Be Good

“Be good.”  (Even ET was at it for fek sake) “Be good or no-one will be your friend.”  “Be good or no-one will like you.”  “Is he/she a good baby?”  “Be good or you’ll go to hell.”  “It’ll be a black mark against your soul.”  “Be good, Santy’s robin is watching.”  “What goes around comes around.”

When I was growing up, be good or no-one will like you/be your friend were mantras.  Two horrible mantras.  Fek that shit.  It is completely impossible and unrealistic to expect to get through this life without someone somewhere not “getting you” or for someone to “not like you” for no other reason than they just don’t like you. 

It’s ok that not everyone will think you are marvellous. 

It is also pretty much guaranteed that you will encounter people who are not to your taste either.   

And guess what?  That’s ok too.

What’s not ok is to beat yourself up over it. Be better than that.  Be stronger than that!  

How many of us have been asked if our baby “is good” at only two weeks old.  A tiny baby, new to the world, busy eating, sleeping and pooping. Who gets a “bad” baby?   I’m not going to go into the physiological reasons why a newborn, indeed any baby, cries so much in the early days.  But is that not just a delicious excuse to soothe them? 

Going to hell.  In my head this was a place with volcanic like fires and a Minotaur in the corner.  Another version of the carrot on the end of the stick, a ploy to beat us all into obedience.  Ditto the black mark against your soul.  I didn’t get it.  I didn’t get any of it but I believed it.  Does that make sense? 

Santy’s robin lives in our garden in winter but I tell our boys that he is a spy! The boys think this is cool. 

What goes around probably does come around.  But we still shouldn’t relish in it. 

So here’s an idea.   

How about being kind to yourself instead.  Give yourself a bit of a break.   

Especially at this time of year.  There have been some horrific, desperately sad stories in the media in the last six months alone.  Two little babies killed on an innocent walk with their father.  A pregnant mother dying alone leaving two small boys motherless.  A shooting in a cinema in America, killing dozens.   Young girls taking their lives as a result of cyber bullying.  Two young sisters falling foul of the same fate within six weeks of each other.  And more recently, just mere days ago, small children dying in another senseless act of madness in Connecticut.    

It is all so short.  So fleeting.  So now.

So why aren’t we enjoying it more?  Why are we so rushed, so hell bent on being ahead all the time. 

Human life is so fragile, so easily wiped out, so easily forgotten about. 

Lately, a young man lost his life when he fell in front of a bus on a busy Dublin street.  A similar accident happened some years back on the daily commute from Dublin.  A male pedestrian stepped too close to the kerb and lost his life to an articulated truck. 

The news swept through the bus and I found myself looking out the front window at the body of the man lying on the road.  Minus his head. 

The driver of the truck, completely oblivious to what had happened continued on his way and was finally stopped at Newlands Cross. 

We sat there for over an hour and during that time watched as an ambulance and Dublin fire brigade arrived on the scene.  The body of the man was loaded into the ambulance and the rest of his life, the one that was swept from his shoulders, literally hosed off the street and swept into the gutter with one of those yard brushes.

That image stayed with me for a long time.  How easy it is to clean up after a life. 

Someone out there had given birth to that man.  He had a family, maybe a wife, maybe children.  But he was here.  He had life.

And it was wiped out in minutes. 

Like those babies, the pregnant mother, the people at the cinema, the teenage girls, those children and their teachers in the school the morning the gunman entered the premises.

It’s hard not to think of the families and how they would have been located afterwards.  How they must have felt on hearing the terrible news of the senseless deaths of their loved ones.

The circumstances of their passing.

It’s hard not to imagine those people saying if only I had asked them to stay a bit longer they would be here today.  If only she had received help sooner, perhaps she would still be here and looking forward to Christmas with her four children.  If only they went to an earlier show.  If only they had spoken to someone, anyone, our children would still be here with us.

And maybe, just maybe there was one thank god I kept her at home today because she said she wasn’t feeling well.

The last thing my mother used to say to us each and every morning, as she stood waving us off to school, was “be good.”

I think I was.

She still says it to me today if I am going somewhere. 

I think I am.

I tell my kids to “have fun” when I wave them off at the school gate.

I know they do.  I don’t know what the future holds for them but I do know we are extremely fortunate to live in a country where the laws are different and yes, they may be bullied, but the chances of them being gunned down in cold blood are very, very remote. 

So by all means be good.  Be very, very good.  To yourself that is. 

Let me Entertain You

Right.  So I don’t entertain my kids.  By that I mean, I am not a make and do mother. I hate glitter.  I hate it so much that when my kids come home from school with it on their masterpiece, that work of art goes straight in the bin.  No looking back.  No regrets.

Birthday cards with glitter on them do not get put in their scrapbooks.  Glitter is not pretty and shiny; it is brightly coloured bits of grit.  Budgies eat grit.  You bring grit into the house on your shoes.  Your cat shits in grit for god sake.  There is no room for glitter in my house.   

