Where is my ism?
I find it easier to believe that at the beginning of mankind, we gazed up at the stars and felt very small and lonely and created the need for a universal parent, leading to the creation of Gods. All that other stuff just seems way too far-fetched. But there I believe is something there, and I think Laughingboy has something to do with understanding it.
So many times have strange things happened like this perfect wee house, like the time in the church with Vivaldi, like the strangest feeling in his bedroom as I stoop over his bed performing a myriad of Laughingboy related things; I often feel a presence behind me and I look around and I’m surprised that there’s nobody there, the feeling is that strong. Maybe it’s that vulnerability of having my back to the door, maybe it’s my dead Granny, maybe it’s my overactive imagination.
Did I ever tell you the story of the prophets?
It was when Laughingboy was but a handful of months old, a wee blob of a child who had spent most of his new life in hospital being poked and pricked, and watched by experts of seizures which zapped his tiny brain and made his baby body convulse like the victim of a taser gun forty times a day and all we could do was watch. That was a strange time, most of it has erased itself from my immediate memory, pushed out by new less nightmare-inducing memories over time.
One memory that does stick out however, is that of diagnosis day. Laughingboy’s neurologist had laid it out straight and ugly, the whole truth of Laughingboy’s condition and future, and all about how there would be not much of either. They took Laughingboy away to give us space to think. That hurt.
But what could we do but go to the pub?
Outside of the hospital, Laughingboy’s daddy and I walked in a melted marshmellow haze of unreality, not knowing what to do.
A ringing phone.
It was in the explaining of the whole sticky mess to a third party that made my final resolve break and smash all over the fag-butt-littered street. Ugh. Crying in public is scarletising. I dived into the pub and made a bolt for the jacks in order to score some toilet paper and that was when my shoe fell off.
I can’t remember what shoe I was wearing, nor why it fell off, but I’ve a feeling that if I’d been wearing Converse All-Star runners laced up to the knee at the time, the shoe still would have fallen off. Either way, I found myself fumbling around a dingy pub loo with one wet sock all of a sudden, and grew confused.
The shoe had fallen into the hands of two men who sat directly outside the toilet at the bar, they each had several shots of amber liquid and pints of Guinness in front of them. An aura of spuriousness surrounded them as they leered with gappy teeth at my state of affairs, the man on the left, an emaciated red-faced chap with a cigarette tucked behind a cauliflower ear… he waved my shoe over his head. The other chap made a strange backward laugh and stared a hole through my eye sockets and through the back of my face. His lips moved.
“Howyeh gorgeous!” he leered.
“Ohfafuc..sake, lads. Now’s not a good time, y’know?” *snif* “I’m having a bad day, can I’ve my shoe back please?” I looked pathetic, puffy faced and clogged with hospital air, pretty far from gorgeous.
“Giz a fookin kiss an I’ll givit back tyeh” the first bloke slurred. I sighed, and schlepped away. “Ah c’mere I’m on’y messin’!” he called after me. “What’s wrong wityeh? Smile, sure it may never happen love!”
I hate that expression.
“I’ve a little baby, across the road in that hospital.” I pointed and scowled and bared my wolfmammy teeth. “They just told us that he’s going to be a little retard, a sodding vegetable for the rest of his life. He’ll never go to school, never say my name, he’ll never get better but will probably get worse so he’ll be in that hospital a lot most likely… you and I will be neighbours, are you sure you want to keep tacking the mick out of me?” The venting of innermost cancerous thoughts made me feel a lot better, straight away.
“Haha! Fuck, is thar’all that’s wrong wityeh? Sure isn’t he still der? Can’t you pick him up if yer want teh and cuddle him whenever yeh want? I’d say you’re pretty fuckin’ lucky missus so shurrup and c’mere and giv’z a kiss!”
I felt a bit stupid all of a sudden.
“I would, but me fella might object, he’s sitting over there.” I pointed to a battle-worn heap of lover.
The two men (it transpired that one man was on a day-release from the Joy to celebrate his birthday, the other a newly retired police-officer) invited themselves over to our table and sat next to us, much to TAT’s dismay. TAT shot me a look of warned desperation and looked like he needed a drink. Sure enough before we knew it, several pairs of pints decorated the table and what could we do, but drink them?
