Like Chocolate

I am at a loss. This may be a recurring theme in my future fathering.

I am being held responsible for childhood obesity. How I hear you ask. How indeed. I the guilty parent undertook the crime of committing the act of buying chocolate. The chocolate was thendeliberatlely left visible to a teenage daughter. I am a bad father.

How could she maintain her weight, let alone actually lose weight, whilst I shamefully taunted her with delicious choccy in a fridge,

Chocolate decision making resistance is not to be left to the inner determination of a teenager apparently. If I wish to buy and eat chocolate, apparently I should discreetly eat in the privacy of my own room.

I must guess what other decisions I must make for her and which decisions I should respectfully leave to he as an adult- in- waiting that should be respected as having a mind of her own. She is not a child I am regularly advised as a pink pullover with a horsey motif is no longer princess cool.

I feel this line I tread is smaller than my boot size.

Now the end is nigh

So I've done my bit of Dad-on-dad getting jiggy with it, and its time to face the "Do the limp" as hamstrings have gone to Muscle heaven.

This blog is going to get less regular than a morning constitutional. It may re-appear occasionally to document future unprecedented events of a fully grown adult's survival against the teenage odds, I must be brave.

But first to confess my past sins. All past posts were more-or-less true and based on an "incident", however I may have exaggerated for comic effect, or perhaps just for effect depending on your taste.

For the record, my kids are damn nice inbetween the odd tear strained tantrum. I must stop this weeping.

And I love'em to bits. I hope they like me a little bit too.

Survival of the ........

Darwin, I suggest may re-write his theory of evolution given the right circumstancial evidence and the Pryce family is just about as circumstancial as one can get this side of a dodo.

I am keen to communicate, I welcome conversation. I am one to enjoy the rise and fall of an accent. Today I am abandoned to more monosyllables than one man should get after saying "I do. My teenagers speak in words unfortunately one at a time. Minutes may pass before another is cursed into the air.

By darn, my inner calm is being tested, because my outer calm has gome walkabout big time.... its doin' a bloody marathon. This is dumb, because it can't be dumber, its got two syllables.

A battle wits of my sardonic eloquence against the one word resistance of the verbally challenged teen.

I know I am losing as the Teenagers smile. Monosyllabic to non syllabic. Darn them.

Lessons in staying cool are brewed from years of deep freezing. I am reaching boiling point.

Time for the big guns. Its time to refer to the zits, there may be tears. Tears have no syllables.

I feel I may be losing the Dad of the Year Award, that I used to win annually without trying. I have the cups to prove it, washed to ceramic in the dish washer, over the years the words have been erased. Perhaps more than the words have been erased. The meaning of the words once perceived for the gullible toddler buying public, now an empty sign of the effort poured in to earn the right to be put on this pedastal . A pedastal not sought but welcome.

We used to walk in the park, I used to carry her on the shoulders of the Giant growing smaller with the years. We used to ....

Its time to roll back the years to come back to a balance,........sorry.

Teenage Tantrums thru the night

In my day and age of teenage kicks, we knew how to rock'n'roll without a digital tampering sample dub or words to that effect.

The weather is hot and the Teenager is un-nerved in a cold digital world. There is something wrong, my spidey sense is in the redddening zone. I may need some subterfuge; I may need persuasion, this is a tough call, but I'm doing it for the kids. Breaking the silence may need more than wind.

Today I have to decode the teenage dna, we walk together in the park. This may be groundbreaking in more senses than earthquake. I am about to enter the teenage zone of reasons why it is hard to be a teenager in a modern cruel world. I am about to receive the key to understanding teenage kicks throughout the night in a New Millenium.I understand the modern cruel world is roughly translated as me, as in Dad, as in embarassing Dad syndrome. Apparently I can be embarrassing, ....Moi.......me......as a parent, I am apparently not a teenage asset. I am am being asked to parent in the shadows.

In my age, you could get to cool via nerd by excelling as a super nerd. Super nerds were cool because they made left-of-centre positively so off centre that falling over was a necessity with or without alocohol.

However this middle-aged super nerd apparently has returned to nerd with or without alocohol. Apparently, if this boy-father-son-hobbit thing is only going to work, if I give up the skull and cross bones t-shirt. Or as his teenage compromise, and he believes it is a major concession, at least not wearing the "garment" outside the house.

