Get Comfy

In which we mortify our child and a horse deals with rejection from a clique of chickens.

We’re staying at my parents’ farm these holidays. There is a new horse for everyone to take turns riding.

I debated whether or not to use the horse’s real name in this post. I am, I suppose, slightly worried that if I do, someone will come to the paddock in the dead of night and lure him over to the fence by calling his name, then ride him away and we’ll never see him again. A horse is a pretty expensive thing to leave outside at night. It seems to be basically an honour system that people don’t go around stealing each other’s horses all the time. I’m relieved every morning when I go out and find he is still there.

I don’t use my kids’ real names online, but I do use the cats’ names. I guess I can use his real name. It’s Frankie. He is a nine-year-old former racehorse who is extremely tall. He doesn’t like to go faster than a walk. He will trot if you really insist on it but at heart he’s the living embodiment of a Frankie Says Relax t-shirt and walking is just fine. He also has two spots in the paddock where he seems to get no reception. He just stops for no discernible reason, every time. We accept it and wait – we all have our quirks. Eventually he gets going again. He is a vast improvement on the last former racehorse we owned thirty years ago, a demented creature called Basil who was like riding a haunted coathanger.

Frankie is an only horse, so far, but he came from a home with several companions so at the moment he is mostly to be found in the corner of the paddock that abuts the chookyard, where he is running a thus far unsuccessful campaign to become part of their gang. They are supremely uninterested in him. I’ve tried to explain that staring mournfully at them through the fence is not the way to make friends, but he is a horse who knows his own mind. When I told him that he wouldn’t want to be friends with them anyway, because actually they’re kind of bitchy, he doesn’t believe me. I’m not lying though. They are pretty horrible. And since he arrived they’ve stopped laying. It’s all a bit adolescent out there. ‘I can’t do my work because the weird new kid won’t stop watching me, Miss.’

On the actual adolescent front, our fourteen-and-a half-year-old daughter, May Blossom*, asked if she could invite a school friend down to the farm to stay for a few days. We agreed, and then she asked if it would be possible not to drive the friend down. We were a bit confused. ‘How else will she get here?’ we asked. ‘It’s two hours from Sydney.’

May Blossom suggested that she might drive back to Sydney with her father when he has to go back for a meeting one day, and then she and her friend could catch the train down together. This seemed odd. Why not just drive back in the car with her dad and her friend? Could this be, I wondered, the beginning of The Embarrassment?

We have thus far gotten away relatively unscathed by the early teen years. Actually tremendously unscathed. Like, I think she still likes us. But I’ve been waiting for that to change, because it mostly does.

After lunch yesterday we were sitting around together and I bravely said, ‘So, the reason you guys want to take the train, is that because your friend hasn’t spent any time with us yet, and you think two hours in the car with one of your parents might be weird?’

She replied that yes, that was the problem. I pushed it. Was there anything, I wanted to know, that we did that was specifically awful. Was it my singing? Was that cringe? (Is saying cringe now considered cringe?)

My singing, she reassured me, was not the problem. And in a million years I don’t think I could have guessed what it was that she was worried about. ‘It’s Dad,’ she admitted. And then, just thinking about what she was about to say made her squeeze her shoulders up to her ears and scrunch up her face in horror. ‘It’s when he says “comfy”.’

‘Comfy?’ I said. ‘As in comfortable?’

‘Yes!’ She was almost disappearing inside herself with the mortification. ‘He says “I’m comfy with that.” Who says that?!’

‘What’s bad about that?’ I wasn’t getting it.

‘He doesn’t need to say “comfy”! He can just say “I’m fine with that.” There’s no need to say “comfy”!’

I found this hilarious. I asked if we could tell Drew**. She said she absolutely couldn’t but that I could. He finds it as funny as I do, and is relieved that it’s not anything else, anything intrinsic to his personality, anything that can’t be changed. Because he can stop saying ‘comfy’ around May Blossom and her friends any time he wants.

He’s one hundred per cent not going to though. In fact there’s been a dramatic spike in the usage of the word comfy since this conversation took place. I’ve taken it up too.

He is driving back to Sydney next week with May Blossom, and there will be a few minutes when she and her friend have to be in the car with him while he drives them to the train station. I can only imagine how many times he will drop ‘comfy’ in that ten minutes. It’s going to be amazing, and I’m very comfy with that.

*Not her real name – there’s a post detailing the origins of the alias here.

**His real name. I am not as worried about husband rustlers coming to lure him away in the night.