Enough is Enough...The Birthday Girl...

We were out shopping and taking our place in line to pay for our stuff. Isobel motioned toward a box of mints that she wanted me to buy.
Isobel: "Can I get these mints?"
Daddy: "What? What mints? (Looking at box of mints) No honey, those mints are like four bucks. Too much for mints."
Isobel: "But they are soooo good."
Daddy: "You say that every time and I fall for it every time. The back seat of my car is full of tins of mints that were just sooo good that you had to have them. The tins are flashy but the mints are usually shit mints."
We finished paying and left the store. (It should be noted at this point that The Boy was looking for a particular item that was on back order.)
The Boy: "Why didn't they have any?"
Daddy: "They are sold out, we can call tomorrow. In the afternoon, a new shipment is supposed to come in."
Isobel: "Daddy, don't say that."
Daddy: ""Say what?"
Isobel: "S-H- Double mints. It's a bad word."
Daddy: "...What?"
Isobel: "You said it in the store, you said I couldn't have the box of mints because they were shit mints."

I love Christmas. I love the pageantry and tradition and the over eating and over drinking and everything else that goes hand in hand with the festive season. I also loved playing in a rock and roll band and drinking and smoking and carousing and making a general drunken, druggy pain in the ass of myself at least six nights a week.
But as much as I hate to hear the words echo in my ears, let alone actually say them, I'm not a kid anymore. I don't want the same things I wanted then. I don't think I am necessarily any more responsible than I ever was just more tired. it's not the years, it's the mileage...that and notes from my liver saying knock it off.
But what, you ask, does my days a s a cavalier rock and roller have to do with the Holiday season? Simple...somewhere along the line I went from a wide eye kid, living the Christmas spirit and making all the appropriate messes to a goggle eyed adult wondering 'who in the shit is going to clean all this up?'
There has been a weird kind of paradigm shift around this place. In the normal run of things, The Father will take up his customary place on the loving seat in the toy room and not give a tinker's cuss about the the Chrimbo tree and its comings and (more to the point) goings. Mrs. Narrator will then take up her customary festive position of hollering and all and sundry about the horrid conditions of the house due to the dessicated fire hazard of a tree and how the Father should get up off his ass and come help because she is doing all this shit on her own...and how she doesn't even like god-damned Christmas anyway!
This year, round about December the thirtieth, I started to have these odd anxious feelings that I could not identify. I couldn't quite put my finger on what was making me antsy in my own house. And then it came to me. We had been out at Mrs. Narrator's sister's house for supper and a very heated game of poker. As soon as I walked in the house, the antsy-ness hit me. As I walked to the living room. The feeling was overwhelming.
Christmas had thrown up in the living room and the children had tried to hide the festive vomit with their old toys. There were literally toys everywhere. Toys we bought, toys Santa brought, toys they had got as birthday presents two years ago. Video games, video game systems, video game boxes. Purses (coloured and uncoloured) Barbie computer printer hair (don't ask) two scooters and boxes, many, many boxes. There may have been a partridge at one point but I'm certain it would have suffocated underneath all of the spent gaiety and frivolity.
By January the second, I had had enough. I didn't lose my mind or my temper, I just said (OK a little pissy) that I couldn't take it anymore and today we were cleaning up starting then...right then The funny thing ( and more than a little ironic) is Mrs. Narrator wasn't the usual geeked out need to get this shit cleaned up maniac- I was. Sure she wanted it done but she didn't seem to NEED to see it cleaned up as desperately as I seemed to. Chrimbo had run its course and I was done with the whole glittery hoarders episode it had become...Toys first and then the tree. A one day restoration of the status quo.
The kids, it would seem, had also had their fill of it. Asking my children to clean up their Christmas loot anytime before the middle of February, would normally be met with derision on total noncompliance...I didn't get so much as an argument. Not even an ' What!!?!?! ' Izzy even cleaned her bedroom.
They say Christmas is becoming too commercial and I can't disagree. But it's not the commerciality of it all that bothers me, I like buying things for people that I think will make them happy. I think it's that we are bombarded by images of it for nearly two months. By the end of the Holiday season, we're nearly begging to go back to work just to get away from all the Christmas crap...
Incidentally, the bastard tree is still up in the living room but it's days are numbered...and it knows it...


Today is my daughter's birthday. My little girl is six...six years old and in my mind, it was yesterday that I could hold her in one hand. It was a day later that she was following me around the house asking "Where's Mimi goes?" The day after that she was watching Kiss and Ronny James Dio videos with me thrashing wildly around the room. My pal, my shadow, my offspring.
And what did my progeny do for her birthday? Some shopping with Mummy which produced necklaces and hairbands and various other bangles and shining finery...Wait, what? No black lipstick? No rock t shirts or long sleeved blouses like Dio himself wore?
At some point, somebody snuck into our house and traded my Isobel for a proper little girl. One who likes shiny things and brightly coloured make up. My god, she came home with a beret. A leopard skin one, mind but a BERET! What's next? Designer handbags and a dog you can carry in a purse?
Come to think of it, I have been noticing a change in her...she spends less time with me and more time on the phone with her friends. Talking nonsense and giggling. "Rock chicks don't giggle, ever." I told her.
"I don't want to be a rocker anymore." she said. "I want to do gymnastics and wear a pink one piece out fit."
Can you hear that sound? That is my crest falling. Her grandmother called and asked what she wanted for her birthday. Here was a glimmer of hope for redemption. "A bass," I thought. "Say you want a god damned bass guitar. Oma loves you, you know she'll buy it."
"Tell Oma I want a girl's work out set." she said.
I felt like I has been kicked in the Stones. Or Sabbath or any of the other bands we would listen to together. I was starting to wonder if there was anything common between us anymore, anything that would keep us together, Father and Daughter...
I was putting her to bed which inevitably led to tickling and laughter and then her having enough of being tickled.
"Enough," she said. Which led to more tickling, naturally.
"Daddy, enough." she said again. More tickling. More laughing.
She stood up on the bed, and pointed one finger at me. She clenched everything from head to toe and hissed at me through tightly clenched teeth. "Enough."
As many of us have discovered clenching one's whole body tight tends to get things moving. A tiny pressurized squee escaped her clenched bottom, followed by a roar of laughter that escaped her wide opened mouth.
My progeny...