Category Archives: musings

Life, apparently

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Life, apparently, is about bringing the person I am closer to the person I want to be, or accepting the chasm between those two things.

For instance, I want to be a person who plans the week’s meals before she goes shopping, who makes family dinners in the crockpot, who runs or otherwise exercises regularly, and who damn well writes a few hundred words in That Other Thing when she sits down to do it.

Instead, I am a person who builds some sort of half-assed plan for dinner as she roams the supermarket, who casts about for inspiration an hour before dinner time, who runs (ahem) once every two weeks or so, and who comes over here and writes a blog post instead.

These are all things that are within my control. I can change them. Sure I can.

If I actually want to.

Geese in a blue sky

Thin skin

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I think I’ve lost a layer of skin since I had children. Or maybe having children had nothing to do with it; maybe I just got more empathetic as I got older. But when I listen to the news these days it’s as if someone has taken a potato peeler and removed whatever defences I used to have when I heard all the terrible things: “It’s not here.” “It’s not me.” It’s not my family.” “It’s nobody I know.” “It couldn’t happen to us.” They don’t work so well any more.

Maybe it’s just that things keep on happening, and my radius increases as time goes on, so that “here” spans a lot more than just the town I grew up in, and “us” includes a lot more people than just me and my parents. Maybe it’s that the law of averages indicates that some day it could just as easily be me, or us, or here, as anywhere else. Some parts of the earth may be less prone to natural disasters, and some parts of the state may see less crime than others, but as my mother would tell you, you could leave the house tomorrow and walk under a bus. There are no guarantees.

But even when I’m not appreciating how lucky I am, and wondering how long I can reasonably expect that luck to hold, those other people whose luck has run out seem closer now. I don’t want to hear about them; I certainly can’t let myself think about them. Imagining my way into their skin is not something I’m going to begin to try to do.

The news is more real, maybe: when I was a child it may as well have been fiction. I wasn’t sheltered from the news as a child. I remember earthquakes and hijackings, shootings and bombings and stories about terrible things happening to children. I remember being more upset about stories of mistreatment of animals than of people. My mother was shocked when I mentioned this, but my rationale was that animals can’t ever speak up for themselves. I suppose I didn’t know about all those people who can’t either, for so many more complex reasons. I was scared of the house burning down, mostly, or random robbers coming to steal – I don’t know what, we had an eight-inch black-and-white television and my mother had costume jewellery. I didn’t know about all the other things there were to be scared of.

Mabel looks at my face sometimes and asks me why I have lines on my forehead. She thinks they’re funny. She wonders why she doesn’t have any. I pretend not to mind them, and tell her matter-of-factly that as you get older your skin doesn’t bounce back so much, and so the lines show that I’ve been smiling and frowning and making other funny faces for lots of years now. I make her some funny faces and she laughs.

My skin got thinner because I used some of it up, making two amazing people and smiling and frowning and wondering and worrying about them. So I suppose it’s not going to stop any time soon.

Maud and Mabel making faces

It’s all about perspective

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If I said I spent Sunday morning alternately trying to convince my five-year-old to get dressed and reading the papers, I’d feel quite good about myself. Okay, so if she had got dressed, and if the TV had stayed off, I’d feel even better, but still. The Sunday papers and a cup of tea sounds like the epitome of civilized living, really.

And yet, if I admit that I’ve been on the internet all morning, I feel rather different about it. I feel as if I’ve been wasting time that would have been better spent working out (hah), sweeping the floor (bah), or, well, laying down the law about television-watching and dressed-getting.

Well, no more, I say. I read several interesting articles in papers ranging from The Irish Times to The Guardian to the Washington Post. I became more informed on topics domestic and foreign. I learned about popular culture and current events. Ireland beat Scotland in the rugby. (Yay!)

What’s more, I shared and discussed some articles with friends. Reading the papers became a social and interactive pastime, connecting me to others even as I sat enjoying my quiet time alone. (Five-year-old excepted.)

So I declare an end to shame. I had a lovely Sunday morning, not a wasted one.

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Big enough

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One thing I’ve noticed about parenting – and hang onto your hats here, because as epiphanies go, this one’s a doozy – is that it takes a long time.

I know; rocket science is a breeze for me, right?

