Dinner time. Daughter Number One is first to approach the table, but does so cautiously. She’s bent at a 45-degree angle and spiders over to her chair, grunting as she does so.
This is because she is days (or minutes) away from giving birth. She’s walking this way because Grandchild Number Two has chosen to ram their head into her cervix: which apparently makes any form of locomotion a little tricky.
She’s followed, eventually, by Granddaughter Number One, who is a little tired and a lot cranky. She also sits at the table, but then gets down and drags her chair away.
Still standing, she folds her arms and declares she doesn’t want to. She refuses to elaborate on what it is she doesn’t want to do, other than to repeat that she doesn’t want to do it. She wants her mammy, but Mammy is firmly wedged into her seat and unable to move anywhere very fast.
The other adults in the room try to intercede. But, rather pointlessly, they attempt to use logic. Three-year-olds are impervious to logic; especially cranky ones. We leave her where she is in the hope she will change her mind.
Meanwhile, Daughter Number Four comes into the kitchen. She is going through a phase where she can’t enter any room without springing into some sort of dance routine, all the while talking. Her favourite phrase at the moment is: I have a question. She has a lot of questions.
While she dances and spouts interrogative statements, Herself is dishing out dinner and telling me that she got into the car that morning meaning to drive to one place but found herself heading towards someplace completely different. She fears that the early stages of menopause are not just assaulting her body, but now starting to rot her mind.
“I don’t want to,” shouts Granddaughter Number One.
“I have a question,” says Daughter Number Four.
When we, or most of us, finally sit down to eat – serenaded by the dog begging for food – I tell Herself that I absent-mindedly do things like that all the time: walk into a room and forget why I went in there. Open the fridge, only to remember that I’m looking for the lawnmower.
She gives me her you’re an idiot look: which in this situation is completely justified. Because I am. I have barely any idea what’s going on for anyone else at the kitchen table because, as everyone else has pointed out to me, I’m the only male in the house.
It’s been mentioned a few times and it always makes me think of the opening line of John McGahern’s Amongst Women: “As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters.” I don’t know why, because that line and that novel bears no relation to my situation.
I am not (I hope) a domineering patriarch, surrounded by females who wish to appease me. And it’s not the opposite either. I don’t feel outnumbered or outvoted or swamped with femaleness. The others have pointed out my singular maleness only out of a sense of curiosity: does it feel weird?
If I said it did, they would probably take steps to un-weird it. But it’s not. If anything, it’s fascinating: around the table are all these women and girls, all members of my family and all at different life stages. None of whom are shy about expressing what’s going on with them. That even includes the (female) dog, though her focus is mainly on whining for food and incessant barking. Rather than weird, to be present for all this feels more like an honour.
In the not-too-distant future, even by the time you read this, another person will have been added to this noisy group. The parents opted not to find out the baby’s sex in advance, so theoretically, it could be a boy. Nah, I don’t think so either.