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I gave my daughter a childhood memory to savour for the rest of her life today. When she thinks of me, after I am gone, she will think of today and it summing up our relationship and the kind of man I was. She will talk to her therapist about it as she tries to work out why her life hasn’t gone the way she expected and attempts to blame me.
We’d been to her gym class as a family. Catie was going on a two hour cookery course afterwards and I said I would take the kids to soft play and then Pizza Express whilst we waited for her. It’s notoriously difficult to park at the weekend in town, so I decided to leave the car at the gym and then walk with the kids to soft play. It looked really close on my phone map.
But it was across a busy road and a common and I had Ernie in the pram, so I almost gave up. We walked with Catie towards the town and then got to a roundabout. Not only was there a place where we could cross the road there, but a road to the right that took us up to the soft play. We’d have to walk back on ourselves a bit, but it still looked like a short distance.
We bid Catie adieu and went on our way.
But the road was a lot longer than it had seemed. We weren’t anywhere near the soft play and Phoebe, who’d already had a gymnastic work out, was saying she was tired.
We were committed now though and I pressed on. It seemed from the map that the soft play was first left and then first right, though that turned out to be up a hill. And as we took that final town, after I’d confidently predicted that our destination was just round the next corner, I saw we were on a residential street and that is was unlikely a soft play arena was suddenly going to appear.
I looked at the map again and realised it was possible that the place we’d been heading was actually off a road behind this one, which would mean returning to the first road, going even further up and then taking the correct left turn.
We were broken. My daughter had bravely trudged on, but I knew if she was forced to go any further she’d take the cowardly Captain Oates way out and go and disappear in some snow. I was also pretty tired (though glad of the extra exercise) and correctly ascertained that psychologically it would be less damaging to retrace our steps and go back the three quarters of a mile we’d walked, rather than attempt another half a mile.
We should clearly have driven. There were loads of places to park up here, though that would have meant having to find a parking space in town later.
So we trudged miserably back the way we’d come, and then on to the pizza restaurant. Every step was agony for my daughter and she hadn’t even got to have the soft play she’d been promised. She doesn’t even like pizza, so nothing was going well for her today.
Will this journey that promised soft play, but only took her to a housing estate near a railway bridge, weigh heavy on her psyche. We had passed a funfair right at the start of the walk, which she’d been excited about, but which wasn’t yet open. She wouldn’t remember that, would she? She’d just remember not being allowed to go on the rides and being made to walk twenty miles to nothing.
She didn’t moan too much though and was helpful, holding the door to the restaurant so I could get the pram in. I let her play on my phone to make up for the disappointment.
But then as we were leaving, we’d all trudged to the loo together (because there’s nothing else you can do - you can’t leave one of the kids behind and ask someone at the next table to keep an eye on it like it was a laptop [that you’d still probably get stolen]). I had to get Ernie back in the pram and when I turned to look up, Phoebe was standing at the door with the door open. I shouted at her for not staying with me (even though she was just feet away), angry with myself for not keeping a proper eye on her and terrified that she might have stepped outside and I could have lost her in the Saturday crowds. She cried because I’d shouted at her and told me that she was just holding the door for us to get out again.
She won’t be able to rationalise where my burst on anger came from and even though I hugged hear and apologised, she will just remember the time that she did something thoughtful and her brutish dad, who had already taken her on a death march to nowhere, told her off. And that’s why she sleeps around and takes drugs.
She spent ten minutes just saying “mummy, mummy, mummy” so I took her to her mummy and she was happy.
Oh don’t worry, mummy is going to come out of Phoebe’s autobiography just fine.
