Grin and Tonic

Yesterday was one of those days that I kept catching myself and watching as if I was above and looking down.  It was near perfect. It was the kind of day I remember from my childhood. The kind of day I wanted for my un-born children as I wondered how our lives would change. The kind of day our girls will recount when they are older and reminisce about their Donegal summers.

It started well. I had a lie in….. Hubby arrived the night before and after two and half weeks of solo parenting, I got to slumber in my duvet and tune into my own thoughts wthout the perpetual background symphony of little voices.  Then, after Ruby went for her morning nap, the four of us had a family game of Monopoly.  When I was a child and we went on our family holidays to Donegal, my brother and I would have epic three day games of Monopoly.  Daisy and Poppy are now equally addicted, although Daddy had to go and bankrupt us all!
Then I wrote a long letter to my mum and sent her all the pics of our beach adventures…. I know she will clutch that letter and hold onto it for hours…. an escape to the outside world.
Then……. we went and saw some puppies.  We’ve been wanting one for ages, and there in the local little shop was a little notice. I knew immediately one of them was ours. Serendipity. A little piece of Donegal with us always. We went to see them and the girls chose their new pet – the little dog that will share all the days of their childhood.  And here he is…… Olly. Serendipidous. He was already called Olly, the name we were going to call our boy that never happened.

In the afternoon we climbed up sand dunes, and rolled down them, laughing out sand, spitting out sun. We walked though a meadow of orchids, cow parsley, cowslips, thrifts, dancing in the long grass. We left our footprints on the soft sand, and Ruby waved at the waves. We climbed rocks and threw sand and wet seaweed at each other screaming in laughter.
Then we got home and sat down together to a great big steaming fish pie, talking about our new family. With Olly.
When the kids went to bed, the sun called us outside and hubby and I sat in the shadow of Mount Ericle and supped wine and smiled.  Then we fell asleep in front of a roaring turf fire. Does it get any better? Does it make up for the endless days of frustration and tears, hard work followed by hard work, rearing and roaring, teaching and tearing my hair out?  Yes, actually. It does. I say near perfect, because I wish my mum would be able to read the letter I sent her. And come and visit us to meet Olly and step her footprints beside mine in the sand as she has all my life.  But then, I know I wouldn’t have been able to have this near perfect day if her footprints weren’t there.  As they always will be. As mine will always be beside my girls whereever they are.

I’m back. Back in the glorious expanse of sky that makes me feel part of a huge beautiful world. All year I have waited for this. All year I have plodded and puffed, toiled and teared my way through the months waiting for this…..

….. the wet smulch of sea-soaked sand between my toes. The wind blowing away the stands of stress with every bluster.  I’m back. And as always, the beautiful wilderness of Donegal makes me feel alive, alert, appreciative.
I’m back….. in every sense of the words.

Today I had an encounter of the weird kind. Quite upsetting actually, although I’m forcing myself to laugh. Laugh in the face of nutters, right?
There I am, bubbled in the babble of morning mayhem – striding up the road to school, three kids in tow, ten minutes late and dealing with the normal emotional meltdowns that cover young girls like an invisible aura. Poppy was whining and whinging and lagging behind. She stayed awake last night longer than is required for happy family life, and was making sure everyone knew about it.  I did the only thing one can to survive a day of endless crying and hysteria – I ignored her.  I strode on ahead and she scooted about 4 feet behind,crying and shouting. At some point, I turned round and told her to grow up and hurry up. So far, so normal.  (Just to point out, there are plenty of mornings – when the required amount of sleep is had, that we all skip to school singing songs and chatting our heads off).

