concedes to my astounding logic and continues to get herself dressed, deliberately wearing her older sisters old school shoes instead of her usual red boots.  By this point I've lost the will to argue, so I pick another more malleable minion to boss, her 6 year old sister – who is downstairs calling for her jumper by name ("Jumpy") – "your jumper is at school, find any other one to wear today."  No response is an afirmative response, I assume for now, fearing another problem to face.  My watch blandly smirks at me, 8:19AM.

I bang on my eldest daughters door and encourage her softly to get out of bed, which means I may have sworn!  I hear a pre-teen groan. 

I have, of course, conducted this entire hasty discourse in near-nudity, and so plunge as into water, into my clothes hung on the radiator.  Baby-boys clothes are within reach and miraculously there is one nappy left.  As he has yet to wake up (this being the day after British Summer Time so everyones body-clocks are all still an hour out, at least!), I wrestle through his protests, waking limb-flailings and snot-lassoos to juggle him out of a sleepsuit and ballooned-out nappy, and into the usual cute baby-boy ensemble, and nappy laced with pink princesses (hey they boys ones weren't reduced, I don't think his willy has noticed, it hasn't crawled off in disgust). 

8:22 and we are all downstairs nearly dressed.  Baby-boy into a coat and shoes and pushchair, make and shake a bottle.  The 4 and 6 year olds are infront of me now in the kitchen so I rip through tangled hair in record time and record volume of screaming.  Remarkably the pre-teen has earthquaked down the stairs in full uniform complete with coat and bag, ready for me to congratulate lovingly on her speedy work, again I may have sworn.  So, the door is open, the baby-boy is in and 4 year-old is on the pushchair, the 6 year old argues with the pre-teen about who got to open the front door.  We are out on the street, dazed but fully dressed, they with school-bags, and I with phone and wallet and keys.  A slam of the door and a very smug wristwatch that grins my lateness at me, 8:27AM.   

Not so shabby!  One adult and 4 kids up, dressed and outside in 10 minutes.  I'm stood in the crisp white light of the winter sun eating croissants with my 4 children.  A moments peace filled with smiles and no bickering.  The feeling flooding over us like just waking up from a shared dream, the world seems slightly brilliant and more uncomplicated.  As good as it gets for a single dad, or maybe for any of us.

And not a single fatality, yet!