At the weekend I read Laura Dockrill’s compelling memoir What Have I Done? which has been sitting on my bookshelf since its publication in 2020. I knew I was going to read it, but felt dread every time I looked at the rest of its title: Motherhood, Mental Illness and Me. There’s another one I […]
Category: Mental health
Icebreaker
So, I’ve been away. Since August. Now I’m back from a bout of mental illness. A full-on, stinking, steaming, absolute mud-pat of depression and OCD. Despite having had it before, I did not catch it quickly. I did not heed any of the warning signs. I was frantic with anxiety, headlocked, relentless bullets of disordered […]
Interdependence
I think all the time now about how dependent we are on each other. I’m not sure how clear that was to me before the emergence of Covid 19. There’s the obvious thing we must rely upon each other for: keeping each other safe. We have to hope that others are taking the same precautions […]
Amigos
I’d thought that the ever-present stress that is the pandemic hadn’t affected my children at all. Yes, they had to wash their hands a lot more often; they saw me glued to the news for stretches of time, whereas before I’d diligently hidden my furtive information gathering, worried that the mere sight of a phone […]
Stoned
A few days ago, I sat in the garden, washing and drying stones with one of my sons. We rinsed and rinsed again with the hose, watching as the cloudy pool of water eventually turned clear. Methodically, we lay the stones out one by one, examining and then carefully drying them. The previous hour had […]
Here, now, nothing else
Well here we are. Hello. All of our human hearts, beating. Except when they stop. Sometime back in mid-January, I started reading about the coronavirus. Soon, I couldn’t stop reading about what was happening in Wuhan. How terrifying it was. I started to obsessively wash my hands. By the beginning of February, my eldest boy […]
Undone
My middle son has this tiny pair of walking boots, impossibly cute, suitably hardy and adorned with preternaturally long laces that are always coming undone. Putting shoes on my three small boys is – sheesh – I dread it. If my husband is around I will diligently go find the socks in our massive odd […]
Musical chairs
My friend’s been playing little ten-minute meditations to her kids on the school run. I probably should be doing it myself, but I like to drown out the dog-eat-dog world that exists in the three car seats to the rear with the volume cranked up on the dulcet, comforting voice of Marty Whelan on Lyric […]
Fog
I am wading through fog at the moment, my brain feels like mashed potato, and with too much butter in it, to boot. I have all these theories as to why I feel like I am lost in the mists right now, all terrifying and unhelpful like ‘early onset Alzheimer’s’ or ‘mercury poisoning’. Can such […]
Gloop
I’m stuck in a tornado of foul weather at the moment. Wexford is sunny, mostly, the eucalyptus trees still sway jauntily beside the wooden deck where I have my coffee every morning. The flowers are still in full bloom, their vibrant colour a solid example of how beautiful the world can be. But boy do […]