My external status has changed. It’s no longer mother of delightfully difficult neurodivergent children, a beautiful team spinning on a kaleidoscope of autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and a collective tendency to shout ‘Pig!’ at random intervals. (Note: I do not find that adorable).

It’s autistic ADHD mother of such abundance, such infuriating stroppy and wilful bandits (Oh! How I love them! Oh! How I struggle so much with them!)

My internal status: Well, it looks somewhat different peering out from a shifted perspective on my difficulties (gifts!), depression (sensitivity!), over-thinking (intuition!), noise-intolerance (surfer of silence!), selective mutism (but she can write!), meltdowns (she needs certain conditions to function optimally and they involve almost no outer stimulation, and good luck with that, mother of children who sporadically shout Pig! that she is), bluntness (but she must tell the truth at all times!) and minimal-to-zero executive function (read: all previous posts relating to the theme ‘How does life actually work?’).

My brain hurts. It’s on the verge of breaking free but I won’t quite let it yet. I don’t know why. Perhaps there is a holding period post-diagnosis.

I am looking out at the world with the same brain I’ve always had, so limited in some ways, so wildly absorbent, vital and (is there an adjective to describe a stallion that is straining to gallop fiercely through endless beautiful mountains and valleys?) bursting to spillage point with unexpressed emotion.

With an unexpressed life.

I am a sludgy drain, choking on the lifelong debris of trying to stuff my square and jaggedy self into a perfect round hole. But I’ve managed partly: I live in that hole, I just had to cut off a few limbs to fit in there. These limbs are strewn about me, discarded far back into the past, dismembered parts futilely holding onto the decisions I have made about how to live.

I know - I know - I can get these discarded parts back.

Nobody I’ve told about my autism diagnosis has been very interested at all. Family, especially. Is that good? Is that bad? I think: There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so, as Hamlet, that tortured young man who accompanied me through the best of my worst teenage years, said.

It is such a deep and profound relief to drop the story of mental illness I have been carrying around all of my life. It is an indescribable comfort to know that I am not defective, that I am not stupid, I did not miss the lesson on how the fuck things work when the bearded man was booming out his heavenly lecture on how to perform effectively on earth.

It is permission - finally - to love myself. It is freedom. It is acceptance.

Why do labels matter?

Why is it necessary that I write here that I am autistic, that I have ADHD?

Well, imagine an internal scale. On one side sits the rage, sorrows, disappointments, regrets and embarrassment of not being able to ‘do’ life according to the rules I perceive: rules that are always changing anyway. You would, until recently enough, have found me almost unable to breathe under this side of the scale, struggling to get up. The bottom of the scale had me pinned down. It felt insurmountable.

On the other side of the scale, sits earnest and reputable psychologists, the weighty glut of reliable information on neurodivergence, neurologists, pyschiatrists and finally, diagnosis. For me, these have brought the scale back to neutral.

That is akin to a rebirth.

I have managed to crawl out from underneath of my own self-imposed labels of shit and I have begun to walk. I have begun to run. And I will begin to fly.

In time, in life, in love - in the indecipherable journey of the fragile soul - such piffling things as a scale fade away into nothing more than another signpost to continue on the road.

Now, though, I can travel without the extra weight.

The ship is not delicate. The ship is just built differently.

So I won’t skirt around the issue at hand, which is that I found God. About a year ago, except I have come to understand that God was there all along. Barriers fell; someone threw a rope ladder down from heaven. I confided in a sweet, good and godly Capuchin friar. Roses were scattered.

Seriously.

Then I thought great, now I will have to inhabit the persona of a Bible-bolstered Christian convert. No-one will want to read what I’ve written because I will have become a God-nut. People don’t like that. I may try to turn everything back to God, like a guileless Willow branch bending in a Spring storm. I’ll ask: Have you prayed yet? Really, have you tried it?

I’ve felt filled up with love for months now. Before that, blocked by hate and resentment, which slowly crumbled out of me like an old scab peeling off a dried-up wound, the more definitively I surrendered myself to God.

I have also wondered if I am dying, such has been my obsession and subsequent inexplicable comfort with the wonder of letting God love me. As I am, not as I would be.

There was a giving up of problems which could also be justly described as passing the buck - there’s been an avalanche of ‘Ok, smarty pants God. You deal with it then. I can’t.’

And then it’s dealt with.

Seriously.

What does it all mean?

It doesn’t have to mean anything. Or it can mean everything. I’ve thought: I’ll lose friends over this. Those who see a different kind of God, those who don’t see God, those who are indifferent to God. Those who are offended by the notion of God.

But each day I surrender myself again and again, and each day the phrase ‘For my yoke is easy and my burden is light (Matthew 11:30)’ wipes more smudge off the cloudy crystal of my soul. It’s true.

All the God questions I had (Where are you? Why are a lot of things down here a shit show? Is there a reason I was born so administratively incompetent? WTF re AI?) are quietened because I don’t need to know the answers anymore.

