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Once again, a high-pitched yell drags me from my bed as the sun begins to rise.

I take my pillow with me, intent on getting some extra sleep top-and-tail on1 my three-year-old daughter’s bed whilst she draws pictures on the iPad that I also grab on the way. I check the time as I go: Saturday, 6:45am. Not a time of the week my pre-parenting self was ever awake for.

Her face drops as I enter the room. “I wanted Mummy,” she groans, kicking the covers off her leg with a frown that could split timber.

“Mummy’s sleeping, sorry bud,” I say. She took the last feed at 4:30am, so it’s only fair for me to be first responder to the Eldest child’s waking whims.

I go to kiss her forehead. Maybe I should have sensed it wouldn’t be well-received, but nevertheless I wasn’t prepared for her to smack me in the face, palm-first. The slap jolts me out of my stupor—looks like I won’t be needing the pillow anymore.

After a bad reaction to my attempts to calm the situation, fresh calls for mummy are made, and she arrives to mediate the situation. An apology is eventually forthcoming, and we move on. I show her how her island on Animal Crossing is coming along. I set it up for her a few days ago whilst she watched. She called it Princess.

Lately, we had been feeling as though getting out and about with two kids was more effort than it was worth, despite the relative success of our recent trip away. The needs of two kids seem to be greater than the sum of their parts, especially as their individual needs are so vastly different at their respective ages.

I feel particularly guilty when I think of my Wife having to venture out with the two of them on her own when I’m in work. Although as a family we’ve adjusted to having two kids well, there’s a creeping sensation that the training wheels are slowly being removed, and now the real world and all its harsh, jagged edges are beckoning our motley troupe.

I suggest that we take a drive to a wooded park about twenty minutes away—it’s a bit of a deviation from the easy, local outings we’ve been sticking to recently, but I thought it would do us all good to be around nature, and perhaps build all of our confidence in venturing further afield.

“I’ve just got to pick up a birthday present for that party we’re going to next week,” my wife says as we bundle the children into the car.

“There’s a bookshop on the way,” I say. We agree to stop there. What excellent parenting logistics. We’ve got this shit down. I press play on a ten-hour white noise track and tuck my phone into the side of the baby’s car seat to help her stay asleep through the journey.

I pull into the small retail park that the bookshop resides in. We stop for a moment, waiting for a car to reverse into a space.

“Do you want to come into the bookshop with me?” my wife asks our three-year-old.

No response. The car in front has nearly finished its manoeuvre.

“Do you want to come in with me?” my wife asks again.

“No,” she responds, lips wrapped around the straw of her water bottle.

Now we’re holding up traffic, so my wife jumps out of the car and heads inside. Rather than march us all out of the car for five minutes, I plan to park somewhere else and circle back when I see my wife exit the shop, gift in hand and ready to go.

I start driving to find a space, when the shout comes.

“I want to go with Mummy!”

My wife has by this point already disappeared inside the shop. The nearest parking space is right up the other end of the car park, a good hundred feet away. I can’t walk my daughter into the shop and leave the baby in the car, and I’m not going to unfold the pram and risk waking the baby to shove her in it.

“Sorry mate,” I say. “Mummy’s just—”

An ungodly wail bursts out of my previously-calm three-year-old. Usually you can tell when something’s going to trigger a tantrum, but to be honest this one caught me off-guard.

I try telling her mummy won’t be long; I remind her of the lovely park we’re heading to; I offer her a snack. Nothing works. Time for the last resort.

“Do you want to watch something?” I say. I receive a nod of the head from my daughter, her eyes glassy and red.

I reach for where I usually stash the iPad in the car. Except it’s not there. It’s back in her room, where she’d been drawing flowers earlier in the morning.

I glance at my youngest. She looks in a pretty deep sleep, I think. She won’t mind if I just…

I slip the phone out from its cubby, gradually turning down the white noise before selecting something at random for her to watch. Usually I ask her, but I know better this time. If she asks for Peppa Pig and I have to explain again that she’s “on holiday”, I think my daughter might actually explode. I think I ended up putting on Curious George.

Of course, within moments the baby wakes up. I start circling the car park, hoping the motion will lull her back to sleep, but no luck. I see my wife emerge from the shop. She jumps in, replaces the white noise with her own phone, and we speed away, desperate just to get to our destination. There’s a brief discussion with the eldest of how maybe we need to think about our decisions when someone asks a question, but it goes over her head. Naturally.

Peace breaks out for the rest of the journey, and our spirits are hopeful as we decamp from the car. As I transfer the baby into the pram, that unmistakeable aroma stops me in my tracks. I change the shitty nappy—the pram isn’t the ideal place to do it, but better that than inside the car.

We make our way into the woods. Our eldest hasn’t been here since she was a baby herself, so she comments on the beautiful canopies above and the blooming wildflowers as if she’s seeing them for the first time. She splashed in puddles2, delighted that on this occasion we’d remembered her wellies.

That is until she wasn’t delighted anymore.

As we’re walking, she hops aboard the Buggy Board and starts shaking off one of her wellies.

“Let’s keep our boots on,” I say, putting it back on.

She shakes it off again. Right, now we’re in a power struggle. I’m about to give her a decision to make. Maybe, just maybe, what we discussed before seeped into her subconscious.

“If you shake your boot off again, I’ll have to put your normal shoes on and you won’t be able to go in puddles.” I put the boot back on.

Predictably, she shakes it off a third time. She might as well have said “Your move, dickhead,” as she did it.

Refer a friend

Of course, now we have to actually follow through. So we stop the pram, take off her wellies and put her shoes on instead. I try to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing, but it’s drowned out by more screaming that rudely punctures the tranquil silence.

