a black tuesday

Some days begin deceptively. With sunshine, or some sign of prettiness that brightens. And then the blackness comes, with a phonecall, or an ominous crack, a frightened cry.

There will be black days for everyone. Days when we have to be strong, and swim through the grief that tries to overwhelm us and pull us under. The weight of those we're trying to keep above the water pulls us in with them. It's a cruel mantle to assume, the task of being the strong one, when your heart is bleeding or breaking or the weight on your shoulders feels too much.

Or the pain is too much to live through. There is so much to lose, in having human capacity for love. And loss, and loneliness. And yet, there is no other way we can do it.

My heart is swelling and bursting with the pain of not being there to soak up some of the hurt and helplessness. I am sending love, and light, and care, and prayers to wrap you all in.

Keem Bay

Achill

3.

At one end of the Atlantic drive, along the coast from the last beach I blogged about, lies Keem Bay. It's a hidden green jewel of a beach, at the foot of big mountains, eaten into the cliff.

the road there, heading away

Middle picture refuses to go in the middle! No triptych for us  :(

My grandmother remembers going there before there was any road at all. And there was a huge rock in the sea in the middle of the beach.

Now there's a stream that flows down from the mountain, under the car park and onto the beach.

                                                   

The kids had such a ball playing in the resulting pool. The incoming tide reshapes it every night. The water is a deep dark brown red, like rusty old blood. You can't see the bottom. One our last day, we let them stay til the tide washed in and cleared half of it away. It's fascinating somehow.

There was a dead fish in it though, the first day - stranded from the tide I suppose. I wasn't sure if it was safe to let kids play in water something was decaying in. What do you think?

You drive up hill again to get home, then down along the cliff - I like going back better, because I'm not right beside the edge, thinking about ... driving over it. Bodhi was mildly alarmed as well. It's so worth it though.

Still, it's nice to get back down again.

skin to skin miracles

When I saw a snippet in a magazine talking about how doctors 'have now discovered' that being held is good for prematures babies it filled me with that familiar frustration and 'duhhh' feeling that I so often have in the wake of scientific findings.

We've known for a long time that skin to skin contact is necessary for establishing bonding and good feeding habits and so on. In Drogheda, when my sister in law had her section, the midwives even made my bil whip his shirt off and hold his son against his skin while he waited for momma to get sewn up. Progress!

But this story, ach. Weepy and stunning: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20100827/twl-mum-s-miracle-cuddle-brings-baby-bac-3fd0ae9.html

I really hope this doesn't upset anyone who's lost a baby - it's a happy story in itself, but might be hard to take.

For those who want to have little sweet girlchildren

Olivia, yesterday: When I get married I will have to have a contract with my husband so that he can't call me sweet names, like, 'honey, I'm home!'

We just heard a bang from somewhere in the house.

Bodhi: What was that?
Olivia: that was just Mum, torturing an Old Man.

Achill

2.

Keel. On the way in, the mountain calls your eye away from the road. Maybe that's why there is a yellow warning sign with the word 'Danger' written on it in big letters, without any hint of what that danger might be. Other than sheep. I wanted to stop and get a photo of Olivia under it, making her evil face, but that might have been courting disaster and the gods of Irony, really.

The beach is wide and long, with little dunes and shallow water. When we were there, two girls in pretty dresses came and paddled, then waded, then joined Olivia in kneeling in the water. They just came out without their swim stuff, but it made an atmospheric picture that made them seem Amish and Meaningful somehow. Like a grieving pair of sisters in a Synge play, perhaps.

The sun kept going in while the kids were in the sea, and coming out as soon as they dressed. Bodhi gets purple and shivery and Olivia stays in way too long and gets whiney. But they both love it.

Achill Island

It's a long drive there. Officially five hours, though it took us more with a stop and a couple wrong turns trucks and tractors and traffic in the towns (no bypasses yet, not a lot of dual carriageway either). It only took Axel three, leaving at six am. Woo.

But then you drive onto the island, over this bridge

And you smell the salt and the turf smoke and you see this view:

I'm tired, they won't go where I want them to, so this must do.

Then as you drive off into the island, you turn towards Dooega, over a road across the turf, in between the mountains. Hard to get photos while driving, and from the car. I would have liked to get one of the Community Services Alert Area sign, surrounded by sheep, and nothing else but heather and scenery.