I just want to rest, not in a RIP way, but in a profound and relaxing breaststroke in clear green waters (my favourite) way. You know, plant the seeds. Smell the flowers. Lean in when the Dunnes’ checkout lady wants to chat. Not just lean in - I mean sit down and get my nails done with her, and listen about how her father-in-law got sepsis after he cleaned out the fish tank with a tiny cut on his hand but he’s ok now.

I want to talk further with Paula, the grandmother I met at Church who doesn’t speak English and just left her whole life behind in Bergamo because she wants to live out the rest of her days near her daughter here in the smoggy wet thick of Dublin city. She’s lonely.

I want to hear my eldest boy’s ever-deepening baritone that foreshadows the man desperately trying to claw out of his beautiful budding pubescent self, my middle boy’s gentle whispering as he masterminds War & Peace with teeny tiny micromallows, my youngest son’s tongue trying to fold around impressive words of which he may or may not know the meaning. And I want to, for as many days a week as is dietetically advisable, watch all three children eating chocolate cake freshly baked by me, because that makes me happy and I have this one recipe that never fails.

I want to slow dance more with my poodle, a strange set of affairs that came about yesterday as I picked up this scrappy nervy fluffball to dampen a manic barking fit then segued into a satisfyingly extended cuddle as I swayed to The Cure’s Lullaby.

I want forests (always), robins’ nests, warm glasses of red wine in front of a crackling fire after long, long walks on wind-whipped beaches replete with violent and exuberant waves.

I want - I want - I want to stop wanting.

I want to stop. Like I said, and I underline this, not in an RIP way. In a lying on the grass looking up at the sky way, ants busying themselves around me, bees buzzing over me, wood thrushes fluting their sonorous songs in the wise old Oaks beside me.

There is no want when you are filled with love. Or, your childish want, like a large squishy ball popping incessantly out of its carefully constructed adult box, is diminished like a discarded fragment of a long-popped balloon.

But here is the test.

What is to be done with such love, if it is real, aka the real deal?

You get filled up with love for a reason. And it has absolutely nothing to do with yourself. Dare keep it within and it will disintegrate like candy floss in an eager tot’s dear little hand.

The love is not for you: it is for everyone else.

Sometimes I think that if I were to be sliced open like a salami at an Italian supper words would come spilling out of me, dripping all over the table and floor and scurrying away in the relief that they were finally free.

I wonder - or I bet - that everyone feels this way, especially if they are not able to express themselves, for whatever reason that may be. For me, so many words and phrases are incessantly forming like stickle bricks, clogging up inside of me because nobody wants to play with them.

There is this interior waterfall of letters which (to use another awkward food-related analogy) should be scooped out daily and served into a sundae peppered with punctuation. These words, fizzing under the surface, get pissed off they are not allowed to pop up and so they saturate, bubble and ferment into layer upon layer of unwritten and unspoken experience. I imagine these unexpressed phrases like those fast-fashion desert clothing dumps, causing untold harm to the environment around them.

The more silent I become on the outside, the more the words swirl and pile up on the inside until there is a veritable swamp of linguistic stagnation - words that once meant something that can never be recovered because they couldn’t find the right way out at the right time.

Is there an easier way to relieve the turgid pustule of a life that struggles to express itself other than just bursting it and doing the thing?

There surely must be, because look how nature itself makes it look so easy. You do not see Mother Nature gnashing and wailing over the resplendent production of a dahlia - she just produces it. Night and light and soil and some little human toil contribute but one day the dahlia just appears, beatific. It is a creative force at the bliss point of creation itself.

I don’t have a pay off here. Just to say, a sliver of salami has gone. Some words got out. My intensely recalcitrant creative CEO turned her head for once, and allowed my little stick-brick player to have fun when no-one was looking. Phew.

I struggle with noise, unless it’s my song of the moment, in which case I must play it loud and repetitively until some poor fortunate (yes, I meant that) begs for respite.

Even in silence, everything is too noisy and only occasionally do I realise that this noise is the spaghetti junction inside my head. Those moments are just a tiny crack in the matrix but they are enough to keep me endlessly searching for, as Wayne Dyer put it, a spiritual solution to every problem.

I panic when a captcha asks me to confirm humanity and before I do it (always a gamble) I wonder if I am going to be able to do it. When asked to tick the squares that have, say, motorcycles in them, I wonder does it mean the little finger that is on the hand of the person driving the motorcycle, or does it mean the person’s scarf that is billowing in the wind behind the motorcycle? Aren’t they as one in that moment, motorcycle and driver? With such an attitude, more often than not I fail the captchas, committing myself to an endless cycle of multi-square hell, where I tick at random in the hope that such an inability to follow instruction will be recognised as a confirmation of humanity in itself.

Of late, I’ve given up everything because I’ve understood that I’ve been asleep again. This may be temporary but it feels good. If I continually strip away things from the outside - alcohol, sugar, shopping, scrolling - then I might have a chance of understanding what is going on inside.

I think - hang on - it’s all a distraction. All of it. For me, information is the worst distraction of all. I can’t have a passing interest: I must have, get, do, be all of the information before I realise that I have strayed once again.

