Butterfly days

Bare shoulders, freckled (mine). Sunkissed legs, growing longer (hers). A constant anthem of "I'm hungry." (Two growth spurts, ongoing.) Huge butterflies on the orange flowers, they flip and flutter past in yellow, blue, and black; no longer a cause for excitement, taken for granted in these late days of summer.

We're sick of sunscreen and mosquito bites. We yearn for structure. We need a more pressing reason to get dressed than the fact that we've run out of frozen waffles again. The summer is done for. It's dead and dusted and we're apathetic and dusty and ready to move on.

What will I keep in my heart from the summer my children were seven and four? Turning 40, going to BlogHer; baseball games and campsites and cold-pressed coffee. I feel like the summer didn't have a theme, a particular game played or toy loved or achievement unlocked. It was the summer Dash started baseball and vision therapy, the summer Mabel got Rapunzel and learned to swim, the year we all went to Ithaca and that I went to Chicago alone with several thousand other bloggers. The summer I had a purple bag, the year Dash had silver trainers and Mabel wouldn't wear shorts. 

I sometimes feel we're not doing America right, especially in the summer. We don't grill enough, we rarely dine on the deck (because of the mosquitoes and because bug spray worries me as much as the bites do). My children do not gorge themselves on berries and watermelon and corn on the cob and as a result I spend a lot more time denying access to ice-cream than enabling it. We haven't been to the beach once this summer, and the single attempt at seeing a family movie was aborted before the trailers were over. We went camping but never lit a campfire, the kids didn't love summer camp, and once again we did not grow any vegetables of our own.

Maybe next year we'll do it better. In the meantime, the butterflies are beautiful.

Promise

The trees are holding next week's blossoms tightly furled and fuzzy in the palms of their many hands, each one ready to burst forth given just a little more sunshine, a little more warmth, a little more time. They are a beautiful dark red, waiting to explode into pink.

The sky is grey, briefly blue, streaked with white, then grey again. A flurry of snowflakes, a handful of gravelly graupel, some rain that starts and stops and starts again. It's a particularly hard March, and that's just on this side of the Atlantic. At least here I can be pretty sure that eventually spring warmth will come - and after that (with luck, not too soon after) the hot and humid days of summer. In Ireland, though the flowers will bloom and the trees will sway green and lush in the breeze, warmth is what you yearn for and heat will probably only be found somewhere further afield. It will come, the warmth, but not as much or for as long as everyone might like.

 
It's the grey first day of spring break and already the children have dropped their bikes and invaded the neighbour's house, where the toys are better and the snacks more plentiful. I just had a phone call from across the road to ask if they could eat a piece of leftover birthday cake. I was a little surprised that I was being asked such a no-brainer.

Purveyor of Cake: "Dash suggested I call and make sure it was okay to give you some."
Me: "Ah, isn't that sweet of him? What a good child."
P of C: "Mabel suggested she'd have some even if you said no."

That there pretty much sums up the children's personalities at the moment. Up and down; a little give, a lot of take; potential everywhere: just like spring.

Compare and contrast

It's a very Irish-looking day here in America, with the rain, no rain, torrential rain, less rain, no rain until you go out in it, and some rain going on all morning. Looking out the window I'm hard pressed to say what makes it America at all.

I see tall trees, taller than my house in suburban Dublin would have around it, but no taller than some in other parts of Ireland might be. They're still winter-spindly with no sign of spring, but some of the others I noticed this morning have a tiny amount of pink fuzz, just enough to make you gasp in relief, finally heralding a change. The air is softer today too; mild, we'd call it, which is an oft-used word in Ireland for any day when it's not bitter. Those are pretty much our extremes, I think.

The grass is wrong, I know. The grass in my back yard is dead yellow, with tufts of new-growth green in between. That doesn't happen to Irish grass: it stays lush and dark all year. You never understand why the tourists all exclaim over the greenth of the country until you've had a winter somewhere else, or a summer somewhere else for that matter.

