Dad’s World with Jonathan deBurca Butler

“DADDY, I have a freckle,” said Fionn, as he sat down on the bottom of the stairs and proceeded to pull up the leg of his trousers.

We were on our way up to do the bath and something in his little mind had triggered an urgent need to share this piece of news with me.

“Look,” he said pointing at this tiny brown stigmata just above his knee, “there it is.”

“That’s a beautiful freckle,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

“Eh...from the sun,” he said with a knowing nod of the head and an Italianesque gesture that more or less said, ‘of course’.

“Well,” I said, taking the opportunity to use this new-found blemish as leverage, “if you go upstairs and get ready for the bath, I’ll tell you all about my magic freckle and where I got it from.”

With the bath done, the hair dried and the man himself all snug in his jim-jams, we plonked down beside each other on the bed and had what’s become our regular evening chat.

Normally, we’d talk about his school or where the boys had gone that day with their grandparents, but today it was all about Daddy’s magic freckle.

“Here it is,” I told him as he snuggled in under my left shoulder. “Right here on my hand. Do you know how I got it?”

“The sun,” he said. Again he gestured, this time with his shoulders, as if to say ‘of course’.

“Ah,” I said. “But you do you know how the sun put it there?” There was silence. “When it gets dark, where does the sun go?” I asked him.

More silence. “It goes to sleep,” I said.

“And when it goes to sleep it dreams. But when the sun dreams about things, it sends those things out into the real world.

"Sometimes it dreams of fairies, and when you’re asleep at night, but only when you’re asleep, those fairies come into little boys’ and little girls’ rooms, climb on top of them, go under their pyjamas and ‘ping’, leave a little magic mark.”

“Like the one you have there,” I said, doing my best incy-wincy spider down towards his leg. “Ping!”

“And like the one you have there,” he said, pointing at my hand. “Ding!”

We both smiled — the two of us happy with the journey our somewhat fertile imaginations had brought us on.

A few days later as I put him down for a nap that he had been reluctant to take, I removed his socks. Inevitably, Fionn queried my motives and as I explained that he’d be more comfortable in his bare feet, I rolled the socks up and put them in my shirt pocket.

Fionn seemed to think this was ludicrous.

“What are you doing that for?”

“I have to make sure the Sock Monster doesn’t get them,” I explained.

Fionn’s face went pale. His eyes racing from side to side as he tried to rationalise what I’d just said. “Sock Monster?” he said.

I grappled for an explanation.

“Well...eh...remember the other day when we spoke about the sun going to sleep?” I offered.

“Sometimes a Sock Monster comes out of his dreams. The Sock Monster goes around stealing socks. He has a really big nose you see, and he hangs the socks on the end of his nose to decorate it. But don’t worry, I have these now, he won’t get them.”

“What about those ones?” he said, gesturing anxiously towards the basket of socks under the changing table.

“I put a spell on them earlier, don’t worry,” I said, and I walked out of the room happy that I’d got out of jail.

I hadn’t. An hour later, Fionn woke up bawling his eyes out.

It would take us the rest of the week to convince him that the Sock Monster isn’t in fact real.

I’ve always thought that fertile imaginations are a wonderful thing but I’ve just learnt that you have to be careful about seeds you plant there.

There’s a fine line between monsters, gods, and fairies.