Strayed from what?

My humanity. The thing that is not all of the things I’m over-dosing on to run from it. The thing that is my leaping heart when I catch the eye of someone I truly love. The thing that awakens when I tune into the birds singing in the morning instead of a podcast. The thing that dances irrepressibly in the twinkling eyes of my 91-year-old auntie, such acute aliveness that one can only see in the very young and very old. The thing that sobs and yells and laughs, sometimes all within the space of half an hour.

The thing that we cannot buy, acquire, book, drink, steal, copy or even become.

The thing that we are.

Every day, no matter what is thrown at you, you have to begin again the next day. Apart from a select few people (mostly children), waking up brings with it an onslaught of tasks, niggles, worries, potential joys, lists, random memories and a general sense that you need to don your armour forthwith just to make it across the bedroom floor.

And generally, unless you are incapacitated in some way - illness, depression, exhaustion, insert here your chosen malady of modern life - you do make it across the bedroom floor.

Unlike my previous somnambulant self, these last six months I have aced making it across that floor. The weight of that onslaught has been flipped off like gossamer silk, left wilting on the pillow to sneak its way back in the night as I take refuge in sleep. The gear to fight in has mainly been tracksuit bottoms, as I dress to walk and move and lift things, or ridiculously fabulous and highly inappropriate items like a tutu or purple thigh-high boots (this shouldn’t need explained). And without the sleep deprivation that characterised my early days of parenthood, I am on for these boys of mine, I am strong for it - the building of strength, both physical and emotional, being a daily decision that I make as a way to manage parenthood.

I take this shit seriously. It weighs on me each moment of every day how I am responsible for these boys, I am their rock and punching bag for figuring out what the hell it is they are feeling or what even is a feeling (answers on a postcard please) and it is clear that whenever I am broken, they break too - except faster and with no glue.

As adults, we become living, breathing kintsugi - broken into pieces over and over again then patched back together with precious gold, made more beautiful than ever as each sliver of wisdom, each day and month and year, teaches us more about who we are and the gifts that we must give to the people around us.

That sounds lofty. Well, so what? That’s what we are here for. What is all this running and working out and uplevelling for? What is this relentless forward motion of life? It is a supermarket sweep, hurtling through the days and grabbing what you can as the years whittle down to seconds.

What are we grabbing at? I think it’s stuff (not like, tins of beans or Weetabix, refer to a more practical writer for notes on that) I mean the stuff of you to apply to your life like a mathematical formula that is both stunningly complex and beautifully simple at the same time.

But all this sharing of the stuff of you just isn’t easy. The weight of your armour - whatever it is you have chosen to get you through the day - can become heavy. You become tired. You start to drop it off, piece by piece, at the end of the day, or at the end of a season in your life.

And as you lay your head on the pillow to rest, brushing off that gossamer silk if you can remember it’s there, you put your faith in something larger than yourself, and hope that great artist with their infinite bucket of golden healing paint will never stop piecing you back together, with great and reverent care.

Wise texts tell you that the only thing you can rely on is change. We are all precarious on these shifting sand dunes, and no matter where we build our castle, it will get washed away. I don’t know if it’s helpful to understand this or not. We are to Be Here Now, as the delightfully psychedelic 1971 book by Ram Dass advises.

How? At the weekend, I met a stressed-out corporate lawyer who has decided the way to do it is to go to Holland and take some psilocybin. ‘It will get me there quicker,’ he said confidently. ‘I’ve done my research.’ Perhaps it will – and Ram Dass famously tried this route also, simply calling it ‘getting high’ and ultimately concluding that ‘love is the most powerful medicine.’

But love, of course, does not exclusively reside in the blissful escape of a high. It is in the mundane grit of plodding on each day with the life that you have created for yourself. It is in the small extraordinaries that you may witness around you, of noticing at sunset how the leaves of your barely cared for Monstera Deliciosa are reflected in the last rays gracing your hallway wall. It is in unloading the dishwasher for what feels like the tenth time that day, or the limitless embrace you give your child after they have informed you they hate you (albeit followed by they actually love you too).

I am very attracted to the allure of the high, the thing that will fix me, the moment that will make me – call it what you will. Often the present moment repels me; yet equally as often it does not. Stumbling around trying to make sense of motherhood, marriage, domesticity and – time – my brain buzzes constantly, pulled to the nectar of knowledge that might reveal the answer to the question that is existence.

But I already know that the answer is now and here and love; that any such knowledge only confirms what we are all born with: a heart that trusts it will all be taken care of, and a soul that knows its worth in the resplendent multiplicity of the universe.

The post Hey, now appeared first on The Delicate Ship.

Right now, something that gives me sustenance is attempting to write Haiku. I don’t want to write long sentences with frippery and slippery language. I also want to escape what’s inside my head, and it is helpful to engage my brain with a strict 5-7-5 syllable format, even though in modern Haiku that is probably not cool anymore.