The next four hours were a blur of strange inyourendos, inappropriate jokes, and glimpses of divine wisdom… it took me the best part of the following week to assemble a loose jigsaw in my head of what was said, and why. They told me that we are each given only what we can handle, that there will always be somebody worse off, and that love (or at least a good rattle) can cure everything. Pretty cheesy stuff I know, but they phrased it slightly differently and it was exactly what we needed to hear at that exact moment in our lives.
Weird.
But…
…the most divine thing of all about Laughingboy, is this.
He uses four nappies a day. Anybody with children will tell you that nappies are risky business, changing them requires swift agility in order to dodge the probability that the child will choose that exact moment to empty their bladder (or worse) towards your face.
Laughingboy is nine years old.
That’s roughly 13,140 nappies that we’ve changed since he was born, and not once has he hosed us down, which means there is a force at work that’s even stronger than Murphy’s Law. The sad thing is that when I extend my thanks towards it, I don’t know who I’m talking to, nor if they can hear me. An odd frustration for a cynicist like me.
It’s a weird kind of faith I have, one without an ism, it seems. Tell me I’m crazy? I probably wouldn’t object too much.
Playing God
Try to imagine for a few minutes that you’re a Deity, a remote entity looking after a country roughly the size of France, and in this country there are several billion people all milling around doing their workaday jobs and living happily.
Life is good for this country for several years, you’re doing a good job it would seem. Then one day a small group of terrorists moves in to the country and starts creating havoc… what would you do to take care of your country?
Would you:
a) Detonate an atomic bomb thus killing said terrorists instantly, and sacrifice several billion happy people so that your country is doomed to restart its population from scratch?
b) Recognise that the country’s own law inforcement is making good progress with the identification and capture of these terrorists, and maybe help them along a bit with re-inforcements via your super powers?
c) Run away?
-o0o-
Sir Fartsalot developed a fairly high fever last week, bugs are rampant this time of year and I had run away to Galway for a girlish weekend thus depriving him of my antibacterial b@@b juice… a bad dose of the snots had taken hold of him. Immediately I was faced with the question above, and from all angles I was ordered to choose answer (a) and it was inferred that I would be a bad mother not to.
“Bring down that fever!! Bring him to the doctor and get him antibiotics!!! Quick!!!”
What nobody seems to realise, is that a fever in a person (above the age of… say six months let’s say) is a very GOOD thing. It means that the body realises there’s something wrong, and it’s reacted by kicking all self defence mechanisms into gear. Roast dem germs out. Swollen glands rock!
Why everybody has this urge to dose a fever with paracetamol in order to surpress it is beyond me. Why I’m ordered to nuke the kid’s immune system with antibiotics is just plain lunacy!! Yet, it’s an argument I have again, and again, and again, and usually my theory works but nobody seems to notice. Echinacea, a good diet and gallons of water works most of the time… the chidler’s antibody population blooms.
Weird.
This phobia we have, this distrust in our own immune systems is a beautiful cash-cow for pharmaceutical companies, but people are blind to it. They have us terrified of influenza under any name, they have us overdosing on vaccinations, and they terrify us with threats of the potential with that ever-steady mantra they sing: ‘better safe than sorryyyy!’
It’s all bollocks, I say. Not nearly enough stock is placed in a mother’s instinct like it used to, but then again there’s no money in that so things shall remain exactly as they are and I shall argue and be deemed a bad mother and I don’t care one little bit.
Burning the cradle at both ends
Every day. Every sodding day.
Every day I wake up and swear blind that I’ll go to bed early for a change. I hate waking up… that is I hate waking up when I know I have to get up; I love waking up and finding out that I don’t have to get up for another two hours, no surprise there, my homo brethriens. My best friend is the snooze button on my mobile phone (the same phone I won two years ago! I’ll miss my Ericsson should I ever go iPhonebound).
It’s just so HARD to go to bed at night.
From 08:00 to 21:00 every day, I belong to somebody else, many people in fact. Six dependants depend on me to keep them alive and happy, and this causes quite a lot of noise, because I can’t deal with them all at once: My baby needs input and a clean bum-hole. My eldest son needs music and attention and someone to remind him to stop grinding his teeth. My daughter loves to hang around with me and do things with me and asks me constantly to look at her doing funny things, which is a beautiful gift and something I adore and enjoy very much, but only in medium doses. My dog needs exercise, a luxury I’m too lazy to afford him which cuts me up, and he whines and gives me big dark sad eyes to rub salt on the wound. My cat meanders around my busy feet and trips me up… and through it all, my husband needs silence while he sleeps. Daytime silence, three children and a large dog – these are difficult things to shuffle!!
