On Purpose

Loading the Very Small Boy into his car seat recently as we were about to set off to the supermarket, I noticed that all the hair on one side of his head appeared to have been dyed bright pink and then styled alarmingly into sharp, crunchy spikes.

“Sausage?” I turned accusingly to the Small Girl (who was already strapped into her car seat and looking over innocently at me) “did you put nail polish in your brother’s hair?”
“He told me to” she replied sweetly, and then, by way of explanation: “he wanted Jedward hair”.
“She did it on purpose”, added the Very Small Boy, pouting dramatically and enjoying an excuse to use his latest phrase (which to his delight he has recently discovered he can use to get his sister into trouble).
“Oh for God's sake.... well it’s too late to do anything about it now” I sighed, and got into the car.

Once again, the summer holidays have passed in a languid blur, and we all felt grateful for the arrival of September, bringing with it a return to reassuring routine, and a welcome relief from feeling obliged to engage in the futile Irish pastime of Hoping For Decent Weather.

I love Autumn and Winter: crisp, bright days, warm jumpers, long dark evenings in front of the fire and the satisfying anticipation of Christmas. In fact, the only thing that clouds my enjoyment of September is the threat of snow and ice forcing me to suspend my outdoor runs in favour of the much less satisfactory gym.

However, for now the cooler weather is perfect for running and I have been increasing my distance runs to up to 10k at a time, surprising myself with my strength and endurance. So much so that I’ve decided to run the Dublin marathon next October (which thankfully is still a whole year off - because the four-month training schedule looks so gruelling that I fear I will actually have to train for the training).

“Mummy?” asked the Very Small Boy, as I was bundling him out of the car and into the shopping trolley seat.
“Yes darling?” I replied, hauling the Small Girl into the main part of the trolley and locking the car.
“You’re a poo-poo head on purpose!”

Before I could react, the Small Girl (who had collapsed in hysterics in the shopping trolley) sat up frowning, put her hand theatrically to her brow, and, in a brilliant imitation of me, said in mock exasperation “oh for God’s sake…”

And we all burst out laughing as we made our way to the counter to buy the children a Chocolatey Treat for the shopping trip.

Not Over Yet

“You know”, said the wide-eyed man, raising his voice above the thudding music as he leant back against the sweat- damp wall and regarded me, awestruck: “people like you are like God to me…”

I took a drag of my cigarette and regarded my teenage self, stunned. It was dizzying: the drinks we’d drunk, the lines we’d snorted and finally, the pill I’d washed down with tepid water from the bottle in my hand. I could feel it working now; a warm buzz, like adrenaline, starting in the pit of my stomach and radiating through my limbs like soothing fire. Stubbing out the cigarette, I turned from the man and ran to the toilets, pushing my way through the crowds to a soiled cubicle with a broken door, which I managed to close before turning and vomiting into the toilet bowl. Then I was walking back to the dance-floor. Walking, floating, beatific; jaw quivering, eyes rolling, beaming at the rapture-flooded beauty of it all: this club with its pounding music lifting me higher, my hands in the air, encircled by devotion, ecstasy filling me up till I felt like I might die…

I’m not proud of the life I fell into in that strange time at the end of my teenage years. But I have enough compassion for my younger self to forgive myself for what was probably inevitable. For we are all shaped by our childhoods, and the measure of a person is not in how far they fall, but in how they pick themselves up afterwards. I fell a long way, and when I realised I could fall no further, I clawed my way back to the real world, to real life, and I did it alone: without friends or family, without doctors or counsellors or support groups.

“Well, you know what they say about runners” said a friend here in Newbridge the other day over coffee and cupcakes as we discussed our shared love of the activity “they’re always running from something!”.
“I’m definitely running from something”, I laughed, as I thought about how even before I began to run, I loved it for what it represented to me: freedom, escape, the solitary pursuit of striving to be faster, better, stronger.