Here are some:

Rain on the windscreen/Calm wisdom of the still trees/As it seeps to their roots

Blush flower stands still/Petals fall one by one/Echo of its soul stays

Deer dotted in grass/Sun cracks in the autumn sky/Herd moves to winter

Old trees keeping watch/On dog souls and children’s souls/Milk of Mother Nature

Skeletal leaf forms/On the cloudy autumn sky/Summer dreams falling

Stardust falls to earth/Becomes part of who we are/We rise to the skies

Song thrushes jostling/On damp Dublin pavements/Early morning joy

Trees in autumn blaze/There is God in your stillness/Golden angel hues

Church bells ring out loud/City traffic hums and roars/Crisp blue autumn sky

Spiderweb spun cloud/Delicate as the rainfall/City starts its day

Happy cloud poodle/Bursting with life and hope/Bold winter beauty

Lightening against the sky/Nature’s own nucleus/Marvellous Maple

And here’s one that cracked my 7-year-old up when I read it out to him, putting things in perspective somewhat, and made me want to try to write more Haiku that would make him laugh:

Pencil case puppy/You lie on the windowsill/While I am crying

Finally, it’s not a Haiku, but rereading Ezra Pound’s In the Station of the Metro blew my mind a little:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Perfection in a little poem.

The post Structure in sadness appeared first on The Delicate Ship.

I have morning despair a lot. This is when you wake up without bluebirds singing chirpily around your head, no sunbeam dancing on the floor ready to shine on you and no soundtrack like ‘oh what a beautiful morning I’ve got a beautiful feeling everything’s going my way’ or whatever.

On one such morning (okay, it was this morning) I asked Google (yep, yes I did – I asked Google) ‘What is the meaning of life?’ As I get older, I conclude that Google is as likely to have this answer as any other entity – as the stars, as the grass, as the moon, as the gurgle of a baby, the hug of someone you love or hot mozzarella dripping off a freshly baked pizza.

It gave me a nifty noun definition that culminated in the mighty tailwind of ‘…and continual change preceding death.’

I snapped my eyes open and jumped out of bed: yes, that’s it, I thought. That is what I’m struggling with all the time. It’s this business of continual change preceding death with no pause button indicated on the great manufacturer’s (aka the Wizard of Oz, or an amply bearded man with a generally benevolent disposition and foul temper, or a dancing twisted ladder of pure energy or – I don’t know) instructions.

So we must trot along, or be dragged along, or swim ahead, or grab on to something, or in our best moments, glide through with the awe-inspiring elegance of eagles, flying high and flapping our wings the least. When I think about how we are destined for continual change preceding death and that is life it becomes so obvious to me that my unhappiness at the moment is that I am simply refusing to believe it.

I won’t change, I won’t move, I won’t get older, things must stay the same, my babies must always say tut instead of put and lello or lero instead of yellow, I won’t let my hair go grey, I won’t dare cross – I am scared to cross – the vast land of middle-age because continual change preceding death is terrifying to me.

If I climb this mountain, what is on the other side, I’d like to know? If I start to embrace change instead of resisting it, what will happen?

What is this exquisite bittersweet time that we have been given here on earth? Why is such joy wrapped up in such merciless change? I circle back to: what is the point of it all?

I’d like to have the answer. I’d like to at least stop looking for the answer. I know, somehow, that the answer, as articulated through various poets and sages through time, is probably here, now and yet – there – it’s gone. Again.

The post …and continual change preceding death appeared first on The Delicate Ship.

He leans nonchalantly against the lamppost, hands stuffed in his pockets, one eye slightly squinting as he surveys the scene around him.

‘How are you feeling?’ I say to my son. A slight shrug of the shoulder, one hand runs through his recently cut hair. ‘Actually…’ he looks around again, the crowds of children returning from their summer holidays, the parents chattering, the new little ones starting school.

‘…I’m pretty bored. Yeh.’

‘You are bored?’

‘Yeh. I’m pretty bored.’ He glances around slowly again, hands moving deeper into his pockets. Steve McQueen has nothing on him. If he weren’t five, I’d expect him to take a pack of cigarettes from his rolled-up T-shirt sleeve and light up.

That lump in your throat you get when it strikes you how big your children are getting was already present, stuck there since the seven-year-old had ushered me away from the school entrance, not even allowing a hug, no backward glance. The nine-year-old, at least, tolerated a kiss on the cheek, taking it with a good-natured smile and thumbs up.

The youngest and me had struck up a deal. When we got to the school gates, I would immediately leave. I would pretend he was on his own, and I wouldn’t even say goodbye. Ok, I had said. You might change your mind when you get to the gates.

So here we are. As I stand back, making moves to go, I watch him, this pretty bored small boy. How he has so many enormous feelings going back to school, how excited he is to see his friends, how scared he is to go in the gates by himself, how tired he is from a sleepless, hectic summer. How full of hope and curiosity he is. He is replete with it, a fat pod of potential percolating, ready to pour himself into his world.

This is all too much for someone so young. He has to say he is bored. It is the only non-threatening, almost-neutral adjective he can pluck out of the air to describe his overwhelm.

I know this, and I hover close by.

‘Mum!’ he shouts. ‘It’s alright if you stay.’

