Syntax Error
-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.
Screwed the pooch?
Whenever anybody I know gets a goo on them for a puppy, I always tell them to try ASH Animal Rescue Centre first . It’s in Kiltegan, not far from Baltinglass (one of the prettier towns in this here county of Wicklow), and is one of those companies that operates strictly by the ‘never put a good dog down’ book. They currently home 20 dogs (though numbers rise to 60-ish), 23 cats, one donkey, one horse, 2 pigs, 3 foxes and two rabbits.
Melissa Hayward, a model with an eye for funk recently adopted a Basset Hound from this crowd and was so impressed, she took it upon herself to create a charity calendar to raise funds for the rescue centre.
And create one she did! It’s so stylish… flourishes of retro flood the pages in high intensity colours that demand a first glance, then a second as the quirky sense of humour sneaked into the pictures hits you.
I would personally love to hang this calendar in my livingroom, but if I did, I have a feeling that my husband might object despite all the scantily clad women knocking about.
“Why on earth would he object to scantily clad women?!?” I hear you ask? Well, he’s not the only one. Pet shops have refused to stock it, and twelve of its backers have pulled out of the project in disgust. Even local TV vet Pete Wedderburn appeared to have difficulty holding his cereal down, labelling the calendar ‘distasteful’ and ‘entirely wrong’.
March. Marching orders, more like…:
There. You’ve seen it. Are you all okay? Anyone in need of defibrillators out there? Jeez. Yes, the puppy is apparently suckling the model’s boob. But isn’t it cute and yet confusingly sexy?!? Doesn’t that show overtones of nurturing associated with the rescue centre, or is this just plain old animal torture? The model doesn’t think so, Agata’s a follower of PETA and is well used to their extreme advertising… apparently the Irish just aren’t ready for it yet though. (Down with this sort of thing!!!) The Daily Mail had a field-day with it, but still published all the pictures, hey.
Co-creator Adelheid Walsh is quoted as saying: ‘We were left really frustrated and in floods of tears because we had all worked for hundreds of hours on this and for free because we wanted to help an animal charity. Then we have people dropping off from the campaign and feminists telling us we are degrading women – we are not.’
Ash themselves refuse to apologise, their spokeswoman Helena Le Mahieu states: ‘The cause is more important. It’s a beautiful calendar and the picture is very tasteful. People should get over the minor details like this and get behind this calendar.’
It leads me to wonder… is it animal cruelty that’s taboo here, or breastfeeding? Either way I find it pretty fascinating and encourage all animal-loving, quirk-searching charity enthusiasts out there to buy a copy. It’s such an excellent cause, not to mention a pretty excellent conversation starter. What do you think?
Click here to buy :)
Schmidt happens
Reward the good, ignore the bad. That’s the advice I got where child discipline is concerned, harvested from many hours scanning blogs and rollercoaster forums. It’s good advice, it seems to work, with a bit of naughty corner thrown in occasionally and the odd zap from a cattleprod.
It works too well though. Puppychild is a good kid. She listens, does what she’s told, has confidence and is always eager to please. This is because I reward her good behaviour with heartfelt thanks and trinkets… many many trinkets and comics that pile up in corners and Kinder Surprises jamming doorways. It feels like I’ve messed it up, like I’m pushing the idea that materialism is the best reward. Her trinkets are starting to own her, I’m teaching her to be owned by clutter, just like I am.
I want to show her what appreciation at its most base level feels like, to feel that vast connectivity with life itself in its carbon-based efficiency and appreciate the fact that we’re not Blobfish, but that’s very difficult for a kid who can’t see past her own curly straw.
How I felt after my first bikini wax
Then I found the link to Plan Ireland floating around Irish Taxi’s blog.
Sponsor a chiseller
I remember the bleakness of Jack Nicholson’s character in About Schmidt, how throughout the film he fails to create a single connection with somebody, even his own daughter…anybody. It’s painful to watch. The bleakness thickens and threatens to envelop the character entirely towards the end of the film and it seems that he’s plummeting towards the edge of nothingness, but then Schmidt gets a letter… a kiddie coloured-in picture from Ndugu, a child he’s been writing months of emotional diarrhea to in faraway lands, and it evokes a beautiful reaction. Such a profound thing, to touch a soul thousands of miles away with a waft of a well-timed token.
