Padraic- Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth!
Unfortunately many of the comical elements in my day to day life cannot be documented due to a small clause in my teacher’s code of ethics titled, ‘Confidentiality’. This worries me in the sense that I wonder what vicious and debauched tales my own children imparted to their teachers over the years. The mind boggles.
When I separated from my first husband, (there I go channelling Zsa Zsa Gabor again) I was alone in a new house with five kids under thirteen years of age, studying full time at University and teaching drama part-time. Sometimes life was a mite feral; especially the frenetic preparation for departure on school mornings. For more on these electrifying times please click … here
Padraic was about nine at the time and not averse to chucking the occasional wobbly. One morning he overslept and feeling feisty, engaged in a ferocious skirmish with Hagar. He was then unable to find his uniform amongst the clothes strewn all over his bedroom and in a fit of Irish temper stubbornly declined my urgent invitation to get in the damn car.
We were late for school already but my relentless blasts on the car horn failed to coerce him from the sanctity of the house. Taking the only option any other reasonable mother would have, I backed out of the driveway and revved the engine Craig Lowndes’ style; but there was still no Padraic in sight.
“Right!” I screamed at the top of my voice, “I’m taking the others to school and boy, are you in for it when I get home!”
When I returned from the thirty minute round trip, Padraic was standing out on the front driveway, fully uniformed and diabolically wielding a cricket bat. No, the cricket bat wasn’t for me but for the ‘bad guys’ he must have imagined were going to get him.
He sat petulantly and silently the entire way to school and only as he slammed the car door did he utter a sound.
“I called Kid’s Helpline because you left me home alone,” he spat self-righteously at me, “and I’m telling my teacher!”
I spent the rest of the day waiting for the police to arrive at my door. I’m still waiting nine years later and I have a vague suspicion he may have been bluffing.
My sister Sam has an even more cringe-worthy tale of “What my big mouthed kid told the teacher.”
Her husband Pedro is a bit of a venturesome lad and when leaving the pub one night became involved in a bit of a scuffle, resulting in him being unceremoniously kicked in the 'nobby’s nuts'. By the next morning his ‘coconuts’ were the size of rock melons and Sam dutifully drove him to the hospital.
As way of explanation to their concerned seven year old daughter Kathleen, Sam and Pedro told her that her Dad had ‘fallen off a ladder’ and bumped his ‘kerbangers’ which were now very swollen indeed.
Little Kathleen seemed to accept this flimsy account of events and months went by as Pedro’s 'plums' gradually returned to a more normal circumference.
It was only at the parent teacher interview, when little Kathleen’s teacher pulled out an explicitly detailed, fully labelled drawing of Pedro lying on a hospital bed; surrounded by doctors who were seemingly probing his grossly enlarged Cracker Jacks, that Sam realised how seriously her daughter had taken the incident.
The teacher, I was informed by Sam, sat poker-faced and serene, while Sam gaped in mortification at the candid sketch with a lovely accompanying story. Apparently the only comment the teacher had written on the page was to correct ‘testacle’ to ‘testicle’.