Like a lot of parents, our social life is largely dictated by the children. A typical weekend: Daughter Number Two comes over on Friday night for takeaway and family gossip. Not that there’s much of it. Daughters Number One and Three are in France, while Son Number One is still working his way through every country in South America. In my lifetime, I’ve experienced exactly one earthquake. (A mild one in New York.) He’s already lost count.
But on Saturday, myself and Herself got to actually leave the house. Giddily, we met a friend for a drink and then went on to a local restaurant. This was because Daughter Number Four was at a birthday party. Thankfully, she’s aged out of parties in sticky-floored playcentres. Now the numbers invited are smaller and the activities slightly more grown-up.
That doesn’t make it easier. Her friends’ parents – and by parents, I mean mothers – are wildly innovative birthday planners. For Daughter Number Four’s last run out, Herself came up with the brilliant (and rather self-serving) wheeze of bringing them to the aforementioned local restaurant. Except they got to sit at their own table like proper young ladies while we sat nearby and drank wine. Then it was back to ours for a sleepover.
This recent party too involved a sleepover, with the usual games, movies and pizza, except the attendees got to sleep in inflatable teepee-beds that had been hired. It was very Instagrammable.
But the beds worked like proper beds. When Daughter Number Four came home she seemed well rested; far better rested than her parents, who had perhaps overdone it a tad the night before. This was just as well, as a couple of hours later she went out to another party. Bowling and burgers this time. We went for a nap.
Parents do this because, naturally, they love their kids, but there’s also this idea of creating memories for them: which is a sweet notion, even if it might not work. You’ll remember it: you went to all the hassle and expense. But there’s no guarantee it will lodge in your child’s mind, surrounded by the hazy glow you’re hoping for. In a few years’ time, they might have forgotten all about it or only recall what was important to them at the time. One of their friends threw up. They won a cheap plastic toy during pass the parcel. Or, like in that scene in Father Ted, it was the day they wore their blue jumper.
Memory is a slippery thing, and it’s almost impossible to control what will lodge in the foreground or fade into the dark storage area at the back. For ourselves or other people.
During her brief between-parties respite, I asked Daughter Number Four what her favourite birthdays had been. Almost by rote, she rattled off the previous three. I refrained from saying something I’ve said to her many times before. She’s a proto-teenager now, so I’d be in danger of getting the eye-roll, of her deploying her new favourite phrase: “Yes, father.”
When I’ve mentioned it before, she says she remembers, though it’s not clear if she recalls the actual event or it feels like a real memory because I’ve talked about it so often. When she was turning five or six, we asked what she wanted to do for her birthday. But this was the middle of the pandemic. We couldn’t have a party or invite friends over. The playcentres – infection cesspools at the best of times – were all closed.
And for Daughter Number Four, this way of living had taken up so much of her young life, she thought it was normal. Her answer to the question was: I want to go to Tesco. Masks on, queuing to enter. A stroll around the section that sold toys and art supplies. It broke my heart a little. Forgetting things isn’t all bad.