He slips his hand into mine and buries his face briefly into the top of my leg, and Steve McQueen retreats from sight as he strolls into another year.

The post The Great Escape appeared first on The Delicate Ship.

Why do I love this line from Taylor Swift’s song so much? Why do I want to play Anti-Hero on repeat?

Am I a Tween, filled with so much hope and hormones, hoping that one day I will be just like the powerhouse Taylor, who writes songs and writes off men with equal panache?

No. I love it because – whatever the song is truly about – it makes me just stop and go: Hang on. You’ve tumbled back again, taken twenty leaps backward after those moves forward you made to better your life, eat well, exercise, make a constructive plan for the future, get your finances in order, stop scrolling, become a suddenly beatifically patient person, insert here the thing you need to do to improve yourself.

Is the song about taking responsibility, or is it about taking blame? Now I am trying to navigate the difference between the elegance of personal responsibility and the brutality of blaming myself for all the stuff that is going on in my life. I like the song on a visceral level. It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. It allows me to think on to ruminate on what I should do about this problem that is me.

Is there freedom in saying It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me? I think so. Because any other way of thinking is a set up for despair. But, you know, not too much It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me, because that, too, is a set up for despair.

I read this morning that your children are like a mirror back to you, their brilliance at mirroring your foibles as piercing and as shattering as that reflector would be if it broke into spikes and pierced you right through the heart. Oh I’ve heard this so many times: your children are reflecting back to you what you are, or they are mirroring back to you whatever stress, worry, anger, joy, content and resilience you may be feeling.

I believe this to be true to a certain extent but of course they are a bundle of cells themselves with searing souls and starving hearts of their own – and their feelings are theirs and not yours. It’s hard for me to separate the two, it really is. It’s hard for me to separate myself from anything, in fact.

Yet It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. Loving this line is a separation in itself. Thinking you are the problem is separation too, a nearly futile trip of the ego that sets you as powerful enough to be able to control any given situation.

We only have control over a few very basic and predictable things, I think. The rest is about letting go, surrendering, jumping in the raft and holding on as tight as you can as it flows, flies, flips and floats down the raging rapids of life.

The post It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me appeared first on The Delicate Ship.

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 feel the same way about at the moment: probably brilliant, I will read it, it will be a painful read, that’s just how it has to be: Alice Kinsella’s Milk (subtitle On Motherhood and Madness, I’m sure we can all spot the theme here).

I don’t know, some mothers really are the proverbial ducks to water when it comes to tending to their offspring. So many seem to breeze through it, ‘getting on with it’, no intense ripples or shocks to the system that last for years afterward. I truly envy them, and even their children, who get the immediate benefits of an emotionally stable mother from the get-go. I acknowledge that some of these breezy mothers are likely hiding pain also, and my view of these super-human capable mothers is skewed. Still, these vibrant beings exist in my head, something impossible to measure up to, as that will never be me.

I struggle. When I’m sad, and I am today, I have to lean back on a few clichés to get a post going: so here’s one: it is one step forward and it is two steps back. It is green smoothies and mulberries, then salt and vinegar crisps and a mountain of chocolate. It is signing up to all of the exercises classes and online too so there’s no excuses, and laying mute in bed, ruminating over all my past mistakes. It is a gloriously pretty dress, make-up on, or pyjamas stuffed under trousers because I can’t be bothered to get dressed properly. It is trying – always trying – to wipe off the stifling mood mud that threatens to engulf me, and then falling back into its suffocating gloop.

That’s moods, isn’t it? They do pass, but it doesn’t feel like that when you have to live them. Laura Dockrill’s memoir was so truthful and exactly conveyed the insanity that can happen post-natally; for her it tipped over into post-partum psychosis. I was close to that after my first-born, and waited far too long to get help with my shameful, horrid, tortuous thoughts (I feel for my self of 10 years ago, trying to plough through that with a sweet screaming newborn).

Anyway now I have a madness of another sort. It is denial of getting older. It is a shock of suddenly no longer having babies. This is another thing, to my eyes, that so many mothers move though gracefully – their babies growing up. Not me! Nope, this was my ‘purpose’ for so many years, following tiny ones around to check they didn’t die, feeding them, cuddling them, rocking them. Now I’m back working some nights, but rattling around the house in the mornings putting a lot of pressure on myself to ‘finally write that book’ or ‘get a highly paid high-powered job’ or ‘become suddenly extremely buff and fit’, and it’s all no good.

I get it, it’s a transition period, just like early motherhood. But do you know what? It actually sucks.

The post And today is the texture of mud appeared first on The Delicate Ship.

In the quiet of the morning, sometimes I wonder at all the young eyes staring at me. Their expectant gaze is matched by a padding of little feet – those of the puppy loping down the stairs, of the toddler, the five-year-old and the seven-year-old. There is a sweet sliver in this glaring early hour in which the eyes all look at me in tandem. They wait, suspended in time.