Apologies if I went on a bit there, but that is the strength of my dislike for the stuff. 

When it comes to doing stuff with the boys, you might catch me making a jigsaw with them.  You will definitely hear me “spelling down” a word for Oldest Boy when he is writing one of his stories.  I will (under duress/pester power) read stories during the day.  If they want to draw a picture, I will provide them with the paper and colours and they do the rest themselves.

I let them crack eggs when I am baking and Shy Boy loves to peel carrots for me.

I don’t join them in their games and I don’t “solve” their boredom complaints.

When we had our Halloween party, I didn’t organise Halloween games.  We don’t pass the parcel or pin the tail on the donkey at birthday parties either. 

I don’t entertain kids. 

They don’t need it. 

In fairness we have four and they entertain themselves and each other.  Mostly.  Sometimes.

It wasn’t always this way, however.

When Oldest Boy was Only Boy Child, I did an awful lot of entertaining.  I spent as much time on his play mat as he did.  I sat on the floor and shuffled around plastic blocks and a myriad of cuddly stuffed toys that were binned as soon as he tired of them.

We watched those Baby Einstein DVD’s which bored me to tears and in hindsight, him too.   

Until the day I put on the Old McDonald one and realised I hit pay dirt. It was the only one he would watch.  Over and over again.

Happy days.

I spoke out loud to him about everything and I feared he might never learn to speak purely because he wasn’t able to get a word in edgeways with me yakking on all the time.

When I think back on the days I took him to the bathroom with me.  Because, don’t you know, he would die of boredom and or loneliness for the two minutes it took me to cross the hallway and use the facilities. 

These days I run to the bathroom for refuge and lock myself in there. 

No, I don’t entertain my kids.

We were never entertained growing up.  Toys were strictly for Christmas and we made do for the rest of the year.  Poster paints that came in pots you could store your eye shadow in today, back then were still being used in the summer months.  Purely because once they were gone, that was it.  No more.

We learned to swim by going to the pool each week.  Self-taught for 10p a session and 10p for the shop on the way home where we carefully and meticulously picked out our money’s worth of penny sweets.  In those days you could get two for a penny.  The lady in the shop always had great patience for us, four or more kids, each of us taking turns to pick out the sweets we wanted.   

We didn’t watch television.  Certainly not to the extent our kids, watch it today.  Trips to the cinema were a very rare treat.  I think we were teenagers when the first video player came into the house and that was only on loan as our cousins were going on holiday and we got to babysit their VCR. 

We enrolled in a thing called The Summer Project when we were kids.  A far cry from your Cul Camps and your Football Clubs and whatever else is all the rage these days. 

The Summer Project, if I remember correctly, cost 80p each to join up and then you paid a further 15p for each activity you signed up to do.  Every child in the town paid to play rounder’s, tennis, to go swimming, and have video afternoons.  It was great.

We also used our bicycles to get into town.  Nobody drove us to our clubs and we also had to make our own way to school and home again each day.   

I was lucky though.  When I was little, there were enough of us to entertain each other.  Our mother never read us bedtime stories.  We didn’t own jigsaws.  She certainly never got down on the floor to play with us.    And television consisted of just two channels one of which did not wake up till mid-afternoon.

We lived out in the country and did not see our school friends from one end of the summer till the other.  We didn’t go on family holidays.  None that I can remember, that is. 

The ones I do remember were spent as pre-teens in Birr, Co. Offaly, with relatives, for a week or two.  We swam in the river in Birr town and some days went to Banagher to swim in the river there.  We always had ice-cream afterwards.

As kids at home, we spent our time roaming the fields and playing in some practically dilapidated sheds, totally at one with nature and each other.  We really did leave the house first thing in the morning and returned only at meal times. 

We had the run of the place and the countryside.  Nobody came after us to stop us from climbing, exploring, discovering, wandering.  When my little brother came along, he literally lived in the hedges. 

Yes, our parents were wary of the road.  I have a strong and abiding memory of the front gate tied shut and a plank of wood jammed in where a railing was missing.  We still played tennis on that road.  We rode our bicycles up and down.  One winter when we had a heavy snow, the road was our ice rink. 

We didn’t know what video games were.  We did know what was going to be for dinner because we tended to have the same thing every Monday through to Friday.  Friday being our favourite as it was always proper home-made chips that day – made from peeling and chopping spuds and using a chip pan.     

And we were always hungry.  There was always dessert.  On Saturdays there was even a packet of biscuits, Custard Creams I think, with a cuppa afterwards.  That same packet of biscuits called me in from the back of the aforementioned sheds.  I had run away.  The back of the sheds was as far as I got.  My parents didn’t even know I was missing.

I got a reading part each and every year at our Christmas plays in school.  Nobody in the audience had a recording device. 

