We were back in Ireland for a wedding last week. My brother-in-law Darragh was marrying his girlfriend Emilie in a lovely ceremony in Dublin, meaning we had to source a babysitter for our kids when every single family member within 100 miles would be attending said wedding with us.
Miraculously, our friend Mary stood up to the plate, offering to take both kids to her mum’s house in Wicklow, keep them occupied with her own kids for the whole day, and preside over the communal sleepover that followed. She was offering 24 hours of free childcare out of the goodness of her heart, and to say we were grateful would be an understatement.
I’d go so far as to say I love my children, but I am under no illusion as to the task involved in keeping them occupied for 24 hours. The difficulty mainly lies with our daughter, a bright little two-year-old sunbeam who makes us smile a thousand times a day, but who’s also so clingy that even moderate lengths of time spent away from us leave her incandescent with fear and rage.
She didn’t sleep through the night once in her first 22 months of life, and even now still regards that practice as a non-essential luxury. We kept a close eye on her for the week before the day itself and cringed with mounting horror as she steadfastly refused to sleep. Family meetings were arranged, in which it was decided that, if she didn’t improve for the next two nights, we couldn’t in good conscience paw her off to our friend, and would take shifts minding her for the entire wedding, a prospect neither of us relished.
Thankfully she slept well the next two nights and we went ahead with the plan, forewarning Mary there was a non-zero chance this task would destroy both her life and our friendship.
In the end, we spent the wedding receiving photographic evidence of our daughter at her sunny best, happily playing all day, and falling asleep a solid 30 minutes earlier than she ever does for us. She slept through the night without incident, and forgot we existed with an alacrity that was almost insulting.
On returning a full day later, she barely acknowledged us, ensconced in the bosom of her new family and greeting us like work friends from a vaguely remembered summer job. Suddenly, the trepidation we felt as bearers of a difficult child was replaced with a fear that we were the problem; a pair of feckless, uncaring parents written by Roald Dahl, whose bright-eyed Matilda could only ever spread her wings in another, more loving, family.
I tried to explain this to Mary, who with a slight frown and tilted head, betrayed a sense she may have sugar-coated just how perfectly our daughter had behaved. ‘Eh, she was grand,’ she said, no doubt fearful we’d ask her to repeat the favour again, ‘but let’s not go nuts.’
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