Usually, I am in the kitchen putting coffee on and I lean back to observe the stairwell: there they are, the eyes. Four pairs, including the puppy’s green offerings, are studying me, this woman who cuddles them and feeds them in that order, every morning, without fail. The rest of the day is frenetic, almost frantic. There is a race to dress them, feed them again (and again), play with them, take them somewhere and mostly, referee them as they live deep in the trenches of sibling rivalry, flinging mud at each other in a never-ending bid to win. The prize, of course, always changes and they are never even sure what it was in the first place. Each of them just wants to win.

The slice of the day afforded to these wondering eyes and soft feet is so short (the fighting kicks in soon enough) but I think about it afterwards. The puppy sets me off. He takes the staring and commits to it fully, from the moment I wake to when I curl into bed to seek refuge in sleep. He tails me incessantly and there is no place too lowly for him. The three-year-old is always in tow, both in tacit agreement that this woman should be followed everywhere at all costs. To the shower. To the toilet. Upstairs when I put away laundry, downstairs when I get more laundry to put away. Up again, down again. To the garden when I am putting rubbish out. Back in again, to the kitchen. To the front door when I open it. Back up to the toilet. All day long.

The eyes are relentless but not unwelcome. They are so innocent; they love me. They need to be with me, no matter how menial the task on display. It must be observed. It must be witnessed. There might, too, be something in it for them. For the puppy, well, there might be a tidbit of real human fare or a tickle behind the ear. For the three-year-old, anything could happen but what he lives for mostly is that I will down the dreary tools of domesticity and play a game of headless Lego minifigures with him. I try to avoid this mystifying game because I don’t like it but a few times a day a thought will slap me awake: do I like trudging up and down stairs to put laundry away or constantly sweeping the kitchen floor more than playing with my small son?

At this point, a tiny but ever-present part of me screams inside: ‘No, I don’t like ANY of it!’ but then the urge to bolt is always superceded by love. Alright, if I’m being honest – guilt too. I drop the unpaired socks in a basket where they will stay, sink to the floor and make my decapitated Ninja fly through the air to the delight of my baby. ‘Love you too Mama,’ he says, without any declaration from me. The older two look on scornfully and declare, ‘That’s not even a real game,’ and soon the youngest turns away from me.

I go back to the kitchen and empty the dishwasher, the puppy with his grassy eyes following me devotedly across the tiles, just in case.

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lovd

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After tying myself up in knots about failing to make a writing deadline and informing an interested party about said non-development I realised something. (Preemptive note: most of my sudden realisations are painfully obvious.)

So here it is. Nobody can really care what you do or intend to do except you. Therefore if you have something that needs done, you’d better start caring about it quick-smart. We all need to learn how to deeply care for ourselves and this must fan marvellously out to all areas of our lives, bestowing its benevolence on stuff that must get done. Growth is when you have learned how to take care of all your needs first, so then your cup floweth over.

Now how the fuck do we do this? I’m clambering up my learning curve at the minute but I expect it to take years. Yes, I’m a pessimist. (You don’t say?)

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My middle son is always telling me ‘my brain told me to do it,’ often in relation to things like nicking chocolate from the cupboard, scribbling on the walls, filling up the toilet bowl with mountains of toilet paper and, post-tantrum analysis, brain gets the blame. His brain told him to do it.

You are the boss of your brain, I say to him, and not the other way around. As if I haven’t been entirely at the mercy of my brain for the last 40 odd years. Only recent information into my consciousness has led me to understand experientially that if I do a bit of mental weight-lifting, I can claw back some control and try to take charge of this brain situation.

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A lot of confusion recently from my two oldest sons on this whole mummy business and how it’s going to pan out. My six-year-old wants to know if I will still be young when he is a grown-up, and my four-year-old has got the wrong end of the stick completely. He is sure that in order for him to be a dad in the future, he will have ‘to find a new mummy’ altogether, and I will be out of a job. Which in a way is true I guess.

The four-year-old is also adamant that I do not become ‘a lady’ by which he means do not become an old lady.

Sometimes, I wish I could stay young so I could meet them at some sweet juncture where our ages cross, and we could transverse adulthood for a happy while together. Wouldn’t that be something? Meeting your 25-year-old child when you were 25. Or when you were both 40. I’d love to get to know them in that way, but short of time travel becoming a thing, I won’t.

The bending and folding of time never stops shocking me. How can I be dreaming about having children in my 20s, fretting for them in my 30s, surrounded by them in my early 40s all so – all so close together? And sometimes I look in my boys’ eyes now and fancy I see the adults they will become. I stumble into the future blindly but I imagine I see it there in the distance, too. Now is always now and we are so complacent about how this ‘now’ disappears at warp speed. (And yet, so much time with very small children feels glacial, snail-like; somnambulant drips of minutes stretching like glue through the day.) I think about when I’ll definitely be dead and that’s it, that’s my journey with these souls over, and I’ll never get to see them or the men they will become at 60, 70 and 80.

It’s our nature to surf on that wave of the next thing, the new thing, even when it’s just 10 minutes into the future. It’s kind of the carrot and stick method of living, it’s how we are built as humans. To bathe in the now just feels unnatural, unless you really set your mind to it and yes, get all mindful.

