I’ve learned exactly half of Xtreme’s song ‘More Than Words’ on the guitar.  I spent half the time in college that I was supposed to. My house is semi-clean, semi-cluttered. I’m a half a job, a quitter, a loser even.

But that’s good, right? If there were no losers, there’d be no winners. You can’t have night without day, hey.

If I’d been more commited, I would’ve told you about Laughingboy’s brush with botox last month. Not just for those with more money than sense, the stuff happens to be quite useful it seems. I was only too happy to have them inject poison into my kid, in fact.

He mutated earlier this year, you see, from a little boy into a strapping young man. His schoolteachers panicked and swiftly ordered larger equipment to handle him, I rushed out to buy big-boy clothes and meanwhile Laughingboy suffered.  Nature would have it that a child’s bones grow first, but their surrounding supportive tendons can take up to a year to catch up.  Cruel, isn’t it? Seems Mother Nature’s a bit of a half-a-job, too.

That’s what the botox was for, to relax those muscles, to make them sleep and stop hurting while his cells multiply.  You should see the difference it’s made! No longer frog-legged, no longer squirming in his wheelchair, he’s his old Laughingboy self again, but taller.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again… I’m so glad he lives in the 21st century.

So, I served wholemeal spaghetti with tuna and sweetcorn flavoured with a wee blob of butter and a squitch of olive oil, a pinch of salt, pepper, a squeeze of lemon and a dash of fresh cream. Then I made a mistake. I added a sprig of well chopped parsley.

Puppychild’s friend pulled a grimace when I placed her little pink bowl of food in front of her. She poked a finger into the depths of her spaghetti and withdrew a teeny speck of green… she looked as though she were about to vomit.

“Wha is dis?” she waved her green speck at me.

“It’s parsley” I explained, “It tastes lovely and it’s very good for you, there’s only a tiny bit in there though.”

“I don’ like ih.” she folded her arms in a huff and shoved the bowl away with her elbow.

“But how do you know you don’t like it, if you’ve never tried it?” I implored.

“I just don’ like ih.” She began to tweeze bits of sweetcorn from the food, but only the sweetcorn that had in no way come within any distance or association whatsoever with the horrible, terrible parsley.

“So what’s your favourite food at home?” I asked.

“Kebabs” she replied.

“Your mummy makes kebabs?”

“No from de chipparse” she replied.

“You like kebabs from the chip shop?

“Yeh s’yummy.” She assumed a hangdog pose, lower lip thrust forward… it was that look that small children make when they’re trying to convey to you that they’re so cruelly starved they’d happily eat a leper’s arse through a hedge (as long as it didn’t have parsley on it).

“But kebabs are full of all sorts of artificial crap, spurious stuff out of cans opened by men with hairy fingers and sweaty arse cracks, you big pink freak!!”

That’s what I didn’t say to her. I just made her a ham sandwich instead which she ate happily and when the children had finished eating, they rushed gaily outside to eat grass soaked in dog pee and to dig up worms and slugs.

Children are so weird.

-

(img found spuriously via Public School)

She’s been unlucky in love in the past, this girl. She has a herd of children by different fathers who diddled her over in their various ways but finally, finally she found an amazing fella who not only fell in love with her, but with her children too and that’s something that isn’t exactly easy to do. She married him, and is living her happily ever after with their dogs and their white picket fences and the future is finally rosy.

Except there’s one thing darkening her horizon, the fact that she now has to adopt her own children.

How bizarre is that?

This is what the questionnaire is in aid of. She’s declared me as an unrelated friend of the family and it’s now my job to let the Health Board know that she’s fit to raise her own children. It’s making me feel really uncomfortable. I mean, I know that her husband likes a few cans after a hard day working, but should I mention this? Should I keep it strictly corny and gush about her well adjusted children and not mention that her toddler eats out of the dog’s bowl occasionally?

It just seems so silly. I could write whatever I want and it might not necessarily be true… they know we’re friends, I’m not about to dump her in it am I? Perhaps they have someone tailing me to see if I’m a stand-up citizen, perhaps there’s someone else out there filling in a dumbass questionnaire about me.

Questionnaires, red tape, paperwork… I don’t know why I’m even worrying about it. It’s not like anyone will end up actually reading it, in all probability. I just feel sorry for their family. All they want to do is live, and love each other under the one surname, but they have to parade themselves and confess their weaknesses to do so.