-o0o-
And so the last child is tucked into bed, and Einstein’s theory of relativity kicks in.
Silence. Pure, peaceful silence, the possiblities endless.
And so I dive for the fridge for a can of beer, and I wonder how to fill my night. And while I wonder how to fill my night, I fall into the Facebook pit and drown in stupid television and give in to the munchies and waste my hours on pointlessness. When 11pm comes round, I feel unfulfilled and ignored. I can’t go to bed unfulfilled and ignored!!!
-o0o-
It seems to be a common theme among people, that need to burn the candle at both ends. Two hours of selfish time is just not enough when you’re a nightowl like me. Sleep tortures us and wakes us up at night time and hates us the next day, and stolen naps create demons with sticky eyes, it’s just not fair. You know what I mean.
I vote for a re-jigging of the 24 hour clock… Days should be longer and weeks shorter for starters, I bet the moon would be up for that. The sun might get in the way somewhat but we’d get used to it pretty quickly with a bit of black-out lining and a heavy duvet. It can’t be all that difficult to arrange, the re-invention of time!?
The three day week… yet another thing I’d do if I was Teeshirt.
Of Overpopulation and Things
If I was the Teeshirt of Ireland I would do the following two things:
1. I would solve overpopulation of prisons by putting criminals of a lesser threat to hard work in war-torn or third world countries. Fraud is such a clever felony, I’m sure such a brain would be of great use to school children in Malawi, it’s such a waste having them rot away in their en-suite (all mod cons) prison cells and chewing through so much tax.
2. I would make adoption of said third world or war torn orphans faaaar less expensive. Couples all over Europe have trouble conceiving kids of their own, yet have large houses more than capable of rooming several disadvantaged kids but they can’t, because adoption (at least in Ireland) costs roughly the same amount of yoyos as a brand new Jaguar X-type. I don’t understand why with a bit of vetting, they’re not throwing those kids at us. They should be on sale in Lidl, they should be giving them out free with Happy Meals but they’re not!! They’re leaving them to die or selling them to rich people who aren’t necessarily better parents just because they’re rich. So bizarre.
Thankfully I’m not the Teeshirt of Ireland and never will be (because the country would most likely go to pot and all the small furry animals would die because I seem to have that effect and would probably have a hard time explaining that to Ryan Tubridy).
I would however welcome the present Teeshirt of Ireland to read my blog and steal my ideas and also fertilize my crops in Farmville for me sure aswell while he’s at it by way of thanks.
Speaking of small furry animals…
Tomb stone nirvana
Puppychild still hasn’t been Christened, I’m hoping for a two-for-one deal, her and her baby brother in their whites with damp foreheads and sandwiches and bottles of Cidona. I just have to pull my finger out, when the next blue moon occurs.
In the meantime, it only makes sense to introduce her into the Christian world in all its complexity, so for the last month I’ve been bringing her to Mass. She plays quietly with other children where the tea-lights burn and asks me what a Holy Spirit is, and where does the basket money go? I failed miserably at the ‘Who is God?’ line of questioning, so I’m hoping the congregation inspires her somehow, but it hasn’t. When I asked her yesterday if she’d like to go to Mass again, she replied “No, thank you, if that’s okay.”
That’s why I left her to sleep this morning, bundled up warmly in her blankie in her girlie nirvana on the couch, and I skipped Mass to go instead to the cemetary behind. Sir Fartsalot nuzzling in my kangaroo pouch, we climbed uphill to his great-grandparent’s plot for they had not yet been formally introduced.
We sat on their grave and gazed into the valley below and I bit his nails and dropped the tiny crescenty pieces onto the soil beneath so that their DNA may mingle forever, and we whiled away and watched the clouds until the congregation’s relief finally shattered our peace. It was a morning well spent.
I think we may do that, my children and I, from now on. We might skip mass and picnic above with our ancestors every Sunday instead and I’ll teach them about God through nature, it’s far easier to explain that way.
The suits might wonder who the strange heathens are who float about in graveyards instead of sitting with them in their pews, and in time to come maybe my children will choose to join them, if not just to scout for boys or shelter from the rain.
It’s their choice, but I’ve chosen already. I’m with the crosses, the Hawthorn trees and deer-droppings in the silence beyond in God’s own church, not Man’s. Chocolate and daisy-chains and snowballs in February, memories by association attributed to God. I might even bring a bible, for the skaa!
