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Tuesday mornings is set aside as daddy/daughter time and I take Phoebe to a toddler football class. She is usually pretty wayward and goes running off for the horizon whenever she gets the chance, but today she engaged with it a lot more. She had lots of fun running round the cones with the other kids, imagining they were chasing her or being chased and shrieking with glee. And sometimes it worked and turned into a real piece of interaction. As I’ve said before I quite enjoy her wilfully doing the wrong thing and pleasing herself rather than obeying the coach, but it’s also surprisingly and amazingly delightful when she learns something new. There’s a bit that we’ve done every week where some cones are put down and the kids are meant to run over them with wide legs. Every other week she’s either just ignored them or run over them, but today, suddenly she understood the instruction and executed the manoeuvre perfectly. Then was so pleased to have got it that instead of running forward and kicking the ball into the goal, she looped back and ran over the cones again and again until I had to drag her forwards to stop her showing off her new talent. I love trying to work out what switch has clicked in her brain to make a new thing become clear. This one was very much - no idea what you’re expecting of me to Oh right, I get it, with no clear moment of epiphany.
Later on before she went to bed she started running around in a circle and laughing and I think she was remembering and playing out the stuff she’d done in the morning. I told her to go over the cones with wide legs and even though there were no cones, she did it. She had been practising what she’d learned and though it’s strange to be surprised by a human being using its memory, it’s kind of special to see it happening for one of the first times. Having got over her illness she’s full of beans and happy and a real delight to be with. She can’t jump yet, but when you tell her to jump she does this odd lumbering step. She thinks she is jumping. Catie and me had been tired and a bit low, but watching her failing to jump around whilst thinking she was jumping made us laugh til we cry. It’s an odd kind of laughter too, because although ostensibly we are laughing at our daughter there is clearly no malice there. And she just thinks she’s making us happy because she’s great at jumping, so it’s win win. It’s fucking joyous and we need some laughter at the moment.
It still occasionally freaks me out that we have somehow created a brand new human being. Sometimes the most normal things are the most surreal. Creating a human being makes no sense at all and if further proof, if proof be needs be, that we are just pixels inside some kind go intergalactic video game being played by a teenager who is taking the piss. And in 2016 has got particularly bored of trying to manage a stable world and so has just started messing about. But come off it. Growing a human from an egg? You’ve got to be kidding Zarcox73Y.
Anyway, go out and have kids if you don’t have them already. It’s just like living in a rainbow and there are no bad times at all. That’s not entirely true, but when it makes you laugh you will laugh more than you have at anything in your life. And your perspective on what constitutes importance will shift like a planet spinning on its axis.
Don’t be a jerk like me and leave it til you’re nearly 50. Find someone and let them impregnate you or impregnate them and get on with it. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