Basically, there's a little road over a hilly bog surrounded by mountains, all green and purple and no people anywhere for a while. It's quite epic, my snatched snaps don't do it justice. Though yesterday evening, we were heading home from the beach, and Bodhi was looking for sheep. 'There's two,' said Axel. 'Wait, no, that's a bridge. No, it IS sheep! There are little bridges every so often, as so many streams run down from the mountain. But it this case, there were two sheep standing on opposite sides of the road, wooly bums facing towards us, looking just like the end of a bridge. Cute.

Anyway. You come over a bridge, or towards it, depending on your road of entry, and there's the house:

I couldn'tget hte satellite to wrk, so I'm kind of sorry it's there. Not picturesque. The kids were too scared to climb up and sit on the roof, sadly. The house itself is basic, and a little damp through uninhabitedness and ... damp - but then there's the view...

that looks like this, or this:

Often in the space of a few minutes.

Take note of my uncle's fine and touching handmade gate. Bless him :)

More later! It was a long drive back and I'm weary. Olivia is bored already and wants the computer. I was going to wax poetic about how it felt to arrive there, and the smells and feelings of nostalgia and elation the place awakes in me, but, ah well. Maybe better without!

dark ages of internet connection

I was going to post about the island, with pics of the panorama all cut short because  my lens can't fit it all in. BUT O2's mobile broadband is so crappy I can't even bring myself to try.

So, you'll have to get it on my return.

It doesn't want me to respond to comments, either. And it won't let me sign in to msn. So glad this is just a free trial!

guilt!

Oh no! It's my mil's birthday today. And Axel stopped in to see her on the way home - and she sent me home a present! On her birthday! Because I made a cake for her!

Agh! She bought me oven gloves - nice red ones with poppies on - because I'd complained a while ago that I needed them (mine are about ten years old and let the hot in) and about how crappy it was that I see buying new oven gloves as a luxury. And the worst thing is, I bought myself a top the other day, for €40, despite the fact that I have no money and if I was buying anything for anyone, it should have been a birthday present for HER. And now she's bought me a present on her birthday! Ohhh, I may go to hell for this!

messages abound...

Irish holidays, oh yes.

So, tomorrow, I am taking the kids to Achill, a barren but beautiful island perched on the Atlantic coast. It's meant to be nice tomorrow, while we're making the five hour drive there but piss rain and storminess on Sunday.

Axel has vague plans to come over on Sunday night or Monday morning or something, but he has to be back by Wednesday evening so I have hte sneaking feeling he's just doing his thing of saying he will and then not. He's going to ask the band lads to come too, but he hasn't yet - I wonder if he's arranged time off work.

But, we'll see. I am no longer invested in stressing over things like that, non, non. I waited around to do stuff with him for years, and years, and never did. So now... new approach. His mother is amazed that I feel I can drive across the country with the kids, and stay by ourselves. She didn't worry so much when I flew to California with them when my aunt died, other than to tell me Bodhi was my priority as he was sick at the time. She also feels confident that if her husband had left her with young children she would have managed fine, while I can't get it together to put clothes away or sweep the floor.

I did used to be scared of driving big places or new places, but I'm getting over that these days.

I am bringing the laptop with me though, and a trial mobile broadband key - ìt remains to be seen whether it will charge for me or not.

I don't know why my blog-inspiration well has been so dry over the last couple weeks. I hope it comes back. I've been filling myself with cake and cookies all week instead of doing practical things, it's a scary addiction, you know. I'm so fat! I hope to drag my children up mountains if I can, and work some of it off.

See you soon, hopefully!

compulsive divulgence

Whoof, lord. Is it just me? I am so afflicted with this need to tell. I need to tell you it all, all the things I feel and need and want and love. I wish I had the urge to write big popular, gripping novels instead of this need to share my innermosts. Things that perhaps are better unsaid. My conflicts and yearnings and sadnesses. What is this impulse to say things out loud, or even more to write things down out loud? The pen and page don't cut it any more. It needs to be announced. Some sort of validation, maybe, making it real.

Right now there are all sorts of things I can't say out loud, and other things I should be saying that I can't bring myself to, though I will, soon. But the weight of all the words and want pressing down on my shoulders is elephantine.

This looks hard to do but the nd result is cool. http://www.origami-instructions.com/origami-elephant.html

tell me a story

Bodhi asked  for booby milk tonight, reluctant to sleep despite his tiredy self. He refused water, but I distracted placated him with a story of a green blue sea dragon with scales shining golden in the sun that brings little boys underwater and offers them the chance to be sea dragons themselves. I wasn't sure what the right way to finish the story was, but Bodhi chose to stay and have fun under the waves, and then went straight off to sleep. He felt no need for the little boy to return to his worried mother at all.

I am immensely cheered by that.