Usually when I begin an early-morning run, I feel drained and sluggish, my muscles tired and sore and my limbs heavy. But what I love most about running longer distances is that if you push yourself through those first few kilometres, past the aches and stitches and leaden limbs, your body just takes over – endorphins and adrenaline flood your system and suddenly you are running – really running – and you feel powerful and strong and muscular and invincible.

Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with running from the past. I have faced my demons and won. I am a stronger, better, more grounded person for it. And if I am running from the past, then I must surely be sprinting towards the future. And the future is a joyous place, filled with light and life, with fun and happiness and with the dazzling laughter of children.

(summer of '94... we were the Beautiful People)

Bye Bye Baby

Since successfully weaning myself off Venlafaxine a couple of months ago, I’ve been suffering with something of a crisis of identity. So single-minded was I when I was taking the stuff, so focused on running, losing weight, living healthily, that I lost myself a little. Admittedly, it was the perfect antidote to the preceding five years, in which I was enveloped in a kind of motherly baby-haze of pregnancy, plumpness, breastfeeding and the nurturing of others. But the strange result of my year of tunnel-vision is that I find myself catapulted suddenly back physically and mentally to a time before babies; before even the need for babies.

Being the youngest in the family, the Very Small Boy will, in some ways, always remain my baby. But as the summer has progressed, he has all of a sudden become rather grown-up. We decided to toilet train him at the beginning of the Small Girl’s summer holidays, and ditching the nappies felt to all of us like a symbolic step; leaving behind us the last vestige of babyhood. And as much as I loved The Baby Years, I suspect I am better suited to dealing with children: real people who eat real food and are able to walk downstairs by themselves, and with whom you can (in most cases anyway) reason with.

Boys baffle me in many ways: whilst I understand the Small Girl in an innate way (princesses; pretty dresses; a tendency to over-accessorise – I just get it), the Very Small Boy’s propensity to climb and jump, throw things against walls and generally fling himself violently on the floor – this is behaviour which just leaves me feeling puzzled. Of course, his bewildering boyishness is also incredibly endearing and often when I see him dashing about playing football in the front garden with The Big Boys from next door, I can’t resist the impulse to run out and gather him up (much to his embarrassment) and smother him with kisses.

So I am trying, at the moment, while I decide who I am (sensible almost-nearing-forty mother of two? semi-glamorous vaguely youthful mum? teetotal hippyish fitness fanatic?), to relax and enjoy these two small people with whom I suddenly find myself living.

The Very Small Boy is even sleeping longer now, finally - often not waking until almost half past six… I was woken yesterday morning at the usual time of 6.24am by the familiar sound of his bedroom door crashing open, followed by his Very Small footsteps thudding down the corridor, before the sound of our own bedroom door being flung violently open.

“What’s the craic, poop-head??” demanded the Very Small Boy cheerfully, before clambering over us, into the middle of the bed and under the covers for his morning cuddle.

Keep It Together, Girl

Not so long ago, around two months into our kitchen extension, DH was unexpectedly called to the States for a week to work, and I was left alone, living in a building site with two children. We had no hot water, the entire downstairs of the house was unusable and the constant and deafening drilling meant that we had to be out of the house every day from 8am to 6pm.

“Keep it together, girl!” said Ken the Builder cheerfully one morning as he stood, sledgehammer aloft, in the rubble of what once had been my kitchen.
“I’m trying”, I sighed, attempting to prise an enormous screwdriver from the Very Small Boy, who was jabbing it alarmingly into the salmon-pink smoothness of a freshly plastered wall.

I gazed through the hazy dust at the scene before me. Despite knowing that the three builders, two plumbers, two plasterers, a roofer and an electrician were carefully orchestrating the various complicated stages of destruction and creation, all I saw was a grey mess of ugly wires protruding from bare breeze-block and copper piping sticking out of drilled-up concrete; everything covered in a thick layer of dust and great blood-splashes of plaster.

I suppose I had expected some kind of grand finale - an unveiling - but of course it didn’t end like that. We lived a few weeks with the kitchen half-finished. I fretted quietly about painting the woodwork and putting up shelves. The constant stream of workmen slowly decreased before ending finally, undramatically, with an electrician calling by one Saturday morning to fix a boiler problem.