Our letter arrived today. I showed Puppychild a picture of a little girl in Malawi who is the same age as her. Her mum is the same age as me. They smiled at us from printed photographs and we connected and Puppychild thought it was nice that she didn’t have to walk for a kilometre every day before school to get water for her ma.
When I had closed the atlas and finished explaining how basic our lives could be, kiddo set about drawing a picture for her little African counterpart of herself and herself holding hands in a savannah.
They shall grow up together and teach each other many things, two souls learning from parallel worlds.
I long to share a bottle with her mother by a roaring fire and have her tell me of stories of dancing and sisters and daughters who are stolen by Gulu Wamkulu people, how she bails her kids out with offerings of chickens and money, how fearful she is of her people’s traditions. Fearful of traditions. That sounds familiar!
So we post back. And we wait.
I hope they don’t find each other on Facebook first.
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.
I put a spell on you…
One of the biggest things I missed about my next door neighbour when she moved away were the snippets of eyebrow-raising advice she used to dole out. Given that witches never really speak about being witches, especially to relative strangers, I felt honoured that she’d envelop me into her circle of trust and tell me of her voodoo shenanigans. After all, there’s a fine line between an open-minded person and someone who’s all too willing to go behind your back and bitch about what a weirdo you are, especially in Ireland.
She loaned me books about rituals. She taught me how to make altars so that I’d have my own personal space to meditate in, a space that meant something only to me. I learned amazing things.
How to get rid of an unwanted live-in houseguest:
Place a witch’s broomstick in the hallway beside the door, and stick a fork into the bristles. Within two weeks, the unwanted guest should be a thing of the past. I may be rough on specifics… maybe the fork needs to be made of a certain type of metal, maybe the broom should be upside-down – it’s not really something I’d try, but her story amused me. A friend of hers did this trick, and within two weeks was separated from her husband. Turns out that she herself was the disruptive influence in the house and her leaving was the best thing that happened for everyone involved. Eerie.
How to nab the house of your dreams:
Whether you’re bidding for a house, or hoping to inherit and battling with siblings, or maybe you just fancy the look of someone else’s gaff (I keep thinking of The War of the Roses for some reason), apparently there’s a fail-safe trick you can do to assure that pile of bricks will someday be yours.
Once a month, given obviously that you’re a female, you need to sneak onto the property, squat, and leak a few droplets of your own menstrual blood onto the soil surrounding the house. I’m not sure what your alternatives are if you’re post menopausal, perhaps crones in covens stockpile menstrual blood in their freezers? It’s an awfully personal question to ask.
I would seriously love to know if this actually works. There’s a beautiful house nearby, a stone-walled three-storey haven surrounded by mysterious woody hinterland with an elaborate tree house just about visible to plebs like me who gaze wistfully from behind a steeringwheel as I pass by every day. If I was caught mid-squat, I’d be scarleh, it’s not like I could pretend I had dropped a contact lens or something. If anything I’d be looking at a two-to-five stretch inside.
It would be kind of worth it if not for scientific experimentation though. Any takers?
God be with the days before Christianity
I’m reading ‘The Mists of Avalon’ right now, a book about Arthurian legend from his mother and his sister’s point of view. In them days, it was all about appeasing the Goddess and natural ritual and Bardic poetry and such other lovely stuff, as Christianity and convents slowly crept into their consciousness.
I can’t help but be slightly jealous at the constant mention of the Bealtaine fires. May first every year, everyone in the community douses the home-fires, then celebrates life and re-birth during a giant hooley by a huge fire. As part of the ritual, it’s required by the Goddess that random people should couple up… so named the unity of the Great Mother and her young horned God. Not an orgy, no no, just appreciation for the exuberant healing powers of spring. It’s not just at Bealtaine either… they get to do this every quarter of the year to celebrate the ever-changing stages of life and death. This is most likely the origins of bonfires at Hallowe’en, then? Can you imagine loads of skobies all dressed up as Gardaí and Zombies all shaggin’ away after their sugar rush because the Goddess wants them to?
Pity they didn’t have Youtube back then!
