Back to the unreal life

Christmas was lovely. Home was lovely. It was great to be back. There were, of course, downsides, like cold Irish houses and vicious hangovers and Dublin prices, but these merely serve to remind one that this is the real world. Not this fictitious always-warm, cheap-because-it’s-the-middle-of-nowhere, temporary life we lead for the other eleven and a half months of the year. Dublin hits you with reality like a gust of rain in the face and punches you in the gut with house prices.

I had a few moments of, anxiety, let’s say, when the whole baby-job-house-future notion started to look like far more than we could chew. The trouble with trying to plan a baby is that once it’s on track you can’t stop halfway through the pregnancy and say, “Let’s just shelve this for now. We can pick it up again later when things have calmed down.” And then, feck, you’re baby-owners in Texas, with all the extra stuff that entails, not to mention the actual infant, moving to who knows where for however long it might be, and will you ever manage to live at home as you keep assuring your family that one day you will?

But I know that life goes on, and people have babies, or don’t, and move to other countries or other states, and live there for a few years or ever, and change their plans and make new ones, and I don’t actually have to have it all set in stone right now.