Apparently sacrifices are being called for.

Poor parenting made esay

I have more bags under my arms than under my eyes. This is a long way of saying that I have a lot of bags. Bags in all shapes and sizes, I am a connoisseur, a suitacse buff of necessity........Hardcase - soft case, 24 hours case, the lightweight emergency one, the mega expandable multi-zip, the "two dayer" (business) as opposed to the "weekender" (pleasure), the "week", the "overnighter", the laptop carrier in versions small, medium, large and large with wheels and to wrap it up the British Expeditionay Force Trunk.

It is all a symptom, a sign like a burning bush without the smoke, it all means I am away a lot.

I am remote parenting and feeling guilty.

I am single parenting the kids as a byproduct of earning the family crust. Life was not meant to be this way when I was a teeanger. I was going to be...... a proper Dad.

I appear to be a "the Visiting rights" bloke who looks a bit like the foto on the walland without the court papers. I may be the man putting Diss in Dysfunctional.

School interviews missed, the footie game foregone, the serious talk over ciggy mis-used unsaid, the laughter over the family legends not re-told and the years are gone.

Time to turn new leaves before the autumnal years.

Yipes...mirror mirror on the wall tells all

Zits, thank God, for zits.

Thank God for mirrors. This adult-in-waiting can see the visible signs, we can see the visible signs, boys can see visible signs, the world will have to wait before this girl goes prematurely to the Prom. She has to wait a tad longer before thinking she is a grown-up.

There is a zit, a zit that says hormones are a-charging and you are younger than you may like to think. And thankfully a zit makes you look as young as you are with all the best makeover creams in the world cannot quite make that zitless look.

One or two zits just enough to slow the race to illicit things that I leave it to my wife to navigate.

But she is not happy. Another lesson in the life's teenage tapestry.

Retro to Go II

A hole in a T-shirt can give street cred where all that was before was a geek seeking non-nerd statehood, but with a do-not-pass-go card that makes three brass monkeys dumber than one primate on the path to evolution.

Am I rambling so to cut a long story short, we all evolve and he ~ the teenager ~ needs my t-shirt to accelerate his adulthood because my t-shirt is cool and is an instant pass to the cool kids. Or so he says in an ineloquent mix of ums, dohs, wannas, heys, as he makes a short story long, as he exercises my rapidly ageing brain cells, the teen translator is near bust.

My T-shirt is faded by time and a star moodily stares out, a star that has survived to be iconic to a new generation. The iconic look has not dated, unlike the cotton it sits on. So to exaggerate for poetic effect I am asked like Pharoah letting my people go, I let my T-shirt go. I make the sacrifice of an inheritance worth more than the cotton picking moment it was bought.

But and double but a holed t-shirt is cool. A holed sock is cotton picking not. My sock of which I have unnecessarily close relationship based on it fits quite nicely thank you very much. My sock is holed like a torpedo called a big toe ~the teenager big toe. My sock is so uncool it traverses the metaphor, it breaks the metaphor, I could get a bloody cold big toe.

So today like many other days, I am facing the executive grilling looking superficially office smart cool, as smart as pink tie on pink shirt can look cool without blushing to give the full pink on pink on pink full effect. Today not like other days, I know I am one shoe removal away from being an embarassment to the VIP Business lounge at an airport. I have a teenager not only stealing my socks, but damaging them. Ho hum. Hobbit boy needs to learn to darn. Darn it.

This is sock abuse. Sock abuse is what this parent needs like a hole in the head, with the notable exceptions of mouth, nostrils and a couple of ear drums. The latter holes being fairly valuable holes in the head, methinks. I have a university education and all that.

This is not on.

And to double whammy my "not on"- us. A T-shirt is returned. I say T-shirt. A T-shirt carefully loved over a decade, gently nursed through fading years, here now it is somewhat ripped, a little cigarette burned perhaps. An icon has a hole in the head that is not where a nostril should be.

It now in fact not a t-shirt, but a oil cloth for the car, today I feel a full body adult tantrum coming on and by damn I deserve it. I may take Mr Scissors to more than a toenail.