And now, when friends call by and admire my beautiful new kitchen (“the skylight!” “the worktops!” “the fridge!”), I can’t help feeling slightly uncomfortable to be surrounded by such excess. And I realised today that, although I'm thrilled with it, and the new kitchen has made my life easier and much more pleasant, it’s not the source of real, unadulterated happiness that I thought it might be; it's more a pleasing background to the things that make me truly happy.

A couple of days ago, the Small Girl (who’s on her summer holidays at the moment) came with me to pick up the Very Small Boy from Playschool, and after strapping them both into the car, we set out back home.

“What happened at Playschool today darling?” I asked the Very Small Boy as we drove.
“We played with shaving foam!” he cried gleefully, before adding thoughtfully “And Samuel did have hair like Jedward...”
The Small Girl looked up sharply from her Barbie. “Jedward?” she asked

And they both burst raucously into song: “She’s got her lipstick on, here I come, da da dum…”

I laughed out loud, and I was still smiling to myself ten minutes later when finally we got home and, still singing, they climbed up together to the new breakfast bar to wait for their milk and cookies.

Royally Yours

“Morning! How’s the running going?” asked the postman, a fellow runner, cheerfully the other morning when I opened the door to him.
“Good thanks” I replied, taking the package he handed me “I’m trying to do 20k a week, but mostly failing…”
“Ah sure, you’ll get there” he said, smiling and nodding his head in encouragement before leaving to continue his rounds.

Feeling sentimental in the run-up to the Royal wedding, I had ordered online some prints from my own wedding, which the Small Girl (who has a fanatical interest in anything to do with pretty dresses) had also taken a sudden interest in.

“When I grow up, I’m going to have a Woyal Weddin’ ” she had announced, thrilled to be watching a real Prince and Princess getting married on the telly.
“That sounds lovely darling!” I replied “can I come?”
“Yes Mummy, you can wear a fancy outfit and a hat and you can wave like the Queen” she said, pulling her chair up closer to the TV to watch the Queen being chauffeured slowly through the crowds in her yellow dress. Then “Mum?” she asked.
“Yes Sausage?”
“Why does the Queen do that funny wave like that?”

I laughed and scooped up my Small Girl for a cuddle. “Well, the Queen is very posh and very serious, so when she waves she does it very solemnly, like this” I explained, pulling a stern face and giving a slight, exaggerated tilt of the hand

Later, when the wedding was over and the Small Girl was happily playing "weddin's” with her Very Small Brother, I carefully put my own wedding photos into the frames I had bought for them, and studied myself in the pictures. I was a modest-looking bride, never really self-assured enough to demand the trappings and frills that most young people these days require on their wedding day. It’s a characteristic of mine, I realised, to never really make the best of myself, fearful for some reason of the result it might produce.

Still, I was pleased with the pictures, and I called the children to have a look. The Very Small Boy came dashing downstairs, but the Small Girl, for once, was nowhere to be found.
“Come on Prince Charming” I said to him, taking his warm little hand in mine. “Let’s go and find your sister”. And hand in hand, we eventually found her, standing out at the end of the front garden; dressed in her finest Cinderella gown, frowning in concentration, practising her Royal Wave on passing neighbours.

We Could do With Some More Grown-ups Around Here

I made the mistake the other day of Googling “coming off Venlafaxine”. The facts as presented by an army of disgruntled users were alarming, and just reading these horror stories was enough to give me the first stirrings of a panic attack.
“Well, you might as well just burn fifty quid” advised Uncle Queue (who isn’t a doctor but probably ought to be) on the subject of visiting my GP.
“Just open the capsules and halve the contents, a week at a time” was his advice. Which was working just fine until, in addition to my usual duties as Mummy, I found myself managing a fairly major building project.