I don’t know if I’ve been doing that or not these last few weeks; I haven’t sat down to meditate, or reflect, or take deep breaths or any of those tools I found so useful a short while ago. There’s an other-wordly, precious quality to these lock-down days that ticks along beside the intense suffering of so many as the pandemic rips up lives and economies across the world.

I’m aware of it. How precious the days are. How lucky I am.

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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 had started picking up Lego with one of the youngest’s baby wipes, saying confidently, ‘Mummy, look! I won’t catch any germs this way.’

I went too far, constantly talking about hand-washing. I made them feel alarmed. The eldest, especially. He’s become a little fixated on death. He’s fascinated about the Titanic, and about Hitler. This is partly because he’s always demanding that I ‘tell him facts about history’ and my knowledge is sketchy even though I aced history at school. It was my favourite subject. Fascinating stories. But real.

Now we are living through history.

Late last year, I started this thing of thanking my former self. Just for small tasks or actions. For example, I’d clean the kitchen a little extra before I went to bed (by that I mean, clean it like a normal person and not a slovenly harlot), and in the morning I would be like ‘Well thank you, Jacqueline of last night, you have made my life so much more pleasant this morning.’ I’d use it for the utter drudgery, like folding laundry, putting it away neatly instead of leaving it in desperate stressy piles. I’d be so grateful to my sage self of yesterday, that thoughtful person who’d crisply folded my kids’ clothes and put them away, ready for the next day of spilling succulent spaghetti sauce and rolling in the ink black mud.

I also used it in parenting, finding that minute moment before I lost my shit and expanding it, or even just acknowledging it was there. Thank you, former self, for not viciously verbally attacking your sweet babies because you are tired, not coping, whatever. Thank you for the silence instead.

Now I wonder, through all of this, what can I thank my former self for? What can I contribute? Like many, I feel helpless. I’m not going out to the frontline every day, every night, and potentially exposing myself to this frightening virus, which is killing people, old and young. I’m not saving lives. I don’t work in a supermarket.

I think about the people who are dying. I read on the news: 839 people have died here, 381 there. And I think about my beautiful beloved uncle, who died on March 6. He didn’t die of Covid-19, but there he was. Laid out in his coffin. Such a perfect expression on his face, exactly the same one as he had on his face when he was alive. He was smiling, his eyes crinkled up at the corners. He radiated love, as he did when he was alive.

The tens of thousands of people who have died. The twenties of thousands more who loved them desperately. The people who died alone. The people who are dying alone.

The things we can do are so very tiny, but so very large. We can just keep hunkering down, keeping our families safe as best we can. We can help people who need tiny-big things – just a bit of shopping, or conversation. I just met Phyllis the other day. She’s in her 90s. She’s my neighbour. I didn’t know that until recently, when I saw her at the window nine doors down as I walked by. She wanted to talk about the neighbour’s cat who kept coming around to be double-fed. We talked about that, and I said I’d see her again on my next loop around the square.

I want to help. I want to thank my former self for not burying her head in the sand in this crisis.

We feel helpless, but we can help. We have to.

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What is success in life? What is your definition of success? I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the weekend. Is success outside of you?

Happiness 101 dictates that it is nowhere to be found outside of you, only bloody inside of you. What a drag! Is it true? Now I’m not going to start waxing on about how you can be perfectly content without material things or concrete achievements because I’m not a barefoot monk sitting under a benevolent tree weeping fragrant blossoms. But I have started to question what success is.

This is because I consider myself a failure at certain things. Either I haven’t tried hard enough, haven’t tried at all, or I have given up too easily. If I were happy with that state of affairs then that would be a success, I guess. Lately, I’ve been wondering if I am happy with my state of affairs. And a lot of the time the answer is: yes. I feel incredibly lucky to be the mother of three sons and the stepmother of a beautiful daughter. I feel lucky to be married to a man I love, even though we are very different, it still feels right (when we are not fighting, of course.) If you had asked me as a child what I wanted to ‘be’ or ‘do’ (ugh, that question), I would have said ‘mother’.

Being a mother featured big on my to-do list, as I’ve mentioned here several billion times before. So am I a success? Do I feel like a success?

No *uttered in pathetic, small voice*. Because we are programmed to always want more. We always want more, and we always want to be more. It’s a cursed thing, it’s a great thing, it’s a human thing. We will always want more or feel like we should be more, or that we are missing out on something, or that we are missing out on being something.

How many of us think, often, even once in a while, ‘Jeez, my life is exactly the way I always dreamed it would be.’ Actually, writing that sentence, I can say that I have thought that thought, briefly, recently. It was early in the morning. The coffee was glugging and chuffing its way out of the machine. The boys were playing around me; the littlest one ran up and hugged my leg. There was crappy white toast in the toaster (my goddam favourite) and salted butter ready to be slathered all over it (I’m not allowed it because of gallstones, therefore I can’t stop eating it.) An old Beatles album, Rubber Soul, played in the background. I’d like to add that sunlight was streaming in through the kitchen window, but it was pissing down. No matter. I still thought: living the dream. Living the goddam dream.