Sing ho for a life of adventure, unfettered by guilty ties to wailing mammies!

powerful essay

It's been a while. Where have I been? Well, baking for the boot sale today, which was not so productive, bah humbug. I shall not be there again. But one has to try, I suppose. One has to try.

I just read this beautiful, heart breaking essay that should really stop me complaining about my kids' eating habits ever again.

I am super tired. I'm going to go to bed... was up late baking, up early with Bodhi peeing in the bed for the first time. I lay down and fell asleep this evening and apart from nearly biting clean through my lip (anti-teeth grinding move as I hadn't got my guard in) it felt soooo good to just go asleep. I woke up at 7.30! And now I think it's time to return to those arms.

I was just reading Gillian McKeith again the other day, and seeing all the things that are wrong with me and why (various vitamin definciencies) and what to do about them, and one of the things was not going to sleep before 11 and therefore not recharging, to put it simply.

She can't cure my run on sentences though. Anyone care to analyse my death grip on those?

yawn. Read that essay, it's so moving and sad and beautiful. God bless mothers.

flatpack fatigue

Ooof. I was going to go to the beach today. But then Axel said he'd go to Ikea and get the desk we wanted - and I'd just efficiently JumbleTowned the other too big one. So I thought we'd all go so the kids could see him, as he was dashing to practice for 2 and has a gig tonight.

But, urg, the desk was discontinued. Last April. Time waits for no man. So, ugh, there was much messing as well as an Ikea lunch - Bodhi wouldn't touch his meatballs til he could have his jelly at the same time, and then he munched both all up. Strange palate, that child. Daim cake is still tasty, Ikea cupcakes, though good value, are not as nice as mine, affirms Olivia (SCORE!) and for a company that doesn't do a vegetarian option, the salad bowls should be bigger than ashtrays. Indeed. But I did get a bookshelf for €15 which isn't what I wanted as such, but will do the job nicely for now. No chests of drawers because none of them were right. I am Ms DIY of late, I've even been drilling things. Well. Screwing things in - when it comes to making new holes, I'm still a bit wimpy.

So here I am, cross legged on the floor, the monitor like my campfire, the keyboard perched on my knee. Such nonsense. Seriously. Why do things not just go smoooothly? The simple things? There always seems to be a lump in the custard. Bah, I don't know.

I think I'm going to do cakes on Sunday, at the Greystones car boot sale, if anyone's around, come, buy biscuit cake! I'm asking the universe for the loan of a wee gazebo, anyone, anyone? Not having any money is getting old. I feel foolish for not going looking for TEFL work. Sigh.

I'm at a bit of a loss, because Dan is away - no one to chat to... so I'm going to go watch True Blood, I think. Because it seems I could keep writing this aimless post forever. Oh well... one of those ones...

children's book post

This is a lovely book. One of those ones I got from the library for Olivia and just revisited with Bodhi. Check it out if you're looking. Beautiful pictures and atmosphere. All about children's imagination and also attitude to nature and wildness.

And for older kids, There's Toby Alone. It's written by a French man as you can see but it's seamlessly translated by someone who married into the Ardizzone family. A name that holds warmth for any reader of children's books. A smooth translation is a beautiful thing.

It's beautifully illustrated and a little bit scary - I got it for Olivia who's just reading her first ever grown up book. I don't remember learning to read, but it seems magic to me, how the words just started popping in this last year, and now she's reading the BFG, the book that my friend got her for my baby shower - as she said when Olivia walked into the kitchen reading it, here we are, suddenly it's seven years later. Bang.

But it fills me with pride, and delight, and happiness for her, that this wonderful world of fiction has just opened up to her. Oh, the places she'll go!

new blue grown up room

I have two little sleepers in their new room, their rich turquoise blue room, in new beds. Bodhi's just gone to sleep without boobie-milk for the first time in ages. Olivia is high up in her new bunk with another tooth in a small box under her pillow. Ahhh, it's good.

The paint is gorgeous, and only took one coat (well. I would have put another on but I did the scrubbing off of the purple, not the putting on of the blue. And I worried then about wasting money, because it was so heinously expensive. But this morning, as Axel didn't get up before work time once again, it occurred to me that there may come a time when there will be another room, in need of sky blue paint, and it will be good to have it then). Olivia's clouds look so sweet hovering in their new blue sky. I need a book shelf and a chest of drawers and I need to get rid of a rocking chair and get some new curtains, but all in all, it does look nice in there. And my little boy is all big now.

Sadlly, you can't really see the colour of the paint here - it's so rich and light and strong a  colour!

one grown up sleeping boy

New very high up bed!

And hi there - I have short hair again.