At the same time you have crack head parents smacked up on gear on trains with sweet little children in decrepit buggies who have no ounce of security in the future, totally escaping the radar. Where’s the sense in it all, at all at all?

I do know how to set a table; the knives go on the right of the plate, the forks on the left. Whenever I pick them up to eat, however, I always switch hands. It just makes more sense to shovel with the right, or use a right-handed anchor to hold the meat down while I saw through its sinews with a left-cutting knife. I’m right handed, ergo my right hand has more control, Shirley? Until that day, I had presumed that everybody ate this way.

It was a very shameful moment, but nothing champagne couldn’t fix.

Almost as stupid as this, I felt. Almost.

I did try switching last week, I shouldn’t have worn that new blouse… shouldn’t have trusted my left hand to take control out of the blue like that, I should have eased it into the idea gently, dammit! Poor lefty bottled it halfway on the journey from plate to mouth and had an awful case of the shakes, discombobulating all over the boobal area of said blouse. Disaster.

But what have I done to my brain?! This lack of control practice for poor lefty has probably damaged it beyond repair, synapses’ bags packed, they’ve gone in search of sunnier climes probably. In fact, I’ve most likely passed the tendancy to eat incorrectly to my growing foeti… if their left hands drop off in their mid-50′s, it’ll be MY fault.

I’m a freak and I’m screwing up the evolutionary chain, the smell of antiestablishmentarianism is rank. I flatly refuse to conform to being a left handed forker though, it’s everyone else that’s wrong, not me!!!

This is especially true for every conversation I’ve had with Laughingboy’s teachers or nurses at school over the last three weeks. He hasn’t seen his schoolroom in over a month, thanks to this bizarre diarrhoea spate he’s been suffering, so they call me up every now and then to check his status.

For the last week, however, there’s been nothing excrementally newsworthy to tell them… the poor kid hasn’t produced so much as a nodge of poo whatsoever, so I don’t really know whether he’s better or not, meanwhile much-needed summer camp respite is on hold.

There aren’t that many ways to express this fact politely though, it’s hard to phrase the problem nicely… there’s:

-He hasn’t produced anything solid, nappy-wise.
-No bowel-movements as of yet.
-Bowel openings are a negative.

I yearn to just come right out with… “The little shit hasn’t had a dump in ages!”

…but that wouldn’t go down too well.

It was out in the garden earlier when I smelt the spurious hum. Laughingboy was swinging in his hammock with a smile on his face, Florence and the Machine was blasting through his earphones and he looked like he was in the zone… you know, that zone.

I whisked him out sharpish and brought him to his bed where I whipped off his tracksuit bottoms and tore at his nappy like a five year old at Christmas, hoping for a flash of brown underneath.

But it wasn’t to be.

I suddenly heard my mother’s voice, that wise poem she used to recite under the right circumstances:

Poor aul’ child, broken hearted;
Paid ten pee, but only farted.

All I want is to turn my hand to whiskey and blog, but he doesn’t understand. He shouts with violent gestures and pounds the air with his fists and I watch the face I love so much boil in its furious redness and I know he doesn’t really mean any of it, he just wants to dance and there’s nothing bad about that.

Even now, as I sit and type, he sings and talks and chatters and pleads with me to dance with him again. He talks and talks, and shouts and yawns and still he won’t go to sleep, this man of mine.

And then I give him the bottle. His third of the night, if you don’t mind. He drinks it down, and talks himself to sleep in the corner and I daren’t move him, lest he start shouting at me again. The abuse I get from him is heavy, but it underweighs the good parts, his constant want to entertain me is flattering and I love his ways of making me laugh and I love his love and the way he makes me feel real and I know I could never leave him.

This could be said for any man, many men. They’re all the same.

Mine is one year old. I’ve never had the opportunity to raise a man before, but it’s comforting to know that they’re born like this, that they can’t be changed. It’s up to us as mothers, as sisters, as girlfriends and wives to find a way through it, to as close as what could be described as harmony as possible,

even if it does mean hitting the bottle.

-The Labyrinth of Genre

-Floaty-mouse images of Dublin City in June 1961 and June 2011, a then-and-now sort of collection. Look at all the dinky cars! (Stolen from Jo :)

This is what real love looks like.

