Christmas can bring a family together, but a drunken toilet mishap is often the real catalyst for unbreakable connections.

 

I have been tasked to recall a Christmas memory for work and work it into a succinct story to warm hearts. Unfortunately, I’m known for being short but never brief so the tale I came up with is far too long. Plus, it inevitably explores gender roles and references reproductive organs multiple times, rendering it largely unsuitable for the masses.

 

So like a slogan singlet from Supre that’s too embarrassing for public use I’d feel bad about throwing in the bin, I’ve recycled the story and treated this website like a Vinnies donation bin. Enjoy rummaging through my musty-smelling memories at a bargain-basement price.

 

IT WAS Christmas morning in the Maguire house, which always starts much earlier than any other days. Me and my siblings seemed to be internally programmed to wake with the rising sun when Christmas rolled around, and this day was no exception.

This was the Christmas we were given the go kart: a motorised speed demon on four wheels which would later crash through barbed-wire fences and severely bruise more than one foot thanks to its irresponsible drivers. It must have weighed a tonne in Santa’s sack, so it was left outside on the pergola, right in the line of sight from any bedroom in the house.

But when the four Maguire children woke up that morning, we didn’t notice its careful placement. The coolest of Christmas presents just metres away form us, separated only by a screen door and, and we ran straight past it. It didn’t help that there was a Barbie Picnic Van under the tree, which was the most exciting thing ever for childhood Dannielle (it was a bright brink station wagon with a barbecue as a tailgate, which meant our Barbie dolls could finally combine her love of the outdoors with grilled plastic meats).

This perplexed my father, who couldn’t understand why a lump of pink plastic with multiple choking hazards was trumping an actual moving vehicle. He motioned towards the go kart with all the enthusiasm he could muster at that time of the morning telling us “look at this!” and was only answered with my uninterested munblings as I attempted to free a pink tray of sausages from its plastic casing. This is probably a good signifier of the end of my days as a doting Daddy’s girl and the beginning of my journey to adulthood – that pink station wagon was about to take me over some bumpy terrain.

My father always wanted a son.

I’m from a family with four girls, and while it was a big win for my Little Women-loving mother, I have a niggling feeling that he would have preferred least one of us had our reproductive organs growing outside our bodies.

A real man’s man, my father (who forgoes his Christian name for the ever-blokey Macca) loves his NRL and boxing, is rarely seen without an Akubra on his head and often wears a pocket knife on his belt like he is a hybrid of Batman and Peter Pan. His heroes are the Bush Tucker Man and Slim Dusty. He would have loved a flesh and blood son to impart all his manly ways on, but instead he ended up with four darling daughters. And while this saved him having to deliberate over removing our foreskins or having to hide the moisturiser during our teenage years, he would have loved for one of us to need to stand up to pee, with sheer masculinity dangling between our legs instead of the eternal void of disappointment.

This isn’t just a view I formed after hearing countless people exclaim “your poor father!” when they were told of Macca’s four blessings, it was once explicitly conveyed to me straight from the horse’s mouth.

Rosy-cheeked and brown-ringleted seven-year-old Dannielle (I can’t remember exactly how old I was, needless to say it was a pivotal, personality influencing age) skipped through the kitchen to find Macca holding a fancy-looking bottle by the fridge. The shelf above the fridge was where all the fancy-looking bottles were kept, and because they were so fancy they were rarely touched. So it was unusual for Macca to be holding one of them, and it was even more unusual for my father to look so forlorn. The details are a little fuzzy now some fifteen years later, but from memory the look my father was giving the bottle was how someone would gaze at a portrait of a loved one killed in The Great War, or a piece of cake while they were on a strict diet. My father’s sad, longing look got the better of me, and I chirped a, “what are you looking at, Dad?”, in what could only have been a sickeningly sweet manner.

Without looking at me, or even tearing his gaze away from the fancy bottle, he said something that most child psychologists would sternly advise against telling a young girl as a precursor to puberty; it was mildly soul crushing and absolutely impacted my future development.

“I was saving this for when I had a son,” he said.

Cue the next few years of my trying to be pull off the tomboy act while being absolutely appalling at anything sport-related. This was of course fraught with failure as obviously sport is a boy’s thing, but as an-ever growing chubby lump of a girl, sitting down and looking pretty was also out of the question. This set the tone for a few angry, heavy-eyelinered years with increasingly strained relations with Macca. There were many feelings, and even more Simple Plan songs played on repeat. As my vocabulary grew, my levels of sass increased and horns were locked. Macca was a FIFO worker for much of my childhood, which meant he didn’t “get me” as well as my mother. A constantly closed bedroom door kept things that way. So my father based his assumptions about me on stereotypical “girly” stuff to plug his knowledge gaps and it rarely ended well. My views of his tyranny and his Women are from Venus ideals kept us both from recognising our glaring similarities, and ignoring this fanned the flames of our furiosity at each other when fights flared up. I’ve been told I’m quite loud and imposing, and since I’m a near exact replica of my father, things became quite thunderous when tempers did ignite. Family occasions were not exempt from the occasional verbal scuffle, even Christmas. Because the event called for extended face-to-face interactions, it wasn’t long into the season before he would get on my nerves and other family members had to step in and suffocate the metaphorical fires with distractions and balls of things rolled in coconut.

Thankfully, after nearly three decades of living solely in the company of women, we’ve finally become used to each other. But it wasn’t until the Christmas I was legally allowed to drink in public that we realised just how close the apple fell from the tree.

With a population of roughly 1500, our little town often tried to pool everyone together for celebrations to build “community”. While the annual show was an obvious ringer, the Christmas Street Carnival was a very close second. Council workers put up road closure signs on either end of the main street and a prime mover pulled a stage into position on the road (and by “stage” I mean “trailer with one canvas side removed”). Lights were strung up, the Lions Club fired up a barbecue and the fire captain would impersonate Santa Claus on elaborate “sleighs”. And the pubs filled pretty bloody quickly, spilling out on to the street. The first year I was able to get as sauced at the mums and dads of my childhood friends. I hit the Vodka Cruisers hard. Macca smashed the XXXX Golds and we exchanged banter as the gang of parents from my old primary school marvelled at how old I was. We were partners in crime and it was glorious.

But our newfound friendship was truly forged the next morning, after neither of us could remember getting home. A toilet roll holder had been ripped from the wall, and no one could say with any authority whether they had or had not destroyed the important piece of bathroom infrastructure. An unspoken agreement ensued that it was both of us, and none of us. Bound by the shared guilt of an act we otherwise would have roused on each other for. It’s odd that a drunken toilet mishap could be the catalyst for a shared understanding between us, but that’s apparently how most of my friendships start.