You’re gonna die
Sometimes when I’m walking around and talking to myself, as you do, I like to rehearse possibly awkward conversations I’ll hopefully be having with my kids someday. The facts of life mainly… it’s important to practice these things so that when the time comes I’ll be cool and nonchalant and not a giggle-suppressing wreck when explaining what a vas deferens is.
Then there’s the question of life, death, and that whole afterlife thing, which Puppychild blindsided me with last night.
Out of the blue, she asked me why my grandparents were dead. Then she asked me when her own grandparents would die and asked if they wouldn’t rather stay alive forever instead.
“Everybody dies.” I explained, in a roundabout way.
The information sank in slowly and I watched as she bonded with the rest of humanity and the millions who have gone before us, fearful enormity plopped onto her shoulders like a big bag of spuds and I felt sad for her. Her teddybear’s lip began to quiver. I explained to her that she must try to stay happy, to love every minute she has with her Grandad and Granny instead of worrying about their demise. The information was absorbed and absolved.
“But what happens to you when you die?”
I told her that we dissolve and turn into skeletons and get chewed into dust and soil. There seemed no point in mincing words, I figured it was better for her to learn it from me, rather than learn it from maggotty dead roadkill at some point in the future. I softened the blow by telling her that flowers and trees grow from soil, life from life, life from death, that sort of thing. It seemed to work.
Then I explained about Buddhist theories of re-incarnation and she chose that she should return in the next life as a puppy. No surprise there then.
I didn’t get to explain about heaven, for she had fallen asleep by then. I’m not sure whether this is a pity or not, she didn’t mention the subject again until lunchtime when I mentioned we’d be visiting Grandad.
“Grandad’s gonna die!” she said cheerfully.
This means she’s now either a psychopath, or she’s figured out the meaning of life. Either way I become famous, which is nice.
The day after tomorrow
I secretly believe that some day the world will change.
Some day we won’t sue our best mates because we slipped and popped a ligament on their decking, maybe we’ll even be able to get together with a few neighbours to build a skateboard ramp for the kids for the long summer weeks without fear of being so sueable. What a bunch of whingers we’ve become! Is it so much to ask just to be a kid once in a while? We need to evolve a bit more… I can’t wait to find out what my great-great-grand children experience in the future because I will be haunting them.
I know everyone is paranoid about our big brother and is convinced that things can only get worse, but someday I know our neighbours will be re-found and doors will be left unlocked again. Where is the bottom of the barrel where evolution cries on the staircase with its bottle of gin and wonders where it all went wrong? Maybe fifty years from now? Two hundred years maybe?
Someday we will degrade plastic (BAD plastic! You call yourself HDPE?! Pathetic. THIS is HDPE!!) to such a degree that we will power our tellies with the same gunge we roast our spuds and life will be good and they will laugh at the Noughties and point fingers at our hair and our paranoid misgivings and they’ll smoke their spliffs and they’ll love again.
And so I slither back into now and I can only smirk and try not to take pictures of my hair.
In the meantime, being that we cannot grow a playground out of nothingness, I need memories. Basic games that please the most gregarious of kids. I feel sorry for their boredom, but I feel sorrier for the pretty purple flowers I’ve planted which are bound to be desecrated by young f’las this summer. If we all as parents group together to buy a supply of stuffs for our chisellers, what would they be?
So far I have:
-Chalk
-Ropes for skipping
-Basketball Hoop
-Swingball
-Goalposts
-Various lengths of donated wood (you didn’t get them from me)
-Softballs
Any more ideas? I’m desperate, lads.
(Image robbed from http://www.justanotherartblog.com/)
The one that got away
People get really disturbed when I curse in front of my n00b kid. I mean, it’s not like I’m corrupting his innocence… babies have a perpetual orb of purity around them until they’re old enough to understand their first episode of Tom and Jerry and besides! curse words are very beautiful phonetically speaking.
Fuck. It’s lovely the way the f slides so neatly into the k like that, like the sound a golf ball connecting with a perfect 9 Iron swing would make, or the noise made by the bonnet of a very expensive car when you try to slam it shut. I reckon I’m doing the kid a favour by including as many sounds and words as possible while his brain’s developing as it is. That’s why my standard reply to scorning parents is ‘Ask me bollix’. It’s in the name of education.
Here be photos of d’holliers. No animal was harmed in their making.
TAT got very excited when Barney arrived on the scene. He wanted a photograph of him decking the big purple freak right on the jaw, but Barney caught wind of this and ran like fuck. It’s impressive how fast that dinosaur can run what with all that stuffing and stuff.
