Phillippe Petit had to be nuts. There he was, a dull August morning in 1974, 1,350 feet above New York City balancing on a wire. By now you'll know the story, but if not - that summer, New York's famed twin towers were opening. Petit, a famed wire walker, saw an image of them being built in a French newspaper and felt a calling. He must walk between them. So he and his bandits blagged their way into the towers one night and over an arduous, dangerous, painstaking few hours they set the wire. Petit walked at dawn.
But why? I've watched the excellent 'Man On Wire' documentary on this as well as Robert Zemeckis's enchanting 2015 take on it 'The Walk' starring Joseph Gordon Levitt and 4 hours of film later, the best answer I can give you is that's just who he was and what he wanted to do.
Guess what? I'm just like Phillippe Petit. I mean, obviously, I'm not like him at all. I'm completely different. But work with me here, because I can find no better metaphor for the junction at which I currently find myself. I have a calling too. Unlike Petit, who's taste for women led to the dissolution of his relationship with one of his co-conspirators that fateful August morning, my calling centred around the people in my life. From my teenage years, I realized that what I wanted in my life was a family, a happy little unit, the kind that for one reason or another never quite panned out in the house where I grew up. Nothing more complex or crazy than that. Just a woman with whom I could bring some little people into the world and we would all live a happy, simple little life together. And I might not be 400 metres in the air pumped full of adrenaline wearing a turtleneck, but much like Phillippe I am achieving my dream and it brings me great joy. If I told you fully just how much happiness the 3 women in my life bring me, you would either get a little bit sick in your throat or you'd outright blow chunks everywhere. But fuck it, it's my blog and you'll puke if I want to. When Friday 5pm rocks around and I get to go home, lock the door in our little Murphy family coccoon, and we're on our own for the weekend, I am delerious. Our weekends are bookended by meals, whatever that may say about our diet. We have pizza on Friday night. Carra stands on her step and puts the pepperoni and toppings on her little pie while I cook for MT & I. Saturday is family adventure day, whether that be a petting zoo, the cinema, shopping, funky monkeys, extended family time or whatever. Sunday afternoon we park ourselves at the dinner table for a roast meal before we flick all the lights off, make Carra her giant bucket of popcorn and have movie night with a kids flick before bed on Sunday night. In this 48 hour span, I am the most contented man on planet earth. The smiles on Carra, Bayley & MT's faces and the giggles that escape from their mouths make me feel so warm and fuzzy inside even I am cringing at myself! They are my joy.
There's always a but, isn't there? You knew there was a but coming...
BUT. Where Phillippe (thankfully) managed to navigate that wire without ever losing his balance, the same cannot be said of my ability to navigate the waters of my life wearing the many hats that I do - father, husband, son, brother, employee, cousin...there's one more. Oh yeah. Kenny! I had a pretty reasonable routine going 6 months ago, but since Bayley arrived, I have struggled. Forget the past tense. I am struggling.
My priority is (and always will be) my kids. This is not a matter of choice as far as I am concerned. I believe if you are going to choose to bring little people into the world than you automatically owe it to them to make sure their wants and needs are catered to first. Next comes MT. We are partners in this whole family thing so I need to help her be in the nick she can possibly be in so this parenting gig goes well. Next? The issue is not so much who comes next, it's that there's not much left to go around. And that's a problem. A big problem.
In the 5 months since Bayley has come along, things at home have been going great. It's just everything else that's gone to shit. I'm exaggerating of course, but only a little. My candle has been burnt at both ends enough to where I just don't have much left for anyone a lot of the time.
Relationships with family members have become strained. Ones who I'm close with and ones who I'm not. My friendships have been tested, in some cases severely. I just haven't been able to invest as much in the people in my life as I would like. Work has been - how do I put this? - a clusterfuck. Through an awkward confluence of circumstances, I've taken on a number of pretty admin heavy tasks over the last 6 - 9 months, just as my energy levels have been sinking and my head is feeling fried. The result has been messy, messy work. Which is tough for me. I've never been in a job and not felt confident, but I don't feel very confident at the moment. No matter how hard I try, I seem to fuck up left, right and centre. I have pride and I have a healthy ego and it's embarrassing realizing you've created yet another mess for your colleagues to clean up, in spite of your best efforts. And then there's me. I'm frazzled, goosed, baked, beat, cream-crackered, pooped, bushed. Get the jist? When I'm this tired, my decision making is poor and my self discipline is non existent. I eat badly - sugar & carbs to give me a boost, I inhale caffeine to keep me going, and I'm so tightly wound that I take any number of unhealthy shortcuts to get some quick relief. (Don't worry, I'm not doing lines of coke in the bathroom, if that's how you read that line).