Suddenly a young man walked past me and as he did he turned to me angrily and snarled, “It’s hard being a child. How dare you treat her like that. You’re one of those angry mothers you see everywhere!”
Once I’d picked my chin off my shoes, I spluttered out an incoherent retort along the lines of ‘How dare you!  How dare you comment on something you know nothing about. You know nothing about me or what I’m going through!”  Did he walk away? Did he apologise?  No!  He stopped, turned and shouted at me in front of my three girls. In a furious attempt to just get rid of him, I told him to ‘clear off!” Honestly – no stronger.  Where I found the self-restraint not to swear I don’t know – probably the look of horror on poor Daisy’s face. Suddenly another school mum appeared, saw what was happening, and literally chased him away up the street.  I hid my upset from the girls and carried on to school. But I was bruised. He might as well have slapped me. A complete stranger called me a bad mother in front of my children. His words pressed down on me all day, like a large thumb crushing my head. Every insecurity, every pore of guilt that I have ever felt came gushing through me.
And then I had coffee with my friend. She has three daughters too. And last week she was on her way to the shops with them. Like mine, she had one in a pram and two were scooting a bit ahead of her.  Suddenly a man approached her and said (and I quote, lest you think I’m joking) “If you let those girls go ahead of you like that, they’ll get lifted by a paedophile!” My friend spluttered some shocked reply, and he retorted, “you need to let a roar out of you and control those kids!”
So there we have it. One week, one road, two men giving us mums some advice. I’m a bad mother for shouting at my child, and my friend is a bad mother for not shouting enough.
We can’t win, can we?

Do you ever read something and it resonates so much with your moment in time and space that the words leap off the page and slap you in the face?  Or maybe it’s a lyric that rings in your ears long after the song has stopped? I read this last night, and it nearly stopped my heart:
A mother draws a map for her child and places herself at the centre of it. Her death wipes that map clean. She leaves you knowing that you must redraw it to survive, and yet not knowing where to start.
My mum didn’t die but the map was wiped clean when she had her stroke. Those three lines sum up how I’ve felt over the last two years, and how I have struggled not only to redraw the map, but to figure our how or where to even start.
Grief is more than an emotion. It becomes a physical part of you – like shrapnel embedded in your flesh – as real, and permanent as your arm and leg. It is always there, although we might seem to heal and live with the scars, it is hidden in your muscles and your bones, your brain and your heart.
Every day I mourn the loss of all that could be, as much as what was. People say time is a healer, but it is also the blunt knife that cuts deeper. Sure, time softens the pain and the heart-stoppping terror, leaving behind a low-level ache. But the knife of time also cuts deeper, reminding us over and over again that as life is moving on, we are leaving someone behind.
My mum lies in suspended animation, a still frame in a world of moving pictures. Poppy turned five last month, and danced in her first ballet show. Daisy is writing stories and singing songs, and Ruby is full of wonder. We have adventures, we make plans, we live our days, and my mum is missing it all. But worse, we are missing her.
I know that over the last year, no-one would have devoted more time to sitting on the sofa hearing Daisy read than her. I know she would have started to write letters to Daisy, and get replies, just like mum and me wrote to each other all our lives. I know she would have been measuring every centimeter Poppy has grown this last year as her gluten-free diet kicks in, and listened avidly as Poppy regales tales of her imaginary friend, Heart. I know Ruby would be wearing little dresses (“I just couldn’t help myself”) that mum would bring down, and my mum would be bending the ears of everyone she knew with Ruby’s minxy antics.
I know that, because my mum was the centre of my map and those are the roads that lay ahead of us. Now I stumble down new tracks, unmapped areas and try to mark my way. All I can do is take the navigation tools she taught me and hope I find my way.