I just had some honey toast with cinnamon on it. Because I read this. Ànd because it's nice.

But it's making me want to make one of those cinnamon raisin roly things. I'm not sure exactly what I mean, but I think it involves pastry.

But. Instead I plan to go wash eco paint off Olivia's walls, so I can put some other eco paint on tomorrow. Operation Room Switch tentatively starts now.

I didn't blog about the fun incident whereby the insanely expensive eco paint arrived by courier and I opened it at the kids' request and then didn't replace the lid as firmly as I should have and Bodhi sped by it and knocked it right over ina big blue pool on the floor.

So with the help  of Nicola, I scooped it all back in, and the kids will now have hairy walls - but at least I'd just hoovered.

Sigh. I have no conclusion to this post.

Oh, except, does anyone have a recipe?

** Hmm. Like this one, maybe? http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,194,151167-232202,00.html

hand on my head, what have I here?

When I was small, my mother used to sing me a silly song that she must have grown up with. I never heard it in Ireland other than from her. These things surfaec when you have your own children.

It used to go

'Hand on my head, what have I here?
This is my head noggin, oh Mama dear
Head noggin, head noggin, nicky nicky nicky noo
That's what I learned at the school, Ma'

and then

'Hand on my eye, what have I here?
This is my eye peeper, Oh Mama Dear,
Head noggin, eye peeper, nicky nicky nicky noo,
That's what I learned at the school, Ma'

And it went on, with various funny words for body parts. I've been meaning to look up the words for years, and I just did, and fond this page, with SO many different versions. It's clearly of German origin (as was my mother, distantly, that and Scots, a dour pilgrim ancestry that I have written down somewhere) and from the posters' input it was obviously meant to be sung in immigrant English, like a first or second generation grandparent might sing to their English speaking grandchild. Sweet, really.

Here's the link. Not that there's any reason to be interested, but ... well, there it is.  Anyone know it?

rights and wrongs

I just read that the judge who overturned Proposition 8 in California, Judge Vaughn Walker, said this of it: "Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians."




Well, yeah.

What's moral? From where does morality come? I don't particularly buy that we take our morality from what it says in the bible. Sure, our principles of morality are based around what Jesus taught, but he taught a lot of good things. About responsibility and authenticity and understanding, rather than an older model based around revenge and punishment.

Still. I'm not sure that gives us the right to point to random 'laws' that allow us to trample the rights of others, no. 'It says so in the Bible!!' Well, maybe, though I'd like to see you point out where and then translate it into socio-cultural context for me, but it also says that we must not eat the meat of shellfish or cloven hoovéd animals. Or get our hair cut. We seem to have let those ones slip into the past, why not this?

All the hysteria about gay marriage threatening hetero marriage. Come on. For a start, what a blatant hypocrisy to suggest that gay lifestyle threatens yours, while stomping all over theirs...

 I can't really understand why a gay couple would wish to marry in a church that has rejected and denounced them, so in essence their marriage would be a purely legal and emotional bond and how does that threaten Christian marriage at all? It does not.

My mil's friend's son died of a brain tumour in London last year. His boyfriend stayed by his side throughout his long illness and, it seems, married him at his death bed. Initially the son didn't want his mother to come over, perhaps because the boyfriend was there. It's a sad story, made sadder by the fact that his father didn't come near him, because of his gayness.

Apparently there was some memorial mass said for him in Bray recently, and the mil's other friend alerted her to the fact that the Husband from London had posted a notice that said something along the lines of, 'to my darling husband, I will always love you' etc.

They didn't tell his mother. Though surely she will have heard about it. Why did he need to do that? Why embarrass the man's father?

And in the same conversation, my mil has no problem with gays, though why they have to flaunt it in the street, she can't understand. This from a woman who has never in her life seen two men kissing anywhere off the television. Never mind flaunting it. She discusses Pride day with distaste, can't understand it, flaunting it in the street.

And I sigh, and fail to find convincing words to tell her that the husband's notice in the paper is political, in its way. It seems like he has the right to make that statement, awkward as it may be for his 'inlaws'.

Where were they all before, she wonders. And agrees that they were always there. And it's cruel, but I point out a truth: a lot of young men in Ireland killed themselves.

Morality. Show me a definition that really defends something like Proposition 8.

** I really should have mentioned something about psychological morality theories and the fact that it's generally concluded that advanced moral thinking departs from an establishmentarian stance and develops its own individual moral codes that can be adapted applied to differing situations. There is never one blanket answer.

Jo is trying not to narrate her own third person life in the style of mundane status updates after spending too much time on facebook

Jo wonders if anyone else frequently catches their baggy sleeve on the mixer tap lever, causing said sleeve to fill with water.

