Whatever Happened To Baby Fabula?
Fabula diBeaumarchais - November 2003
Darlings, this month I thought I'd share some personal insights into what I feel is my second most prolific area of expertise: Childcare
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 Darlings, this month I thought I'd share some personal insights into what I feel is my second most prolific area of expertise: Childcare. Yes, all-too-often I have been traversing down Maylor Street (don't ask me why, there's nothing there that I could ever possibly want or need to buy, I must have been following a refugee with a gun or something) and I have seen them coming out of Smith's toy emporium; those hopelessly unassertive pram-faced Mammies beseiged by the demands of hideous, snotty-fatty little gurriers looking for new yo-yos or Mutated Turtles or whatever the hell it is they play with nowadays. Heroin in Dublin, I believe. Anyway, to ease the suffering of all you Michelles and Assumptas out there, the not-so-proud owners of such vile children, I have compiled this wonderfully easy-to-use guide, a Bible for every situation of child-rearing. The only thing you have to do is be able to read. Hoorah! Let's begin. Situation 1: You're in the Supermarket. (I'm never in the Supermarket, Galvin's delivers my groceries to my tradesman's entrance daily) Terror-Spawn #1 sees some sort of confection that it feels it cannot live without. You check your purse and see that you have spent your entire giro on a bad perm and Tesco Value tins o' crap. Terror-Spawn begins to scream audibly. You feel helpless. But fear not! In this situation many Mothers would feel obligated to buy said sweet for Terror-Spawn, but remember: You do not have to. You have a choice! 1. Just Say No. Rarely works, unless your child is a mute or blind or something. If this fails, move to strategy 2, below: 2. Hit Child With Trolley. Ramming the metal guide-bar at the bottom-front of a trolley into the Achilles' heel of any child will quickly take its mind off of sweets and onto corrective footwear. This is a most effective method of correction, and one I favour above all others. Sometimes I like to practise my aim on other shoppers' children, just to be sure of maximum impact. Just be sure to give the trolley a good, hard shove first. However, if the bastard-child dodges your aim, proceed to strategy 3, below: 3. Advise Terror-Spawn that Santa Claus, Harry Potter, and Dustin the Turkey are not real. Then watch as they forget all about the desired treat and burst into quiet tears of hopelessness as yet another fragment of precious childhood is destroyed, lost forever in the ether of pre-adolesence. This is a last resort, ladies! Remember, once you take this step you will never be able to use it again, and mental cruelty of this nature is only useful once. Also, a nasty side-effect of using this strategem is that the child may don white nylon tracksuits and start to steal cars and livestock, so be forewarned! The above solutions may also be applied to any/all situations where you simply don't want the child to have anything. Situation 2: You're at a family gathering. Auntie Patsy is clean & sober for a week, or Nanna Abinah has been given parole, or something similar. Your entire brood has turned out for the occasion, resplendant in synthetic fabrics in primary colours, and Tweed by Lentheric. The men are wearing dinner jackets, short-sleeved pastel shirts and navy Farrah slacks. It's a Bit of a Do. You are silently praying that your Mong-Children will be well-behaved, the promise of being allowed to watch Charmed without supervision goading them into good behaviour. Suddenly, an ear-splitting scream rents the air and you see that Mong-Child #1 has tied Mong-Child #2 to the garden fence and is throwing empty Blue Nun bottles at it. Your whole dirty Clan turns to you, aghast. What to do? Ladies, this is a particularly tough cookie to crack, since you are not only dealing with child discipline, but also the possible disapproval of your whole family. And you don't want to appear unattractive in front of your brother-in-law, Mickey Horse, as he has promised you 'a schtick of de Sausage' later on, when his wife is irreparably drunk. Try these solutions: 1. Deny their parentage. If you're lucky, your own dirty children will be indistinguishable from the several thousands of other dirty children always present at such gatherings. Something along the lines of 'They're not mine, mine are the brown fuzzy-headed ones over there!' will suffice. If, however, your children start looking to you to referee their disagreement, you will be caught out, in which case, proceed immediately to step 2: 2. Untie Mong-Child #2 and produce a Kleenex. Spit in said Kleenex and wipe your mucus all over both childrens' mouths, under the pretence of cleaning their faces. They will be so embarassed and disgusted by this action that they will sit quietly in a corner for the rest of the evening, allowing you to drink stupid amounts of Dutch Gold and receiving Mr. Horses's Stick with good grace. This is a tried and trusted method of silencing unruly offspring, and is more effective if the child is older. For maximum impact make sure the child is fourteen years old, and that the Kleenex has visible green crust dotted about it. If, however, you have taught your children to think independently (shame on you!), and they reject the proferred moist hankerchief, then try this: 3. Make a game out of it! Yes, Ladies, show your youthful sense of humour and your general joie-de-vivre by passing other empty bottles of Blue Nun to other members of your dirty Family (at this point in the evening there ought to be more than enough to go round) and taking pot-shots at any miserable flap of kid-flesh that comes within ten yards of a parent. With any luck you'll concuss some of them, and you can eat your Big Macs and Fries in peace, while the remaining children run about in confusion, thinking their cousins/siblings/cousins who are also siblings are dead. But remember to save the Happy Meal toys afterwards, it's something for the children to do in the A & E while you're waiting for them to get stitches. And finally, perhaps the most galling childcare situation of all: Situation 3: Puberty. Ah yes, that hormonally-challenged wasteland of tewlve-to-nineteen years old where even the sweetest, most docile child in all creation becomes a raging cesspool of emotion, rejecting all of its Elders and Betters, preferring instead to wear a lot of black and grow mystifyingly horrendous pimples. Picture it: You come home early after a hugely successful day's shopping. Your hands are practically worn down to the bone with the amount of Saint Vincent dePaul bags you're carrying, and such is your good mood, that you literally cannot wait to get upstairs to try on those nearly-new off-mustard ski pants. As you pass the living room (now missing a door; sadly you've had to chop up all the internal doors for firewood) you hear noises like an animal in great pain. You stick your head around the door and you see Male-Child #1 sitting cross-legged on the floor, bent double over the Kay's catalogue, interfering with himself at a ferocious pace. He looks up, and for a short, horrifyingly shambolic embarassing moment, your eyes meet. You know it's flicking itself off. What do you do? Ladies, the Adolescent is a queer fish that only understands one language. Here's what to do: 1. Kick it. 2. Harder. 3. In the throat. 4. Until it bleeds. So there you have it, girls, a handy quick-reference guide to childcare and parenting in the 21st Century. Use it well, and just remember: if you can afford the computer on which you are reading this then you can probably afford a nice boarding school somewhere far, far away. I sent my children to a lovely institution named Spike and they've not come back yet. Until we read again, babies, I bid you all a fond... Hoorah! Lovings! F diB XXXXXXXXXXXX
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