Our Christmas tree was religiously put up, much to our chagrin, on the 23^rd of December.   

We were almost sick with excitement and up at dawn on Christmas morning. 

We didn’t have much but we never went without.  I know that our mother did to see that we didn’t. 

Our kids get a small toy when we do the grocery shop.  A small toy multiplied by four means an added twenty euro onto the cost of the shopping.  That small toy either gets lost in the shop before we leave, gets dropped down behind a car seat and left there or the dog will eat it within a few hours. 

I have to beat them away from magazines that cost more than a chicken.  They have swimming lessons.  I bring them to the cinema on occasion.  They get brought out for breakfast every Saturday morning and sometimes even have a hot chocolate.  Each.  Complete with cream, marshmallows and a flake bar.  (Thanks, Barry!)

They get a Kinder Egg once a week.  Friday is Freddo Friday in our house. 

I don’t begrudge them their treats.  Much.

But I do not entertain them. 

Happy Birthday to Me.

I can remember dying, literally dying to turn 16. Thanks to all of those American teenage romance novels I thought I was going to be born again.

Being 16 would mean the Valentine’s Day cards would finally arrive.  I’d figure out how to wear my hair loose without it flopping into my eyes.  And cure it of its fizziness.  Discos!  God, discos!  

Overnight I was going to stop being clumsy and awkward.  My skin would clear up and I could throw out that awful Clearasil that wasn’t working anyway. I would stop burning and getting more freckles during the summer and have a tan.

And.  And I was going to get kissed.  By a real live boy! A small problem, but.  It would mean having to talk to one first.  And I didn’t know any. The other small, but equally large dilemma was that I went red at the drop of a hat and Jesus I couldn’t risk that happening.  It would be so embarrassing.

I was so envious of the other girls with clear skin and long sleek hair who didn’t fall over and who could chat effortlessly with members of the opposite sex.  I put it down to their having older brothers so were used to the male of the species. 

I conveniently refused to acknowledge those who didn’t have older brothers and were still able to do it.

So my 16^th year wasn’t all that.  Never mind.  I had my 18^th to look forward to.  For some reason, that was another big age for me.  I would be legal.  To do what exactly though?  Drink?  Vote? Have sex?  Move out of home? Drive?  Or were you allowed do some of those things at just 17? 

As it turns out I can’t remember my 18^th birthday.  I spent it in hospital having been involved in a road accident. I probably wouldn’t have celebrated it in any great style anyway.

Roll on my 21^st.  Great things were ahead.  I was earning a wage, had the obligatory steady boyfriend and a social life to match. And I had read at a very young age that you didn’t get new freckles when you were in your twenties.  Bring it on!  

I laughed when I was told things would whizz by in a blur once I hit my twenties.  Of course I laughed; I knew everything.  Don’t we all at that age?

I was only twenty-one.  I had my whole life ahead of me.  Loads of time.  What was she talking about?  That lady, her name is Anne, was right. 

I have no idea where the last nineteen years have gone.

On Saturday 8^th December, I will be forty years of age. 

I spent my teenage years wanting to be someone I wasn’t.  Today I would tell my 16 year old embarrassingly yet sweetly innocent self, that sweet 16 and never having been kissed is not such a big deal. I wasn’t the only one, despite what my friends wanted me to think.

So I was sporty instead of social?  So I liked to read and spend time in my room alone instead of talking on the phone. 

In my twenties I grappled for and desperately sought self-confidence.  Spent way too much time second guessing a lot of my decisions and envying those who always seemed to land on their feet, managing to sail through life unscathed.  I still hated my freckles and was obsessed with finding the perfect foundation to cover them up.  Suddenly there was a lot of male attention and wouldn’t you know it, I was still awkward and had no idea how to deal with any of it.  

In my thirties I realised that all of us, warts and all (or freckles in my case) are only human and even those who had led my idea of a charmed life, had fucked up somewhere along the way.  They, like the rest of us, rose from the ashes, dusted themselves off and just kept going.

What happens today is wrapping for tomorrows fish and chips.

Now that I am on the cusp of being forty years of age, which let’s face it, is middle aged, I know who I am.  I have found my skin.  And I kind of like it.  Even the freckles.

I know what I like and I like what I know.  I like me.  For a while there I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. 

A part of me still doesn’t.  There is still a void there, waiting to be filled.  I still say I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. 

I think I will always be looking for, always searching and striving towards……….. something. 

And that’s grand because I am still growing too. But unlike my younger, naïve and hapless self of yesteryear, the now older, yes older, and definitely wiser me knows that in order to make something happen, wishing on a star just won’t cut it.  There can be no sitting around talking the endless talk and waiting till someone else does it to examine the pros and cons.

There can be no living vicariously.  What is the point?

We only get one life.  And this is it. 