There are still dead leaves wet at the bottom of the garden, in the corners and crevices. We're probably supposed to scoop them up, but more likely they'll stay there and turn to mush, to loam eventually, perhaps. We can keep hoping they'll blow away instead. Ivy climbs up the treetrunks, looking just like Irish ivy, dark green on craggy wood against a grey sky. My garden shed does not look like a garden shed. It seems here you can have two types of shed: the sort that looks like a miniature house, or the sort that looks like a barn. Mine looks like a barn, because it's an Amish shed, I'm told. Irish sheds are not Amish. They look like sheds. (If you need further explanation, you're not Irish. I'm not going to try.)

We have a deck, which is unIrish, and a rotary clothesline exactly like the one that still adorns my parents' back garden. I have wooden clothes pegs and plastic ones, but my parents only have wooden ones that are blackened  and thin with exposure and use - becuase in Ireland if you miss the start of the rain, you may as well just leave the clothes out there until the wind starts blowing them again. Here, I am lazy and use the clothes dryer in the winter. I blame it on my Reynaud's, which makes my hands painfully numb doing things like that in cold weather, but the truth is that we have the luxury of large American appliances, and I bask in that luxury and exploit it.

It's lashing again. Torrential. Floods, cats and dogs, Datsun cogs as the old joke goes; pissing, we'd uncouthly say in Dublin. Good for spring, I suppose. A couple more weeks and we'll be surrounded by the beautiful blossoms of the pear trees that line our streets here in the neighbourhood, and the days will be sunny and more than mild and the sky will be blue, and America will look nothing like Ireland once again. Except for my clothesline, the constant.

Room in my head

I love trying to bring up a memory that's hidden deep in my mind. I sometimes set out to find one, or to expand one further than I think I know. There's a knack to it, and it doesn't always work, but you have to hook onto a thread of something - from your childhood, probably, when your memory was an open plain to be filled - and tease it out, pulling, pulling, gently, looking around and delving inwards, until you produce a gem that you didn't know was there.

Today I noticed that a particular room I remember has become a location in more than one book I've read. My brain is a theatre filled with dusty sets and props - every now and then a new production pulls out the old stuff again and it's been so long that everyone's forgotten they were used before.

This room was in the home of a friend of my parents. Only children tend to be taken where plural children are not; they are unlikely to create mischief alone in a room full of adults, and given a book or some paper and crayons, can probably entertain themselves for a while; failing that, they can be precocious and entertain the adults while their parents attend a grownup gathering, drink wine in the afternoon, gently flirt with people who are not their spouse while observing their spouse doing the same thing across the room, and pretend that their life hasn't changed all that much.

So while I also visited this room on quiet afternoons with just my mother, what I remember most is tucking myself away in a corner while the adults mingled and jested and nodded and guffawed and tried out this newfangled wine-in-a-box. I remember the Russian dolls that lived in this house, dolls that I was always allowed to play with most carefully, and how the biggest one squeaked painfully every time her belly was wrenched open along its slice to disgorge her daughters and granddaughters and greatgreatgreats. I remember getting to the point where I would seek out my mother and pull her sleeve and ask, "Pleeeease can we go now?"

I think I remember, too, curling up on the spare bed in the front bedroom, with its soft black woollen coverlet of some sort of holey 70s knitting, and going to sleep there during an occasional evening party; at the end of which my parents would just hoist me up, toss me in the back seat of the car, and drive home. I do remember how the streetlights looked from my horizontal position, cosy in my sleeping bag, watching them flick past against the black; restful orange or bright white, hurting my eyes and sending out spears of light when I squinted.

And then we'd turn into the second-last road and then there'd be a sharp corner and I could always tell our hill by the gradient, as gravity pushed me against the join where the bottom of the seat met the back. Then a quick swing around (my father was quite the rally driver) and the same again as he backed down the steep driveway to the hidden carport at the back of the house.

And then I'd be picked up and I'd pretend to be asleep, and I'd be fireman-carried into the house and up the bumpy stairs and plopped into my own bed under the eaves, under the wooden ceiling, where I belonged.

Pretty cool

Dash is still pushing the envelope with his sister, and she's still yanking his chain:

- I love you a million. But I love mummy and daddy and friend-across-the-road giant.
- So do you love me giant?
- No.
- Tell me the truth.
- I love you seven. That's the truth.
- But do you love me infinity? I love you infinity.