Obviously, the three-year-old is massively fucked off. She solemnly walks beside the pram, wailing about wanting to put her boots back on. Again, an explanation about why it’s important to make good decisions is attempted, and again it is not received. Perhaps she’s too young to comprehend. Either way, there will likely be more bad decisions in her future before the message hits home.

We stop at a row of benches overlooking a pond, which provides some distraction for our eldest from her hardships for all of twelve seconds, when she announces mournfully that there’s no fishies in the water. The baby is mewling, so my wife picks her up to give her a feed.

After taking the eldest for a wee behind a tree, she returns to the lake and continues to moan about her wellies, and the lack of fishes. The baby wriggles around in my wife’s arms, fussy but not quite hungry.

I try to stay present amidst this lush wildlife. We try as parents to touch the grass and try to appreciate every moment. But when their needs and complaints as incessant, and we haven’t fallen into the same generational cycle of shouting them down, it’s very, very hard not to dream of the moment when they’re both asleep in approximately six hours’ time.

I look around at the beauty of our surroundings, and at my daughter having another meltdown. You’re welcome, I think, then regret thinking. It’s not her fault. Our parents may have said things like that if they thought we were being ungrateful, but this is just a pre-schooler processing emotions. It’s still hard to deal with though.

I look at my wife. She looks at me. We’ve given it a go, but we wordlessly decide to throw in the towel and head home.

The eldest then tells me she needs a poo. We take the travel potty behind a bush.

The baby is tetchy all the way back to the car, on the brink of a mini-meltdown of her own. The eldest drags her feet and moans yet some more. Now her legs are too tired even to stand on the Buggy Board. God, I wish I had a Buggy Board to take me all the way to bed.

We embark on our home-bound trip, but not before a second nappy change for the baby, just in case it’s the wetness that’s bothering her. It wasn’t, but worth a try, eh?

Just two minutes into our twenty minute drive home, we remember something we’d said to each other in passing as we were leaving the house.

“We can pick up something for dinner on the way home,” one of us had said, the other agreeing.

Shit.

Another pit stop was not what any of us wanted, but needs must. We pull in to a Sainsbury’s. We make a quick plan for me to take our eldest in whilst my wife feeds the baby. I drive past the bank of parent and child parking spaces. Of course, they’re all full.

I coax the eldest into the shop with the promise of chocolate animal biscuits, but not vectors contorting myself around the driver’s seat to allow her to sit on the travel potty that’s nestled between the two kids’ car seats. Despite her denials, she did indeed need to go.

She cranes her neck around every aisle we pass looking for them. She’s surprisingly patient as I look for pesto.

I can’t find small bags of the animal biscuits so I have to settle for a larger bag, on the proviso we share between the three family members with teeth. Eldest agrees, but I sense the agreement is built on shaky ground.

On returning to the car, I open the door and that smell hits my nostrils again. The two cars either side of mine are pretty close and the boot’s3 full of crap, so baby lies on my wife’s lap as I kneel on the driver’s seat to do the deed, my driver’s door still open so I don’t have to fold myself up like a fucking accordion. The eldest is wondering where the hell her animal biscuits are.

As I’m changing the baby, and trying to pull apart those damn fiddly tabs on the nappy4, I hear the clunk as the car that my door is resting against is unlocked. A few moments later, the driver of the car on the other side also returns to their vehicle. To have a good fucking look at what I’m doing.

At least, in the moment that’s what I feel. Maybe they were sympathetic to our cause, and could see the struggle that we were in. But in that moment their eyes crawled all over me. I want them to just piss off and let me fumble this nappy onto my child in anonymous solitude. I slam my car door so the other driver can get into their car, probably more forcefully than I needed to. My wick is burning dangerously low.

Mercifully, we set off home, but by now everyone else has lost the scraps of patience they had. Baby is blue-in-the-face crying, and our eldest is furious at the portioning of the animal biscuits. This nearly flips me into a rage. God, I’d have got pelters for that as a kid. Don’t be so ungrateful. How dare you?!

“You’re welcome,” I mutter inaudible to anyone but myself.

We’re just over five minutes from home, but we have to stop. The baby has transcended to another dimension of livid, and so she goes back on the boob. Our eldest needs another wee.

As if someone upstairs said, “Alright, that’s enough,” and bestowed some pity on us, the eldest calmed down and the baby fell asleep to round off the rest of the journey. I sling the baby’s car seat into the lounge—the room that’s meant for us adults to retire to in the evenings once the kids are in bed, but of course have not sat down in for nearly three months now. The eldest is grateful to be freed from her seat, and scampers off with my phone to sit in the family room to finish watching Curious George.

I take some cleansing breaths in the kitchen as I empty my cluttered pockets. My wife goes upstairs, probably to lie down in a dark room.

I sense my daughter looking over at me from her position on the sofa, lips wrapped around the straw of her water bottle once more.

I feel awful. I know what it was like to walk on eggshells around stressed parents. I want to be honest with her, to let her know that it’s not her fault really, and that we all have big feelings sometimes.

I can’t think of anything profound, so I simply say “being a grown-up is hard sometimes.” I almost say it to myself, not expecting a response.

She stops sipping from her cup for a moment, to say “thank you Mummy and Daddy.”

The stress of the afternoon melted off my back in an instant. Where all we’d seen were tantrums, shitty nappies, judgy passers-by, internalised frustrations and mental exhaustion, she’d seen two parents who, despite all that, had shown up.

I leave the cupboard I was tidying half-open to go to her. I hug her.

“You’re welcome,” I say.

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Previously on Some Other Dad

Recent previous issues

The Great Family Road Trip

Confessions of an Obsessive Parent

A Different Kind of Father's Day

Comparison Culture