Working hard to avoid doing the real job at hand

Date Published: 24-May-2011

It goes without saying that I'd take a bullet for my children, but taking a day off when they're sick? Well, that's a different kettle of fish altogether.

It’s not that I don’t love them with all of my heart or that I don’t cherish every minute I spend with them – but even unconditional love has to come with certain conditions.

And work has never just been somewhere you go to earn a living – it’s also an escape valve, without which you’d be very likely to explode.But now the enlightened Brits are floating the idea of "shared parenting" – giving fathers the chance to spend more time off with their new born babies – and in a heartbeat, a million men feel the blood drain out of their brains.

Because the office isn't an impediment to being a good father - it's a pre-requisite.

The days spent at home minding the children are infinitely more relentless than the hours spent in the office; at work, you have an hour for lunch, you might sneak a coffee break and, during quieter moments, you might even have time to check on the internet to see what’s going on in the world around you.

At home, the world can revolve around nappy changes, cleaning up baby gic, remembering to keep the stair-gate shut, trying to avoid shooting headfirst through the front door on a misplaced roller-skate, or separating sparring siblings.

You might have to come up with a more comprehensive menu than Gordon Ramsey, because one of them doesn’t eat onions, the other doesn’t like chops; one prefers chips, the other pasta – and the only point of consensus is that none will eat vegetables.

I wouldn’t for a minute hide my undying admiration for anyone who spends their day rearing children – without patronising anyone, it’s an infinitely harder day and more rewarding in terms of achievement.But that’s one of the reasons I’m delighted to have the perfectly legitimate excuse of a job.

Obviously the main reason I’m glad to have a job is that I love it and I get paid for it – but sometimes it can also be a handy reason to hold up your hands, shrug your shoulders and mutter ‘what can I do’ when domestic matters come to the fore.

There are many stay-at-home dads who wouldn’t swap places if you paid them the average weekly wage of a Manchester City footballer, and there are even more who share equal responsibility for childminding.

Equally, I’d hazard a guess that there are many more who would profess to wishing they could spend more time at home – but if the chance ever presented itself, they’d be gone quicker than an Anglo-Irish banker off to the United States.

In a previous existence, I worked in a daily newspaper than produced an edition for St Stephen’s Day.

While most of it was filled with stuff we’d prepared earlier, this did necessitate a small handful of sad people going into the office on Christmas Day to duly report on what the Pope said to the faithful in St Peter’s, how many lunatics jumped into the freezing waters around our shores for charity, and a few calls to the emergency services to see if anyone had suffered fatal mishap over the holiday season. 

 For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.