It’s just, you start a family and you dream about all the things you’ll do with your kids: take them to the movies, play board games together, go out to eat and have a happy family occasion… and you know it’ll be a while, because a little baby can’t do those things, but you think soon… some day soon, surely… maybe now they’re old enough…

And you try far too soon and find that your two-year-old is terrified by the noise of the big screen, or is ready to jump up and run around just when the ads are done and the feature is starting because that’s enough sitting still for one afternoon; or that your four-year-old really doesn’t want to eat anything on the kids menu and once his chocolate milk is all gone, that’s it for the restaurant outing; or that the only board games they want to play are the ones that you have to be able to read for, which they can’t do yet, and then they eat the pieces and you fish them out of their hamster cheeks and put the whole thing back on the high shelf for another year or three…

So here we are with a five and a seven and we went to the movies last week (to see Frozen ) and everyone liked it and nobody wet themselves (except me, because someone had apparently just dumped a giant coke all over the seat I chose) and we stayed for the whole thing, even though it was very loud and Dash was grumpy about watching princesses. And we loved it, dammit.

And today we took out the Risk and played a short game with three players (and one play-with-the-spare-soldiers-off-the-board-er) and it was almost, dare I say it, fun for all of us, and nobody threw a fit when I won, fair and square, because I’m better at rolling dice than anyone else. (That’s probably because of the rocket-science, isn’t it?)

And the restaurant thing, well, we’re still working on that, but at least they can both play tic-tac-toe on the menu while we wait, and they can both eat some damn french fries and we usually don’t actually have to evacuate the whole show mid-mouthful any more.

So, while it was only yesterday that I had a baby, and then I had another, and I swear I don’t feel as old as I must be by now; on the other hand I feel as if I’ve been doing this for ever and shouting at these short people for a long time, and it’s about time we got to do some of this stuff because we’ve all been waiting a while now. You know?

Recalibrate

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Let’s look at it this way: I’m lucky to call two beautiful places home. (Sometimes beauty is subtle. Sometimes you have to go away to see it at all.) I’m lucky to have family in one place and a family of friends in the other. My children are lucky to have two passports, to feel (a little bit) at home in two places, to know that America isn’t the Only and that the way Americans say things or do things isn’t the One True Way.

Someone asked me, or maybe they didn’t but this was the question I answered, why we bring the children to Ireland every year. I want them to know their grandparents, of course, before they don’t have them any more; and I want them to know their aunts and uncles and cousins too, because those relationships are real and special and not something that you can just pluck out of thin air. But apart from that, I suppose I want them to know Ireland enough that it’s not a big, huge, special, once-in-a-lifetime place for them. I want it to be a normal place, somewhere they’re used to being and where they feel, to a degree, that they can belong if they want to.

And maybe I look too far into the future when I declare that I don’t want to grow old here where my roots are not, and that I don’t want to give my children another place they could belong, in case they decamp and have my grandchildren there, far from me. Maybe I should just chill about that sort of thing, because they might move to Australia or have no children or never move out at all, and I might be unhappy about any of those eventualities too.

Maybe everything is just fine, and I’m lucky.

I know I’m lucky.

Family car

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As the only child of tidy-minded parents, I always found that other people’s cars had an air of messy family-ness that ours lacked. I loved it. I loved the casualness and the randomness and the disorganization. It seemed to be the hallmark of a real family to me, and I loved being subsumed into the families of my more-siblinged friends, whether for a whole week in the summer or just an after-school playdate.

At my house, when we got home, whatever had come with us came out of the car and back into the house, to be thrown away or put away as appropriate. The glove compartment contained one pair of gloves, one pair of sunglasses (in their case), an orange chamois to de-mist the windows with, and the car’s owner’s manual. (Of course, this was before you needed twelve different adaptors for all the things you might conceivably charge in your car, and also before cars were littered with broken CD cases, defunct cassette tapes, and album inserts that didn’t match the contents. We didn’t even have a car with a radio until I was 14.)

Other families’ cars, though, had cyclinders of wet wipes on the back window and crumbs between the cushions, lost hair bobbins on the floor and abandoned liquorish allsorts under the seats. There was a fine line, of course, between the endearing and the disgusting – used tissues proliferating on the passenger seat, mysterious stickiness on the door handle, half-eaten packets of Tayto scattering as we rounded every corner were definitely out of the grey zone and into the gross.