The first time I walked around our house, I knew it was the place for us. It was badly laid-out, appallingly decorated and almost completely devoid of any kind of warmth.
“Let’s buy it!” I said to DH, as the Small Girl (who was Really Very Small at the time) toddled headlong into an expanse of oddly-placed bare brick in the middle of our soon-to-be kitchen, keeled over backwards and started wailing.

Almost four years on, the entire ground floor of our cosy family house is a building site. Much to the delight of the Very Small Boy (who currently loves nothing more than to don his hard hat and reflective jacket and spend hours climbing about on their digger), The Builders have arrived and are working on our new extension. It’s all terribly exciting, but at the same time it requires on my part all manner of complicated decisions involving electrical sockets, gas piping and whether or not it would damage my credibility to offer The Builders (at least two of whom appear to be rather baby-faced and prone to blushing a deep pink if I so much as look in their direction) a round of pink cupcakes with their tea.

I can’t help feeling that I could manage the whole antidepressant withdrawal thing just fine were it not for the general responsibilities of Being Grown Up. Had I the luxury of spending some quality time lying motionless in a darkened room, for example, the whole process would have passed fairly uneventfully. However when not curled into a ball and sobbing, I have found myself over the last few days wandering aimlessly through the rubble, tormented by roiling queasiness and weird electrical jolts, desperately trying to focus my confused and elusive thoughts.

“Mum!” shouted the Small Girl the other day from the garden, where she and her brother had been playing on the digger .
“Yes darling?” I replied, dashing to the front door and wondering vaguely about public liability insurance in the event of a Very Small Broken Leg.
“The Builders say we’re not allowed to play on the digger unless there’s a grown-up with us!” she wailed.

I stood at the front door, hanging on to the doorframe and looking back over my shoulder, casting about for the grown-up in question, before the dawning of the slow and foggy realisation that actually, she probably meant me.

Poo-Poo

“I think this town ought to be called “Poo-poo Town”” the Small Girl announced last week as we negotiated our way daintily around the mounds of stale dog mess littering the pavements leading down to Big School.
“I agree, Sausage”, I sighed, having only last week called angrily over to one of my more far-flung neighbours to complain about her roaming dogs using my front lawn as a lavatory. (She had looked at me as if I were quite mad, clutching her door in bewilderment and gazing slowly, mouth agape, from the enormously fat Labrador at her feet to my house, three doors away).

I often wonder why people let their dogs roam the streets this way in Ireland, for it is just as unlawful in Newbridge as it is in, say, London, where dog-owners usually fulfil their obligation to clean up after their pets. It’s all down to sheer laziness, I suspect; the job of picking up after your dog rendered unnecessary if you don’t ever bother to go with it when it goes for a walk.

The Small People, however (being at that stage of childhood where toilet humour is considered the highest form of wit), love the excuse to have constant conversations about poo. “Eeeeuuuurrrgggh! Dog poo!” shouts the Small Girl every morning as we head off for school. And “Where’s the poo? Let me see it!” cries the Very Small Boy, ambling over to peer at it then delightedly crying “Eeeeuuuurrrgggh! Poo-poo!”.

It all adds to my general sense of unreality at the moment, as I struggle to wean myself off my anti-depressants. Rather pleasantly labelled “discontinuation syndrome” by drug manufacturers and GPs, the dizziness, irritability, sleeplessness, listlessness and nausea brought about by lowering your intake of Venlafaxine is in reality nothing other than a pretty unpleasant dose of good old-fashioned drug withdrawal.

I deal with it by running. Concentrating on breathing, posture, pace, becomes my escape - almost a form of meditation - allowing me to focus on nothing other than this moment, now. I went for a long run on Saturday morning, finding it harder than usual because of the withdrawal. Gasping for breath, sweat-blinded eyes struggling to focus, I forced myself to run for 6k until I could practically feel the drugs leaving my system.

The feeling of achievement after a run like that is incomparable and I jogged the last few steps to my front door triumphantly, realising a moment too late that one confident foot was landing square in the middle of a fresh pile of dog poo…

“Oh shit” I sighed, and limped dejectedly the rest of the way to the house to clean my shoes.