The difficulty lies in how I'm wired. I am OCD, to an extent. Things have to be perfect. Come into my living room and take a look around, or check out my desk in work. Everything in its place. Ergo I struggle to relax until everything is done. And when I do happen to be super busy, the combination of the lengthy to do list and my frenzied DO-IT-ALL-AND-DO-IT-NOW thinking put me in a vicious circle. I am so scattered and frenetic. You could ask my colleagues in work and they could readily reel off examples where I've started to do one thing, been pulled away to do something else, and never finished the original task. But here's a real world story from just this morning that best encapsulates the issue: I was running around about 8:45 trying to get Carra dressed and ready for school, feed Bayley, prepare Carra's lunchbag, get some coffee & food into myself, and get dressed. In amongst it, I put a capsule in the coffee machine, stuck my AJ Styles mug underneath and fired it up. The coffee poured into the mug. Five minutes later after making Carra's lunch and feeding Bayley, I went to grab my coffee. Except it wasn't there. I looked back at the table. Not there either. What the fuck? Where's my coffee? Then I spotted my AJ Styles mug in the sink, filled with water, having been rinsed out. I had legitimately NO IDEA if I drank the coffee and rinsed the mug, or just lost track of what I was doing and rinsed the mug out while it was still full of coffee. Not only that, I still don't know. I made another cup and went on my merry way.
It was that moment, combined with feeling flashes of a familiar illness over the past few days, that I was inspired to write. At the point that mugs of coffee are literally vanishing, it's probably fair to say I am overstretched and my balance is out of wack. No más, no más!
There are little things I can do to redress the balance. I can talk about it, whether here or to the people in my life. Awareness is half the battle. I can sleep more. I went to bed early the last couple of nights and it genuinely helped, even if I was up half of the night with Bayley last night anyway. I can pause and take a deep breath once in a while. And I may just have to start learning how to be ok with everything in the world not being done. It's anathema to me to go to bed with a dish not washed or to leave the office on my lunch with an email not read, but perhaps it wouldn't actually be the end of the world? I say that mostly facetiously...but there is at least a part of me that wonders if somehow leaving a half eaten plate of chips on the kitchen table and going to bed would, in fact, be the end of all mankind. Only one way to find out...
Of course, what you have read is the struggle and the consequences. Would you like to know the best bit? Because I want to tell you. I am a good Dad and I have happy, contented kids. My eldest is a strong willed, determined, hard-nosed, stubborn child - a parenting challenge! The kind with whom it would be very easy to have an adversarial, confrontational relationship with. She wants to fight you on EVERYTHING you ever ask her to do. She wants to do things her way. She does not understand the idea that she isn't the boss. She didn't when she was Bayley's age, for flips sake. But we have a good relationship. I negotiate with her. It takes the patience of a bloody saint but I communicate politely and clearly with her often enough that we don't fight and she mostly does what I ask. And she loves me to bits. And she's developing so much. I can see the confidence buregeoning in her and I believe this is at least partly because she has a settled, safe and loving home environment. There's not a lot of conflict here and I think that's how a kid should be raised. She's a Billie Barry Kid now (all caps, folks). The ease with which she arrives at that building and wanders off into the hall without me (parents are banned) gives me great pride. She is not afraid to be on her own in the world. She's confident in herself. And my youngest...she's a little dote. Bayley is so dissimilar to Carra at the same age it can feel like a trick of the mind that they are sisters. When she has a sore tooth or a cold she will let you know she is suffering, but on an average day - today, for example - she is just so pleasant and relaxed, so docile and content. I mopped and hoovered the entire house while she lay on her mat for an hour this morning, googoo gaga-ing away to herself. Now if only she'd start sleeping all night! I do believe it's the extra time and energy I put into my girls that leaves me short everywhere else, but at least I know it's not all for naught.
