Steve Braunias

Steve Braunias looks forward to being a parent helper, for the last time

She came home from school the other day and we exchanged our familiar greeting. “Heyoo!” “Heyoo!” It’s my favourite time of day. I hear her open the front door and I race to the top of the stairs and smile down at her smooth little heart-shaped face. Her fair hair is cut in a bob. She wears her intermediate uniform of green shirt, blue skirt, white socks, black shoes. It’s a jungle out there, God knows what goes on in a compact tribe of boys and girls — in the 1963 film of Lord of the Flies, the fat little boy who played Piggy was turned on and told he’d die, just like his character — and every parent breathes a sigh of relief when they get home in one piece.

“How was your day, beautiful?”

“Good.”

“Hungry?”

“Yep.”

The best parenting I achieve is the preparation of after-school snacks. I put more thought and care into these small feasts than my work or my future. She got braces a little while ago, so now I put the emphasis on mush: macaroni cheese, sushi, peeled mandarins, that sort of thing. She tucked into her fuel — she’s always

had lovely manners and always says thanks — and I sat down at the table beside her and bored her with my news: “I went to the dairy ... I read a really sad story about a pet goose that died in its owner’s arms ... I stole some firewood from a building site.”

And then she said, “There’s a school trip coming up and it’s the last one you can ever come to because they don’t have parents at school trips in college.”

“They don’t?”

“No.”

I tried to keep a note out of desperation from my voice, and failed. I shrieked, “Why not?” “Don’t need to, I guess.”

“I guess,” I said.

She took a drink from the glass of water I poured her from the ice-water tap in the fridge. I needed something stronger. The school trip! All of a sudden I was filled with a terrible longing for the school trip. Her childhood flashed before my eyes as I thought back to her history of school trips, and my history as — God I love this term — a parent helper.

Going along on a school trip as a parent helper is one of the great parental rites of passage. It’s a wonderful occasion, an outing on a coach to some place — a museum, an event, a boring field, it doesn’t really matter where, because the point or pleasure of traipsing along is its access to the society of children, which is the strangest of all societies.

Childhood is a constant disappearing act. It slips out the door every single day and all it leaves behind are artefacts no longer in use — toys, clothes, the cot in the garage — and memories of a bygone age when there were such things as parent helpers needed on school trips.

There was the one to a farm.

“It rained and it was boring,” she said.

“But remember that little boy who I looked after? Really tiny. He called me ‘Mr Braunias’. So sweet.” There was the one to a beach.

“Hated that,” she said.

“No, you had a great time. And there was that extremely large boy who burned his feet on the sand and I looked after him.”

There was the one to a soccer tournament. “That was fun,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, and sighed. “Who was that little boy on the farm trip? Do you remember him?”

She ran off and came back with the class photographs from her entire primary school career. Year Zero! Her hair was so blond. I looked at her through the ages and there were her friends, a little taller and less babyish each year, Abbi, Lucy, Zahra. She said, “Zahra’s 13 on Saturday.”

“A teenager,” I marvelled.

And there he was, the little boy, with his short hair and serious face, at the end of a row in Year Four. Our school trip was to a dairy farm. It rained very hard. There was mud, cows, a tractor. He was afraid of something, I can’t remember. I held his hand. He reached for it all day. We hung out at lunchtime in a barn. He rolled off hay bales to make me laugh. I laughed and thought: What a great little kid. His family moved away at the end of the year. I hope he’s all good.

She said, “So are you going to come as parent helper on the school trip?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I said.

Going along on a school trip as a parent helper is one of the great parental rites of passage.

NEXT WEEK: Ashleigh Young