And that is success.

PS I have a deadline coming up which I’ve been avoiding and I would rather do anything else – pull off my toenails, iron my vulva (to steal a phrase from a funny old friend), pluck out my my eyelashes one by one and glue them back on again with yesterday’s porridge – than go near my book draft. See above. What is success? I’ll report back from the front soon.

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Ambitious blog title, eh? I haven’t got a bloody clue how to do that, but I am interested in finding out. I think there are adults who have managed to reach maturity fairly unscathed and there are adults who simply have not reached maturity yet, even at 35, even at 60.

Even the unscathed grown-ups are still hauling around that inescapable inner child, and though they might be treating them fairly well, now and then they might get a shock when that wayward young one stamps their foot to try to get things to go their own way.

As well as mothering my children, I often notice the need to parent myself, and frankly it is exhausting and I fail at it quite a lot of the time. I get my kids up, dress them, feed them, take them to activities I think they would enjoy (like today, for example. My toddler son had a marvellous time hiding in the shoe cubby-hole while the music teacher sang about monkeys jumping in the bed and the other tots clapped their chubby hands in delight), I read to them. I remember that I actually have to, like, hang out with them also, sans distractions, so I crouch down and try to just think: isn’t this great? Me and my three boys just hanging out, spending quality time together. I try not to think about: the laundry, the dishes, what’s for dinner, have they had enough fresh air today, where have all the socks gone, why is there only one of every shoe readily available just as we are about to leave the house, why can’t I keep my voice light, calm and gentle, should we be doing crafts, are they going to be fucked up, is this enjoyable, really? Is parenthood enjoyable, really? I want to read my book, I wonder if anyone has sent me an urgent What’s app message, is it just me or is parenting three young children shockingly hard, what if this were the 70s, does that mean I wouldn’t have to worry so much about meeting their every need, how is their emotional development coming along, oh crap am I their blueprint for relationships, how long before I can put the TV on, if they play in the street will they get run over, what is the point of cooking dinner if no-one ever eats it, why do I feel so old all of a sudden, do I have early onset Alzheimer’s, how long can I get away with not washing their hair, do they have cavities yet, is hanging out in the living room with them like that movie Room where the mum and kid are being held captive or is it ok to hang out in the living room, should we go back outside again…

These thoughts come in between moments when I snap to and think – Jesus, they are growing so fast, can you JUST. ENJOY. BEING. WITH. THEM. I’m parenting the only way I know how – it’s fuelled by love and incompetence – but the deeper I wade in to their childhoods the more aware I become of the need to parent myself.

Myself has gone absolutely wild with the lack of mothering. No boundaries when it comes to sleeping or eating. Emotions allowed to run unchecked. I haven’t taken a firm hand with myself to even cover the basics. I think I can coast like this for a while but it’s not fun.

If you’ve reached adulthood without any inner anchor of self you have to try to find it. I think you do that by parenting yourself. Trying to understand yourself. Giving yourself what you need, and not simply what you want in that moment. Setting boundaries. Respecting your dreams. Telling yourself No when necessary and equally Yes when it’s called for.

Ultimately, being there for yourself. You have to be, because no-one else really will. You are the mother of you.

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What? What’s that you say? I am not allowed to precariously carry these piled up glasses I’ve hunted from the cupboard by pulling my highchair over so I can teeter on the edge to get them? I think you should revise your opinion *throws all the glasses on floor and punches my leg.

He is often violent with his brothers, pulling their hair or biting them when they snatch a toy or berate him for destroying their intricate lego games; he has experimented with hitting smaller babies and – yes, well he just keeps hitting me. I get a good whack or scratch in the face for just about everything I do, bar breastfeeding, although once he also got pissed off with my boob and hit that too.

He’s an angry young man, and it appears to be his default mood. Of course, I blame myself. I was monumentally cranky in the third trimester carrying him and it’s hard not to wonder if all the Tupac I kept listening to had some kind of effect on him. Tupac blasted out during labour and even up to the point of birth; I have no idea why, all I knew was that I had to listen to something that was the opposite of gentle to distract myself from the pain I felt.

Now he is like a small and angry rapper from the ghetto himself and I know I have to love it out of him. It is going to have to be severely loved out of him, just oodles of extra stretchy infinite love. Just like I have to love all the irritating unhelpful (straight up understatement) qualities out of myself, I am acutely aware that I have to love this tendency out of him.

I’ve been pretty angry with him a few times, usually based on the level of pain or surprise experienced in relation to the latest wallop, and obviously unleashing anything on the rage spectrum works the opposite way. More anger from me, tenfold back from him. Getting all shouty is clearly not going to bring out the sweeter qualities in my little ball of frustration. So it’s all about love. And I love him so much but gentle is not my default mode in any of these situations.

So I have work to do. Countless times a day I have to catch myself, ramp up the gentle, scoop out the love, set my inner Tupac firmly aside and channel – I don’t know – Celine Dion instead (alternative suggestions welcome).

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