Jo just got her hair cut, but can't seem to manage to take a nice photograph.

Jo wonders if her children will ever stop fucking screaming at each other and herself.

Jo is nursing her heart, having just finished The Lacuna.

tumbleweed

I drove down the town yesterday morning, off to... somewhere? And as I approached, I was weirded out by the lack of traffic at 11am on a monday morning. An all the car park spcaes empty. The town was deserted, and all the shops had the shutters down.

Holy Crap! I said to my poor children, I knew Bray was in a bad way, but has it become a ghost town over night?

Baaaank Hooollidddaaaaaay, my brain whispered to me. Ah yes. That would be it, then.

pinball

My thinking bounces from wall to wall and back and forth again, over and over.

From the kids, to Axel, to his mother, to my responsiblities to other people, to my responsibilities to myself, to what about me? to the cost of such selfishness, to the cost of not changing things, to making things worse to bashing my head off a wall. Bounce, bounce, bounce. My head is ringing. My heart is squeezed.

Could, not should. What about me? Gah. How do I turn this thing off?


Oh yes! I remember why else I'm feeling all pinbally too - I was going to say. I'm gettign towards finishing the Lacuna and I'm totoally immersed in it. It seems to be all about love and loss and passivity (at least to me, right now, that's what I'm finding) and it's killing me. The narrator character is so sympathetic, yet frustrating. Mhmm. It's all just very sad, but a wonderful story. Barbara Kingsolver is amazing.

for blogland friends of Danielle

I have in my hand a text message from the Wilds. It has been requested that I pass on news from his exile in the wilderness.

Danielle was alarmed by his Minis' request to go sail round on a raft that you camp on. He has frequent flights of fancy about living a simple life outside of civilisation, but, always a man of dichotomies, he has an irrational fear of peeing in the bushes and cooking with fewer than two pots.

Text:

I fought a storm in a sm-boat*. And peet in the woods. Here are wild horses. More spiders everywhere. Blog about it if u like.

And then:

Aside that all is nice. The kids sing hey baby and swim in the lake. I have a martini (cooled in the water) and cook risotto. Life is beautiful.

He misses all his blogland friends.

I'm so proud of him for peeing in the woods!

 He says he hates text messages and won't send them, but then this unasked for little painting pops up. I feel we are ... lucky.


* An 'sm-boat' is a small motorboat apparently. I was moved to ask as well...

And another thing...!

My mother in law just irked my by referring to my friend who lives across the road from her as 'that girl', despite the fact that she's in her mid forties.

I'm reminding myself that she also refers to her seventy-smething friends as 'girls' too, so perhaps I'm just at she won't make the effort to remember my friend/her neighbour's name.

Still though. It leaves me wondering about the attitude towards women that leaves someone loathe to call them that. I'm thinking of people I know... I think I'd still refer to my friends in their twenties as girls, but definitely not anyone in their thirties or forties. Hmm. Except Cassie, perhaps, but then I've known her since she was 13 or something. We're both girls when we're together.

Maybe I don't mind being a girl still. But I've no problem being a woman either. Are we allowed grow up? Isn't it a good thing?

pet hate

You know what I hate? When you say something that people think is weird because they don't understand it, and they say 'okkkkkaaay'. Like you're odd and irrational and stupid and so are your interests.

I'm guilty of doing this on occasion when someone is being genuinely weird, but I think I'll resist in future. It's dismissive and irritating and you're so busy making a stupid noise that you can't stop to actually consider what the person is trying to express. T'would be better to expend that energy on working out what they're trying to say, and consider that the issue lies with your own non comprehension  rather than their lack of reason.

The same goes for people who say 'Aw, bless,' in  a condescending tone, as if to imply that you're 'special'.

It's rudeness masked by irritating teen type catchphrases, that's what it is. In my humble opinion :) You'd be better off just saying 'you're fucking mad, you, and I can't be bothered listening to you at all.'

Ah, there' s nothing like a pointless rant in the morning.

And if you're thinking of saying 'ookkkaaayyy' in the comments you can stop right there, I've busted you.

opinion?

Question: If you have a rare urge that's been building for a while to make something extremely fattening and you need to lose significant amounts of weight, should you indulge or supress it?

I have had two peanut butter cookies in perhaps the last 25 years and I've been thinking about them a lot for the last few weeks.

I gave in and bought peanut butter today. The recipe calls for a cup of peanut butter and half a cup of butter and a cup of sugar, oh my. I suppose I could try doing some healthy substituting...