More often than I could understand, there was a hairbrush in someone’s car. My hairbrush never travelled more than a foot from my dressing table, where I picked it up, brushed, and set it down again. My mother’s was the same. I always puzzled over the migratory hairbrushes.

————

Well, I’m happy to report that I’ve achieved nirvana, where nirvana is the perfectly messy family car. Art projects on the passenger seat? Check. Discarded toy parts and litter and tissues liberally spread around the floor? Check. Crumbs in every crevice? Check. Hairbrush on the back seat? More often than my former self would believe.

The Internet: not so scary after all

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D’you remember the movie The Net ? Sandra Bullock, presumably alongside some forgettable male, played someone who was so plugged in to technology that she never left her house, ordered pizza on the Internet, had no friends and no outside-world contact. Your classic movie introvert geek – the it-could-never-happen-in-real-life twist, I suppose, being that she was a pretty young woman instead of a Comic-Book-Guy-esque bloke. She got mixed up in something, she made magic with her fingertips on the keyboard, the computers fizzed and popped, and lo, everything was all right in the end. She was probably even enticed out of her apartment and into the real world.*

The future looked pretty bleak though, and it was a cautionary tale for those people who might end up like Sandy. Don’t get too attached to the Internet, they told us, or you’ll lose yourself down a rabbit hole of online dating (DANGER, WILL ROBINSON) and endless cheesy pepperoni. You may even forget how to communicate with the guy who brings the pizza, and then he won’t get a tip. And then he might murder you. (Different film. Probably.)

But then there’s this.

Last week a friend of mine was having a bit of a hard time. Some other friends got together, had a quick whip-round, and bought her a present to cheer her up. She was touched and delighted. All these friends were geographically spread across three countries at the time, and most of them had never even met her, or each other, and still haven’t.

Elsewhere, a woman who has helped many parents over the past several years by providing invaluable support and information had a family crisis. There was an outpouring of love and prayers and good vibes for her situation, as a whole passel of people who have been helped by what she has done saw a chance to give back, if only with thoughts and words, a fraction of the good she has done for us.

Once upon a time there was a girl whose not-so-secret desire was to be a real writer. She still hasn’t quite got around to writing that book, but thanks to the Internet, she got to write regularly and get encouraging feedback from an array of friends and strangers, and it meant oh so much to her. Because the Internet means she is a real writer.

People on the Internet make a difference for others, without necessarily leaving their houses. They build communities, they make friends, they have real relationships and provide true, unjudgemental empathy. They also have fun dates and meet nice people and, hey, order pizza without going outside, and that works pretty well.

The Internet is not such a scary place, is what I’m trying to say. It’s growing up and turning out not so badly, I think.

* I purposely did not look up the movie ( on the Internet ; oh, the delicious irony) to find out more about what actually happened, lest I touch the delicate bloom of my ignorance and discover that I was completely wrong and my whole carefully constructed (ahem) argument falls apart at the seams. If necessary, you may understand that this is my imagining , from this later point, of what The Net was about. I’m positive it was Sandra B, though. That much I know.

Notes on re-entry

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O’Hare airport, Saturday afternoon.


I feel as if when I get back to my kids, they might have aged ten years in my absence. I can’t be sure time was passing at the same rate where they were. It probably wasn’t.

Talking to the kids on the phone is a disembodied experience. Their voices don’t even sound the same, and they don’t know what to say to me and they nod or shrug and forget that I can’t tell. Talking to them on Skype is even odder because I can see them, but only in two dimensions. My children are a 360-degree experience, a full-body contact sport, an assault on all the senses. Being at a remove changes them and I don’t know who they are, those flat noisy beings who flit in and out of view.

On our first Skype call, on Thursday, Mabel looked at me and said, “I’m thirsty.” She clearly expected me to do something about it.

I am a woman with children, almost always. Can’t you tell by looking at me? Isn’t it obvious? Don’t I have it tattooed on my face (in lines) and streaked through my hair (in grey) and written in braille all over my body? Apparently not; I couldn’t tell whether anyone else at BlogHer was a mother just by looking at her (unless she had a baby with her, as some did). We were all singular. 