-US Actress Tina Fey’s ‘A Mother’s Prayer for Her Child’; it’s as though she’s inside my head.

-10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling Read these, and write them out twenty times, you naughty children!

-How to make a gift box out of a bank note. For when you couldn’t be arsed buying that voucher.

-Arty Bollocks Generator because everybody needs an artist statement!

Oh, and a creepy picture by Lori Nix. Click the image to magnifify it.

-Your brother’s a retard!

The second those words left my lips, I felt the scarlet rise. It just slipped out. To a room full of parents of kids with special needs too, no less.

Cringe. The flush burned my cheeks and made the capillaries on the tip of my nose tingle. My heart skittered like a ball of grease on a hot frying pan while the clock ticked a silence of undefinable length.

-Yes it’s true.
Somebody else nodded.
-You need to show them what words to use in self defence!
*nodding*
-True, true…

I was at a meeting to discuss Sibling Workshops, an initiative ‘they’ have set up to help families with disabled children. See? ‘They’ aren’t all bad! Brothers and sisters of kids with special needs have all sorts of issues that I had never even considered. Like… when a special needs kid passes a milestone it’s an amazing feat worth certificates and rounds of endless applause, yet nobody says a bippy when his younger brother passes the same milestone. From small droplets big waterfalls grow.

My question was about teaching some sort of self-defence mechanism to kids prone to bullying in the street… but it kind of came out funny.

I think my filter needs replacing.

I rushed home and dived into Laughingboy’s room, where he lay suffering a scorched arse and an aching belly and I kissed him a whispered happy birthday. He had been diagnosed with a bowel infection y’see, more than five days before and in spite of his antibiotics, was seemingly getting worse. If he could have clutched his belly he would have been doing so with gusto. With 82%(!) of the family in ribbons what with some condition or other, I’d completely forgotten the date.

Poor kid.

I rushed out again with Sir Fartsalot to buy copious gifts, which were presented sometime later along with a muffin, a flaming candle, and a Puppychild who led us in birfday song. We knew he couldn’t eat the muffin being a tube-fed sort of urchin, but it was good enough that his sister could enjoy it beside him, maybe, if not only for the company.

He wasn’t arsed with his new runners or his lava lamp. The Spongebob whoopie-cushion idea was lost on him… something that farts is probably not the best gift to give someone with a bad case of the squits though, in hindsight.

Well known voices turned up, as did those not-so-well-known (to the preturbinance of Sir Fartsalot) which blew me away, it felt being visited by fairy godparents and angels but Laughingboy was not in the mood.

He turned double-digits today.

That’s ten years since I became somebody’s ma!

I’ve to drop stool samples into the local hospital every day for three days now, it seems. I’m not squeamish really, but being a mother can be very graphic sometimes. And I think about how hard it is on me, and how hard it is on him, and I suddenly feel like I owe him a much better birthday someday somehow. Like a trip down the liffey on an elephant, or at least sparklers to the playground with the bucket swing and the squeaky see-saw.

I owe him so much but I yearn for ideas as to entertain a kid like him.

Does anyone have a recipie for home-made fireworks?

A three-lane motorway is a powerful thing. It gets you from A to B without you hardly having to even touch the road. It was here, at roughly 130kmph (81 mph for you metriphobes) that I got an itchy forehead. I was overtaking a fuel truck at the time so my scratching it was a very automatic thing. It never occured to me why my forehead was suddenly itchy until the culprit bounced off my nose and landed with a thud on my lap.

Yes, I felt a thud. This was a considerably large piece of something.

I glanced down (whatever this was would need an examination period of roughly a semi-split-second, to be exact) to see a spider scuttling between my legs towards the business end of my tracksuit bottoms.

It’s moments like these, when you’re hurtling along way above the speed limit and you suddenly learn that there’s a large spider roaming around beneath your crotch, this is when you truly feel alive.

Eyes on the road.

It tickles.

Eyes on the road!

I did eventually manage to pull my van onto a slip road and escape fairly sharply into a random carpark in Firhouse where I promtly exited the vehicle to do The Spider Dance. You know the one, it’s an arms and legs all over the place with much self-smacking sort of affair… hilarious to watch but very uncomfortable to perform.

Someone laughed and beeped as they passed. You know who you are. I have your registration number. Expect an eight-legged parcel through your letterbox really soon, bud.