Ham Shank
Several highly disturbing thoughts swirl around my head on a daily basis, it seems unfair that I shouldn’t declare at least one of them here;
Laughingboy is but eight years old now, and he will grow into a man, even if this idea seems absurd to me… there’s little I can do to stop this happening. Men have needs, needs that require locked bathroom doors and copies of Victoria’s Secret. Laughingboy will have needs too, I get preludes every now and then when I unwrap his nappy of a morning to be greeted by a wee stalker winking at me. If your average bloke chokes his turkey at least 356 times a year, who’s going to do that for Laughingboy?!? Do I bring him on holidays to Amsterdam for a month around his birthday to make up for lost time? Do I put an ad in the local newsagents window for some willing lady to do the job every Tuesday?
I once caught a middle aged lady giving her poodle a ham shank on a park bench one day… I wondered then what would happen if she had a disabled son instead of a stupid looking dog? Hang on, I just have to go and vomit for a second…
…that’s better.
I wonder if most people in my position would ever think about the dangers of re-absorbed baby-batter and the side-effects thereof, or is it just me? Mothering is such a weird job sometimes.
How to love thy neighbour's stretchmarks
If there’s one thing lately that irritates me more than an army of wasps at a picnic, it’s the loss of sisterhood in today’s society. Not that I’m a feminist but… (uh-oh…)
What women tend to do nowadays is wrap a compliment in an insult and get away with it scott-free. Much like these examples;
“Walk behind me, you’re a skinny bitch and you’re showing me up.”
“God your hair is gorgeous, I fucking hate you!”
“Your boobs are so perky today Mary, I hope you die in a horrible car accident.”
What would make for a really refreshing change, would be to overhear the following conversation;
“Howye Mary, I prayed for your sebaceous glands last night, I see it paid off!”…”Yeah I thought my hair was extra glossy today, thanks Aine!”
We’ve lost the knack of sisterly caring and support in this heavily patriarchal world, the ying and the yang are totally off kilter and instead of rallying our femininity together again, we wish cancers upon each other and that really, really sucks. Menses are hidden, menopausal women are left on their shelves, caesarean sections rule the day for a quick and easy birth instead of securing a happy and calm environment for mother and baby. We’ve been converted into cows… jealous, backbiting cows.
In the spirit of this, I would like to remind women who we used to be… Goddesses. (WITCH!! WITCH!! I hear you say? Yeah I wouldn’t blame you, for you’ve been conditioned that way.) I shudder to think of the 9 million women who were burned, drowned or commited suicide in defense of their sisterhood. This post is for them, and for you ladies out there who hate your bodies and hate your friends because of theirs.
Let me introduce you to the Goddesses who used to inhabit our souls before they were bet out of us:
Gaia; Knows that stretchmark creams are truly pointless.
~
Hecate: Never could be arsed with the likes of Oil of Olay.
~
Rhiannon: Knows that ‘pale and interesting’ far outweights St Tropez fakeness.
~
Sappho: Born on the island of Lesbos and will kick seven shades out of you for slagging her about it.
~
Yemaja: Wants you to tell her to her face that motherhood isn’t a real job.
~
Baba Yaga; Wise beyond Botox
~
Isis; Beyond asking if her bum looks big in this.
~
Mary; Loves you with or without your Wonderbra.
~
Of course there are some other Goddesses that should be included here, but maybe best celebrated in the privacy of one’s own home;
So go on out there and love your women. Wish blessings upon their belts and tell them you think their acne is cute. Sisterhood is dead. Long live sisterhood.
The child that almost was
This is a post about miscarriage. It’s not maudlin, I’m not looking for sympathy, it’s just that it’s a subject that a lot of us come across many times in life that isn’t spoken about much. It’s awkward, it’s deeply personal, and it sends people running. If you would like to run, now’s your chance!
What do you get if you cross a dead guineapig with clock gears?
___________________
You’re still here? Good stuff. This is just my story, maybe it’ll help someday if you’re caught unaware, maybe it’ll help to know… what to say, if anything. If you’re looking for a guide to help you figure out what you’re supposed to be feeling, I’m afraid you’re on your own, for I haven’t figured that part out yet myself.
I wrapped a yellow bow around the pregnancy test, it was February 12th when it tested positive, so it went into a Valentines day card for TAT. He was chuffed beyond reason. Perhaps not the best timing for a child, but when is? I told my mother in law later that it was an intentional accident, much the same as the rest of my kids. Accident and surprise should own the same word, if you ask me.