I’m spending so much time in my childhood house these days as I care for mum, that it has that old familiar feel. I’m not the random visitor of that last 20 years, leaving my breath on the window pane on my way out. Instead, I leave my imprint in the bed, my things accumulating in bedside drawers and wardrobes once again.
As my mum lies in her dining-room-converted bedroom, I wander the rooms of my adolescence and remember the memories. Fights, laughs, chats. The front door opening and closing a thousand times as I went to and from school. The hours I spent standing in the hallway talking on the phone to friends and shy first boyfriends. The whispers my bedroom walls heard as I revised for exams, wrote secrets in my diary, gazed beyond my horizon and imagined my life ahead. Hours spent beside my mum, licking baking bowl spoons in the kitchen, sitting beside her on the sofa learning the lessons of my life.
These walls housed many family sagas before our own. When we moved here I wandered about then, touchng the walls and trying to listen to the whispers of other people’s stories. Now I sit with my mum and go through old photos…. black and white characters no longer filled with the colour of life. Long lives, long lived, but over now. Now they are the ageless faces in aged albums. Like the people who once lived in this house.
And as our family sage comes slowly slowly to an end, I cannot help but wonder who will live here next. What fights, laughter, chats, hopes, dreams, heartache, pain, love will fill these walls.  But for now, we must still fill this hosue with the noise of our family. Until those memories too drain of colour.
Replaced in brick, but never in hearts.

I’ve been given a special gift this week, made all the more precious because it was unexpected, a still frame in the blur of life. For months, I knew I was coming up to care for mum for a week while my dad took a much needed break.  But my focus was on finding childcare (my gorgeous aunt-in-law came over from Uganda to help us out!!!), school pick ups (thank you Brid!), and making meals for every night so Aunt Judith didn’t have to cook as well as looking after three young tearaways and change her first nappies at the age of 60+.

So when I arrived it was in the tailspin of planning, packing, and panicking. You do suddenly panick as you run out the door leaving three small children in the hands of a woman who has never had kids – my worry being for her, I hasten to add, not them!

But as squeals of delight greeted me down the phone every day, I began to relax into the week with my mum. When my mum had her stroke 19 months ago, I never thought I’d enjoy my time with her again. She was a shadow. And I was scared of her strangeness.

But this week was almost like days of old. I did her hair and make-up every day, and we laughed. Really laughed. She has made so much improvement, that at times I forgot the fear, and enjoyed the fun.  For the four hours a day that she is in a wheelchair, I took her out to the amazing Titanic Exhibition, to the shopping centre, and round the park in the sun. Her friends came round for lunch and stayed all afternoon. We watched and sang to the Sound of Music, and we went through old photos.  She still can’t remember people or names, but she engaged none the less. Every morning, I brought a little table in beside her bed, and worked beside her on my laptop, chatting and drinking tea. And in the evenings, I would hop up on her bed and lie beside her while we watched TV. 

For a week, I’ve had my mum back…….. one of the most precious gifts I’ve ever had. 

Apologies for the blog hiatus – but frankly I was too busy eating chocolate and drinking wine over the Easter holidays to nurture my neglected baby. With the girls off school, I was busy nurturing them instead….. and my waisteline. We went to Wales for a week, followed by a whirlwind tour of English friends. Then Belfast, back to Dublin, off to Meath, and here I am back in Belfast, catching breath. And letting out my belt. Here’s some of the things I learned while I was away…

1. Don’t be fooled by the sneaky sun. Two days bluffing and I put away all the winter clothes and unpacked the frivilous summer fabrics. Then we went on holiday. We were doing great the first two days as the girls swam in the sea and we picniced on the beach. And then it snowed. Twelve hours after sunbathing, it snowed. We had no socks. I had to go out and buy fleeces. Next year the jumpers are staying out until July.
2. If you eat all your children’s easter eggs, you will get fat. And unpopular.
3. Five hour ferry rides are not enjoyable. Five hour ferry rides with a livewire toddler who won’t sit still, while 40 drunken students dressed as pirates sing and cavort the whole way across the Irish Sea is just plain hideous. I didn’t know whether to grab their port and start singing, or jump overboard.
4. If you drink wine every night, while sharing a room with your baby, you will soon feel you are dying from sleep deprivation. Combine this with chocolate overdose and you will actually wish you would die.
5. As my mum would always say, “it’s lovely to go away, but it’s even nicer to come home.”
6. Mum’s are always right. Even when they eat all your chocolate.

Dear Ruby,