Regrets are fine.  We all have them.  But that is all they are; regrets.  They are for yesterday.  Today is for the here and now.  Today is for living.  Our life is for living, regardless of age.

If there is something you want to do, take steps towards making it happen.  16 steps, 18 steps, 21 steps, 40 steps. 

The sooner you start the fewer steps you will have to take.    

As for me?  Well, turning 40 is going to be my second chance at being 16.  Not so sweet, definitely not so innocent but all the more wiser with it.    

I'm a Believer

When I was growing up I believed in a few things.  I believed cigarette smoke made the clouds in the sky.  I believed the local librarian, Mrs. Caffrey, was the famous children’s author, Enid Blyton.  I believed that if you spilt water on the ground it would make the rain.  I believed cars on television with sabotaged brake cables, could be stopped from speeding out of control simply by turning off the ignition.    One particular episode in Hart to Hart still stands out.  I believed I was going to marry MacGyver. 

Now I believe I’m going to marry Brax from Home and Away when I grow up.

I believed mothers couldn’t drive until I started school and saw otherwise.    One of my sisters used to think that Bobby Ewing from Dallas lived next door to us.  My brother believed that pouring salt on his dinner cooled it down. 

Today Screecher Creature No. 1 is of the belief that sausages will give him a tummy ache.  Screecher Creatures No. 2 and 3 believe that a sticking plaster will make anything better including a bump on the head.  Yes, I obliged and stuck plasters on their hair once.  The tricky and painful act of removing them ended that little belief.

Screecher Creature No. 4 at the tender age of 19 months believes I am the best thing that has ever happened to him and that I can make everything right in his little world.  And because he is the baby and I am his mother, I make damned sure everything is right in his little world.

Screecher Creature No. 1 thinks that sleeping on the very edge of his bed prevents nightmares.  But the three older boys strongly believe a Monster Kiss smack bang on the middle of their foreheads will keep bad dreams at bay.  Of course it doesn’t and there is hell to pay when this is discovered.  I can usually talk them down with a hug and a kiss but occasionally there is a little more work involved. 

I believed in Santa Clause until I was about 11 or 12.  As a young teen I was absolutely mortified that I was “a believer” for so long, but looking back on my innocence, I reckon I got the better deal. 

I remember the day I found out.  It wasn’t my parent’s decision.  It wasn’t through a friend telling me.    I was totally excited and looking forward to Christmas.   I asked a girl in my class, another believer, if she had written her letter to Santy.    We had a lovely chat amongst ourselves about what we had asked for.

I have no idea how it came about but our teacher, of all people, someone in a position of authority, took it upon herself to chastise the other girl for being “so silly” as to believe in the fairy story that was Santy. 

I remember sitting there with a smile plastered to my face.  I was in absolute shock and a state of disbelief as I listened to the other believer loudly protest and insist that Santy was real.  My world came crashing down that day as the perfect illusion of Santa Claus was shattered.

Finding out the truth about the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny is one thing.  But Santy?   

That is a different ballgame altogether.  Santy represents magic, mystery and an all-consuming excitement that can induce vomiting.  Every child has a right to a little magical mystery in their childhood.  The longer it lasts, the better.

I don’t remember this but my mother said I told her Christmas was ruined for me after that.  It took the good out of it. 

I hope our boys get as long as I did out of the fantasy that is Santy.  And I certainly hope they don’t get told the truth by a careless teacher.

It was an innocent game of hide and seek on Christmas Eve that unearthed the reality for some of my younger sisters.  Hiding in the pump house, they found themselves in the company of bulging black sacks.  Naturally enough, little fingers poked holes in the plastic and all was revealed. 

Of course, everything Santy represents also means anything is possible and today parents are doing their utmost to ensure Santy delivers. 

Parents everywhere are stressing over the constant demands that their children are making and wondering how they are going to pay for it all.  Our house isn’t any different.  But I believe that kids are entitled to be spared from all the worry and stress. 

Our boys want everything they see on the dreaded television.  I mean everything.  They get so carried away even Barbie’s pink castle, her pink clothes and pink horses are asked for.  I say “yes” to everything.  “Yes, you can have that. If that is what you want, and we have enough money for Santy, then you can have it.” They always respond with, “Oh, thanks!”  Thanks, Mammy!”  All they want is an answer.  And if it’s a positive one, they’re happy.  They just hear the “yes” part and block out the “only if we have enough money” bit. 

They are still of an age where they will be happy with what they get on Christmas morning.  What they see in front of them will be more than enough and all previous thoughts of Barbie and fluffy barking dogs will be forgotten.

I know that cigarette smoke does not make the clouds in the sky and spilling water does not make it rain.  I have also discovered that Brax is only 31 and has a Real Life Long Term Girlfriend.

But a part of me will always believe in Santy. 

And I will do my damnedest to make sure my kids believe for a long time to come.