The week before superstition would allow me to boast about my being on the bubble, it arrived. Lots and lots of blood in all the wrong places and I knew, even before I called my friend for advice, what was happening. The pain followed soon after… a milder form of labour pain but horribly evil with no possible chance of a happy ending. I slugged Vodka. I took Ponstan and Solpadeine, but nothing would take it away. No more baby. Just dead cells and intense discomfort. I had it easy compared to most, which is a horribly scary thought.
I was brought into hospital where an ultrasound told me I’d been carrying those dead cells for four weeks… nature had seen it fit to call it a halt to this kid’s development after only eight weeks of growth. Why, though? Why have Laughingboy develop to term, only to have him suffer with disability in his life? Why take this child now?
The pains stopped suddenly… so suddenly that I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing, and ten minutes later while seeing a man about a dog, I laid an egg. Right there, into the toiletbowl – *plop*. What a way to go.
I cried, then, purely because I didn’t know what else to be doing at the time. I knew when I scooped the foetus out of the toilet bowl and wrapped it in tissue, that it wasn’t a child, that it probably never was. I wanted to keep it, bury it in a shoebox, and not tell anybody. Instead, I handed the wadge of tissue to the lady at the helpdesk who asked me if I was okay, but I couldn’t answer with anything but a limp smile. A few moments later found me spreadeagled on a hospital bed, being probed for a D & C.
“Seems you’ve done all the work for me!” the doctor smiled.
“Yeah!” I laughed. I actually laughed, as though we were speaking about furniture removal or earwax or something equally as mundane. No sadness, just emptiness.
We stopped off at a relative’s house on the way home against my fervent wishes, and I sat alone on the couch. Nobody spoke of what had happened apart from one or two statements that I really didn’t want to hear, and nobody has mentioned it since. Far too awkward. Far too scary. Get on with your life already, woman, and count your blessings.
It was when I got the letter a week later that it hit home. I was invited to a mass in the hospital for the souls of recently miscarried babies including my own. I didn’t reply. I waited as the day arrived, and as the mass began elsewhere, I suddenly felt immensely guilty, like my baby was floating in a dense fog somewhere, counting on me to release it from it’s horrid limbo. I sat on my couch and tried to ignore it, tried to pray my own prayers, but the feeling stuck. I did nothing for the soul of that child, if there was such a thing, it’s existence on this planet went totally un-noticed. Is that wrong? I don’t know, for nobody’s really given me that much of a chance to talk about it. It’s probably a question which has no answer anyway.
If you do meet someone who’s going through this experience, I can arm you with advice… just listen. That’s all you have to do. Try not to say something for the sake of breaking silence… phrases like ‘It’s probably for the best’, or ‘Sure you can always try again’, or ‘Time’s a great healer’… they really don’t help. Boxes of chocolates go down extremely well, hugs are surprising, human contact sometimes is an excellent remedy… it fills the hollowness wonderfully.
Miscarriage is one of those feelings that stays inside a person. Even though the body is gone, the memory persists, an innate feeling that one has failed in a responsibility to another human being. Somebody died on my watch. It’s a tough cross to bear sometimes, and if left to fester can cause a multitude of other problems. It needs to be let out, so let it out. Talk. Listen. Remember that tiny pile of cells to somebody else, write stories about it.
Above all, never, never feel too ashamed to talk about it.
However you find this, whether it’s by search-term or by fate, I hope it helps. I hope it’s comforting to find you’re not as alone as you think you are, male or female, brother or cousin twice removed. You’re the proud owner of a new scar and it defines who you are. Wear it. It’s beautiful in its own weird way.
Retaliation
I worried for my name for a moment this weekend in the knowledge that I would be forced to abandon my loyal men and women followers, but only for a moment. The unavoidable trip to the donkey santuary left their mission wide open without my guidance, but as my loyal submarine commander told me upon my return;
“Often in war, lines of communication become cut off. That’s where you have to trust your cells of fighters to carry on without you. The first sign of a fine leader is that your people can carry on when you’re not there. All Hail K8 the Gr8!”