Human milk rules
When I had Laughingboy eight years ago and came face-to-boob with a myriad of problems caused by his developmental delay, I had no idea where to turn. The nurses in the maternity hospital were less helpful than they were physically violent… it’s a weird thing entirely having your delicate lady lumps viciously man-handled by a bearded nurse, and being woken every two hours to ‘try again’ when I was severely sleep deprived wasn’t very nice. They put me off the whole idea to be honest.
There are various local groups and enterprises that are there to help in this situation, but the vast range of opinions can be confusing, so I’m delighted to see this new parent-orientated version ‘Friends Of Breastfeeding‘ evolving.
“Friends of Breastfeeding was formed by a group of mothers who met on online parenting forums. Many of these mothers found the internet to be the only place they could access true support and reliable information and advice about breastfeeding. The need for two things was clear to everyone involved – better understanding of breastfeeding across the general public, and improved access to good breastfeeding support in Ireland for women who want to breastfeed their babies.”
—
Feeding Puppychild was an entirely different, easier and much more lovely experience. She and I would retreat to a quiet place and she would make the back of my neck tingle as the flow commenced… we would sit there for as long as she needed until her eyelids drooped. I can’t describe what an addictive feeling that is, it’s a maternal opiate. They told me when I had tonsillitis that I had to cease breastfeeding while taking antibiotics. Turns out this was complete bullshit, and the horrendous rip through the sacred bond that followed was totally unnecessary. I wish parental support and advice could have been around back then.
Now I have a new problem. Puppychild now realises that this new baby won’t be fed by magic glittery bottle like her doll babies are, rather he or she will get milk from mummy’s boobs.
Puppychild is fine with this. Her curiosity is encouraging, in fact. A little too encouraging.
She asks me every now and then if she can have a go, and is perfectly accepting of my reply that there simply isn’t any milk yet, until the baby actually appears. But, there will be a day when she will be entirely more insistent that she have a go of my boob, straight from the tap as it were.
I’ve never heard of anyone else dealing with that problem before. I don’t want her to sense my revulsion at the idea, and I definitely don’t want the relationship between Puppychild and her new sibling to be founded on jealousy… it’s a horribly awkward position to be in, and yet it must be breezed through like a hot knife through butter.
I suppose the problem lies in society. The YouTube clip below creeps the hell out of me, it makes me gag and retch that a child so old still breastfeeds, but Puppychild wouldn’t flinch. She’d see it for the natural act that it is. So – is this my problem or her problem? I’ve no idea.
Valentine musings from the overworked and underpaid
Valentine’s day has always annoyed me a bit. As a late-blooming teenager I had always hoped that an anonymous card would find its way through my letterbox intented for my spotty four-eyed face, but it never did. One year an anonymous card did appear, but it was addressed to Billy Burn who lived at the other end of my road. A set up most likely… possibly by Billy himself, more likely by somebody else who wanted a cheap laugh. I can’t remember whether I delivered it or not, I hope in hindsight that I stuffed it into the exhaust-pipe of his dad’s car, but that’s unlikely.
Since starting on the sordid path of dating, it’s just gone from one extreme to the other… lavender-filled balloons and cheesy teddybears with crappy slogans like ‘You to me are like a spanner; every time I see you, my nuts tighten‘ were given to my by fellas who wanted to know what colour my knickers were, and when I finally hooked up with TAT, I got little or nothing. I prefer little or nothing by far.
This year, Laughingboy showed his love for me by producing a hefty dump in his nappy in the small hours of the morning. When I checked his schoolbag for baby-wipes, I found a sweet glitterish heart-shaped card with painty fingerprints all over it, and a wee bag of homemade chocolates. I let Puppychild show her love for her daddy by jumping on him violently at 5pm to wake him up for his night-time shift. TAT showed his love for me by reading me excerpts from Bill Bryson’s ‘The Lost Continent’ while I scraped eggy gunge from lunchtime kitchen saucepans, and I showed him my love for him by buying him an extremely violent Xbox game – ‘Army of Two, the 40th day’ – a shoot-em-up game that can only be played by in co-op with another. (What could be more romantic than annihalating things together over a glass of wine?)
I will be celebrating my love for myself tonight by lying on the wooden floor and listening to John Coltrane surrounded by candles for an hour or two before digging into a can of Guinness and a game of Assassin’s Creed.
Hallmark didn’t get a brass cent. Ha.
