aBigForehead

Lately, I’ve started to have these fleeting feelings of jealousy every time I saw a child running, smiling or crying. It’s illogical and mad, I know. But I can’t help it. In fact, it got so bad that I’ve taken to challenging children as young as two, to counting competitions! These competitions are not even for the children’s benefit. I play to win. If they count to four, I count to five. If they throw a ball five meters I throw it fifteen.

My own children get the worst of it. We have eating competitions, singing competitions, reading competitions and even a ‘who woke up first in the morning’ competition, you snooze you lose. Of course when I oversleep, the competition automatically turns into who slept the most competition. Needless to say, I’m the undefeated, undisputed, world heavy weight champion of all these competitions.

Still, even though I’m winning them easily and shall continue to win for a long time to come, I can’t help feeling that a real defeat is just around the corner. These children will soon grow up and run faster than me, eat more than me and possibly read and spell better than me. If I were to lose my crown, I’d rather lose it now when I’m in the prime of life. I don’t want to get defeated when I’m old and withered. I really don’t think I could stand the double whammy of old age and the loss of my undefeated trophy all at the same time. It’ll be the end of me, I tell you.

These children know nothing about me. To them I’m just daddy who sits by the TV, reads books, plays with them, disciplines them and takes them out. They always tell me of their exciting school days and all the funny things that take place in there. What do they know about exciting? If it were not wrong, I would have told them about my own school days and how I once stuck a fish in the school air-conditioning to get the boring French lesson cancelled (it was cancelled by the way and so were all the lessons for the rest of that week). I could have also told them about the time I and a couple of friends caught a snake in the school backyard and gave it to our biology teacher who was so impressed he passed us with flying colours (even though snakes were not even part of any of our lessons). What is more, seeing a snake in the school backyard (discounting the headmaster of course) was very rare, never mind CATCHING one. I did that! But will these kids ever understand the significance of that? I really doubt it.

When they become teenagers and start having interests in people of the opposite sex (or same sex) they’ll think such things never happened to daddy. Ha! Only if they knew about the days and months I spent grooming myself and trying to look good so that I could impress the Sri Lankan maid that used to live across the road from us. Only if they knew of my fiery love affair with the Filipino cashier in our local supermarket. All my friends were jealous of my amorous skills. Can my offspring manage to entice a Sri Lankan maid? Not likely.

Do they know that I once heroically almost rescued a drowning man? I let him go when he failingly managed to get hold of my head. But that takes nothing away from my initial courageous act of jumping into the deep water to rescue him.

Do these kids know that in my nursery school I was egg and spoon champion for three years running? We’re yet to have an egg and spoon champion in our house.

I would tell my kids all of these things and more but I don’t want to come across as being a self-indulgent naval gazer who is also pathetic and very needy. Because I am not. Pound for pound and when compared to my development when I was their age, I am and shall forever (I hope) remain the undefeated world heavy weight champion of my household. These children with their disgustingly happy laughs, extravagant cries and endless energy really do not know what kind of hero lurks amongst them. It’s a shame, a real shame.