I don’t drive. Yes it’s true, I’m in my 30’s and I just haven’t gotten around to it. I know how, I’ve had lessons many times over the years, I even own my own car and used to drive it…on short trips…avoiding all hills…and roundabouts. I just don’t have my full license and now that I have a baby I don’t think it’s right to drive without one. I mean, it’s one thing to put myself and thousands of other Dubliners at risk, but my precious baby?! Yes, trout-slap me now.
So, up until now I’ve not experienced the guilt-trip that is loading up your car in a car park. My sister looks after Eve and her own two-year-old son for the few hours I work every day and today she had one of those minor episodes that is the daily bread and butter of every parent of young children. She had just got back to the car when she discovered that her son had had a wardrobe-malfunction of the nappy variety and was soaked through. So, she strapped Eve into her carseat and then proceded to perfrom an emergency nappy change on the front seat of the car. Meanwhile she notices that another driver has decided to wait for her spot and slowly a long line of cars is forming behind him.
Trying desperately to get the nappy on to her furiously struggling toddler she can feel the weight of all those eyes upon her. That lovely feeling of being judged. She is so hassled she gives up trying to put his trousers back on and plonks him wearing just nappy, vest and coat into his carseat. At this point he decides he does not want to be in the carseat and proceeds to have a full on screaming, limb-flailing tantrum while she is trying to strap him in. Does this prompt the driver to move on? Noooo, he just sits there, with the queue of people behind him, all tapping their steering wheels and craning to watch the show.
As she struggles on, her face bright red, sweat streaming, one of the other drivers comes up and asks the lead driver would he please move on as there are plenty of other spaces further on and the line of traffic is starting to back up out onto the main road causing a traffic jam.
Phew! Thinks my sister, at last someone with some sense, she can carry on her battle without the audience. The first driver finally pulls away and goes on to find another spot. Only the line doesn’t budge because the next driver in line decides that he will now wait for her! So she has to finish the wrestling match with her son, whose screams have been joined by Eve’s who’s upset that he’s upset, and then she has to collapse the buggy, manhandle it into the boot and try to find space for the shopping…all with the impatient ticking of engines in her ears.
When she did get out onto the road she was already a good few miles away when she remembered the scratch card and packet of M&Ms she’d put on the roof while trying to find her keys. Good on her though, she was so peed off with the whole mess she went back to search and found the scratch card and the M&Ms on the side of the road. She decided she was just a little too embarrassed to be seen picking the M&Ms out of the gutter (I mean it was Dalkey you know!) but she swiped up the scratch card and ended up winning a fiver on it!
