Learner Dad: Our eight year old is eating up books at the moment ... the beauty of reading is the sound of silence

Picture: Stock image 

IT'S never good news when you get a phone call from a landline. The best you can hope for is that it’s someone ringing up to subtly suggest that your house will blow up if you don’t pay them €99 to service your gas boiler.

So my heart sank a little yesterday when I got a call from an 021 number, which my phone tells me was from Cork/Coachford/Kinsale. (I always wonder how Coachford got in there.) 

Anyway, it was the school. My six year old was complaining about a pain in his stomach, would I come up and get him. So I did, after checking if stomachache is a symptom of Covid-19. 

It turns out pretty much everything is a symptom if you read on down the list. 

I felt a bit miffed walking up to the school, thinking they’d over-reacted. It was just a dicky tummy really. And then I saw the headmistress leading him out the door, in her protective visor, and I felt like a clown. 

The teachers are in there every day, sharing a room with 20 or 30 kids. They’ve probably all got someone vulnerable to the virus in their lives, they might even live with them . Coming into the classroom every day is brave and generous, the country would grind to a halt if they didn’t do it. 

I walked away from the school feeling chastened, even though my six year old skipped down the road. (He wasn’t making it up by the way. I won’t tell you how I know that, but we had to burn a lot of incense in the bathroom.)

Autumn blues 

A friend of mine told me they took a last-minute half day this week and brought the kids to the beach because they got hit by a dose of the Monday blues. This struck a note with me.

I asked around a few other parents, and they all said the same thing – we’re struggling. 

Now, we shouldn’t be struggling. We’re all healthy, our livelihoods are still intact, our kids are in the form of their lives. But something isn’t quite right.

I think part of it is we didn’t get to tune out over the summer. Your day is mapped out for you on a foreign holiday - you just get up and go to the pool, or the beach or a nearby town where you bribe the kids with ice cream so you can mooch around an air-conditioned museum for an hour.

An Irish holiday needs more thought, googling ‘things to do with kids in Kerry when it rains’. As a result, we ended up in September, mentally drained.

I normally love this time of year, chilly sunrises and the leaves on the ground. But it’s hard when you’re not sure if you should look forward to anything. 

Will we be squeezing in the door of a warm pub in December? Hardly. Have we seen the last of lockdown? Probably not. Will we get to hear the roar of a crowd in a stadium any time soon? Doubt it.

Human beings run on hope. And we seem to be running on empty over the last few weeks.

Reading

I did my son’s homework with him last night , English and Irish reading. I love watching my kids learning to read, and not just because there’s a chance they might stick their head in a book for an hour and leave me free to check Man United transfer rumours online. 

Our eight year old is eating up Diary of A Wimpy Kid books at the moment. It’s about a very cheeky child, but so was Just William and that didn’t do me any harm. (I think.) 

The beauty of reading is the sound of silence. No cartoons or over-excited YouTube stars with incredibly annoying voices telling my kids how to play Minecraft. Things get very calm in our house when we all have a book in our hands. 

Maybe that’s what we can look forward to in the next few months. Everyone cosied up on the couch with their own book, the heating on, a packet of Maltesers to hand.

Things could be worse.