Okay, so I added that last bit but the surprise party went down a treat and conveyed the same message. Such nice people. In fact, it would seem that their dedication has inflamed them into epic tasks. The uniform is fresh from production seven months ahead of schedule! To see their faces… their triumph as they handed me the last uniform with plastered fingers and exclaimed: “We just love the smell of Napalm in Blogger.” I shed a tear.
The blog bombings were inspirational.
These brave soldiers defended me to the hilt in my absence against an unholy torrent of abuse and I am so proud to be their leader. They are true K8opian heroes.
What a mess my good name has become!!!
Brutal allegations of a grievious nature have been pinned upon me on the internet and I would hereby most defiantly like to tell you that these are all false. To think that I would sell cigarettes to small children?!? I merely teach them how to roll their own, thus cutting down on pocket money expenses and eliminating arsenic poisoning. If they’re going to smoke, they might as well do it properly.
It is a sad fact that ‘He who must not be mentioned’… *sigh* link… has based his entire defense on lies. Such cheap tricks, such shameful tactics.
This is what I look like. All the time, even when I’ve just squshed an increadibly large spider barefoot in the dark by mistake on a stumbling visit to the loo.
All I can offer to you, my loyal people, is the truth. We all know that the truth is far uglier thing than fiction, as you will soon find out. Spies have been deployed all over the capital city of Maxiland in an effort to sample the taste of their regime, and they return feeling very ill indeed and carrying video tape footage that suprisingly didn’t burn to a crisp the very moment it was recorded.
The great leader of Maxiland is a wanker.
I do not use the word in its derogatory sense, it is simply pure fact. I offer to you some damning evidence as recorded by my faithful troops;
“I’ve wanked pretty much everywhere. If I’ve been to a place more than twice, chances are I’ve blown my beans in the surroundings … Every room of every house I’ve ever lived in, or visited. Every room of every place I’ve ever been employed in, or visited. A car. A bus. A phone box.”
“I remember a time I was walking past Ann Summers on O’Connell Street and there was an old dude outside the front door, and God love him he was trying to catch a glimpse of some girl changing into underwear or the salesgirl running through a demo of a new dildo and he had his hands hidden under his over coat. I would have judged, maybe even stopped him but I was on my way to Brown Thomas to whack off all over the Manolo Blahnik displays.”
Won’t somebody please think of the children?
—
Overheard at a bus-stop;
“And I left the shop, went and calmed myself down with a nice shot of crack.”
—
One brave soldier even had the nerve to engage this so-called ‘leader’ at the bookies and recorded the following perplexing information;
“Yeah, “I guess I turned to drugs and murder after I saw my drunken father mowed down by a devilishly handsome Ford Fiesta driver when I turned 5. He turned to look at me, and said “Happy birthday, sweetheart” and then turned to face his death.”"
A man with such weighty responsiblities who has learned his leadership skills in prison is not a pretty sight. I fear for his people, I imagine an evolved landscape of Orks, poor pure elvenfolk who got caught up in the madness and are now forever damned. I urge those people to step back, to have a proper look at this leader of theirs… a man who hates bank holidays, who enjoys having his privates gnawed on by zombified hamsters, who doesn’t actually have such an innate fear of tampax!
“In all the commotion I forgot my tissues, but as it turns out “feminine products” are much more absorbent for a runny nose than even the strongest tissue, and the smooth applicator does make a difference.”
My undercover interviewer almost passed out when this information was recorded, this golden piece of damning evidence. She is now away in the Bahamas for some well earned R&R, but not before she found out that the Queen of Maxiland - the position I so politely requested in the days before this cruel war began – is an avid fan of Boyzone. Boyzone. While Keith Duffy is already in my army for his sensual comedic skills, I cannot condone the music. He knows that. We’re cool.
Would you really fancy ‘Love me for a reason’ playing in the cold interior of an army tank as you advance into battle? Would it motivate you into killing yourself or the enemy? I think you know the answer.
Do not be fooled by this leader’s big puppyblog eyes. He is no innocent, I fear this past weekend’s infiltration is but the tip of the iceberg, that Maxiland is a scurrilous place and should be gravely avoided.
This is a rare photograph of the elusive character taken at a so-called ‘Peace’ rally yesterday (on the right, beside Baino’s oranges:
I think it fair to say that this man has issues.