I am at a remove from them, not just physically, but mentally too. Not simply that I’m not thinking about them, but that I’m some other version of myself who leads a parallel life without children. How can they exist if I’m not there with them? It’s a little lonely, but I don’t feel a void. If I think about them a lot, if I tried to, or if I see other children the right age, I could miss them plenty bad. But mostly they are existing in their universe and I in mine. Our universes will align again and return to their rightful place soon. I’m not ready for more time in this one yet, but it was interesting to visit.

Of course, nothing exists if when I’m not there in it, observing it, with it. It all leaps into being from its flat-pack life as I walk into the room, as my train approaches the station, or my plane flies over the pop-up trees and houses, as we slowly round the curve of the globe. Isn’t that true for you too? Isn’t that how life works?

I trusted, and my trust has not been misplaced. I had faith that they would be returned to me in the condition I left them, plus or minus a few meals, a few ice creams, a few squabbles and scraps and scrapes; and they will be. I believe it. I believe in them. I didn’t invent them; though I did conjure them into being, once upon a time.

Too old

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Lately, I’ve found myself saying to people that I’m too old for that.

It’s a good thing.

I’m not telling them I’m too old to dye my hair pink (should I so desire) or bungee jump off the Sydney Harbour Bridge (sure!) or wear a short skirt or exercise or eat dessert or read teen fiction or have lilac toenails. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I’m too old to spend time worrying about what other people think, because I trust my own judgement.

I’m too old to care about what other people are wearing, because I’ll wear what I feel good in.

I’m too old to bother with fake tan, because I’m finally learning to love my fair skin.

I’m too old to worry about what the bitchy girls are saying.

I’m too old to even take the time to figure out who the bitchy girls are.

You don’t have to wait till you reach the illustrious age of 40 to embrace this liberating mantra. You can be too old for all that at 20, or 30, or even 16, if you’re really ahead of the game. But I have to say it seems to come more easily as the years go on.

Windows to my soul

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So far, my planning for BlogHer has mostly centred around what colour my toenails are going to be.

This is a vital consideration. One’s toenails, in sandal weather, are an extension of one’s very being, a porthole into one’s personality, and an ever-present accessory. I don’t want to spread pedicure paranoia or anything, but as far as I’m concerned the shade of my toenails says a lot.

I also have a problem with purple at the moment. My problem used to be with green, and I sort of declared an embargo on green things to deal with that. But apparently I moved to purple and now I’m in great danger of matchy-matchyness, which just won’t do at all.

Let me run through the shades of nail polish I have at my disposal, and the messages they convey, at least in my head, and probably not in anyone else’s.

    • None: A classic option for the natural beauty. Groomed nails with no polish say that I’m above all that. Or that I didn’t get a chance to paint them. Or that it’s winter and I’m wearing socks and what, you brought your x-ray specs, Superman?
    • Clear: Not much point, really. If you’re painting your toenails, paint your toenails.
    • Darkish tomato red: Fun, but not really me. A little too bright and clashes with most of my clothes.
    • Dark sparkly red: Classic with a twist. Goes with almost everything, but doesn’t say a lot about the purple/green-loving person I am deep down inside.
    • Dark bronze: Very me (I’m an autumn , you know), goes with everything. But a little too much like the colour of my sandals themselves. Too safe, maybe; doesn’t say “I take risks in blogging!”
    • Palest lilac: Lovely, very summery; has the unfortunate side-effect of making my pale feet look as if they belong to a corpse. Pity about that. If I have to spend several conference sessions with my toenails in my line of sight, I don’t want to be wondering whether or not I’m still alive.
    • Brighter lilac/orchid: Also very summery, not quite so corpse-like. The problem is that I have too many t-shirts the exact same colour, not to mention my two orchid dresses and my purple/berry bag.
    • Dark sparkly purple(not pictured): I just got a pedicure in this shade, and will probably never be able to find it again. It’s very nice, though. On the other hand, it’s exactly the same as my glasses frames. (See what I mean about the embargo?)
    • Metallic teal: Last year’s purchase – gorgeous colour but doesn’t suit my skintone at all, and clashes with almost all my greens, which are more on the yellow side of green than the blue. Great with the bronze sandals, mind you.

      Some might say I should choose my clothes for the conference first and take my cue from there. But then I’d be denied all this very engrossing and important contemplation. I probably need to invest in a few more options. Now taking suggestions.

      I’ll let you know what I finally decide.