**********

Somehow, a dichotomy has been established in our house between cool and pretty. Cool things are boy things and pretty things are girl things. Every time I hear some variation on this being trotted out, I tell them "cool can be pretty" and "pretty can be cool" and "nothing is just for boys or just for girls" and I hope some day it makes it through and out the other side by osmosis because at the moment they are rigid in their definitions.

**********

And I want to tell my daughter something:

Pretty is fine, but you don't need to be pretty*.

I want you to be strong, I want you to be heard. I want you to stand up for yourself and for others. Polite is good, consideration is vital; but I want you to above all keep yourself safe and sane, which means demanding the respect that is due to you and no less, as a member of the human race and as a woman.

• First, use common sense. You're smart. Act smart.
• Second, listen to your gut. Follow your spidey sense, never discredit a "feeling".
• Third, it's never too late to make a change for the better.

Pretty is fine, and good is nice, but strong is beautiful. Be strong, my beautiful daughter, and you will rule the world.


*Inspired by this blog post I happened upon recently, which quotes (but doesn't really attribute) a famous thing Diana Vreeland once said. And I have no idea who she was, but she seems cool.

In dreams

There's a road I walk along often in my dreams. The sea is on one side, a high wall on the other. The waves tend to be choppy and white-crested, the weather harsh. I am trying to get to an exam, or walking an impossible route to catch a train, or late for a performance of something unlikely. I may or may not be missing some clothes, or have lost my glasses. Maybe I've only visited this place once or twice in some very vivid dreams, but it feels as familiar to me as a path I tread every week.

I've always known exactly where it is, because this place exists in real life - though the wall might be a little craggier and the sea a little wilder in my dreams. It's near my old school, by a tiny local harbour with a marine-supply store my dad often went to. I don't know that I've ever walked that particular part of the path in reality, as it's beyond where we'd turn off to go down to see the boats, and I'd never need to go further by that route - but in unreality, it plays a frequent role.

I have no idea why my subconscious chose this place as the site of so many incongruous and frustrating adventures, and it had been a long time since I went there in person. I was driving to my parents' house a few days before Christmas, and I took the sea road, as we often do when we're home - I like to see the sea. The road turns up inland after a little and we usually follow it straight up the hill, but this time I turned back down a smaller road to go past the harbour.

There it all was: the stone of the tiny pier; the narrow concrete path, single-file wide; the sheer, slightly mossy granite wall - I probably hadn't been there for more than a decade, but I'd seen them all so recently and so regularly that if I stopped to concentrate, my feet and my fingers could trace every inch of it.

We didn't stop, though, because while in my dreams I'm usually alone, singular, in the daytime world I had two cantankerous and jetlagged children in the back seat, who were getting tired of being told to admire the sea.

"Why do we have to look at the sea again?" they whine.
"Because it's a rule," I say.
"It's not a rule." They are too canny.

But it is a rule. The sea is always there, and even when I'm an ocean and a landmass away, I have to stop and look at it in my dreams.

Official

The people in the waiting room had taken the American government's vague requirement to be "properly attired" in a fascinating variety of ways. There was a diminutive, aged Indian woman in a pale blue sari with silver embroidery. There were men in suits. There was a Rastafarian in his best dreadlock-covering hat, his best leisure wear and silver chain. There were women clearly dressed in their "good" dark-denim jeans with a plain sweater and clogs. There was Sunday-best and dressed-for-work. Some people kept their important documents in a plastic bag, some held manila envelopes. Mine were in a green cardstock file folder.

Mostly people came and went through the heavy door at the back of the room without expression, without incident. I read my book and tried to ignore the 24-hour news channel exploring an unimportant incident in far too much depth, from all the wrong angles. A young black woman bounced out of the room, smiling and making jubilant motions in the direction of her husband, who was minding the baby. She had obviously dressed with care: her tiny frame sported a shiny, teal, drainpipe-legged pantsuit, finished off with bright white bouncy sneakers. Her long cornrow braids shook with triumph as she kissed her little boy.

I had gone through at least three outfits the night before, rejecting the trousers that don't really fit any more because it was eight years and two babies ago when I used to wear them to work, and ended up in the exact outfit I wore for my mother-in-law's funeral last February: purple dress, teal slim cardigan, black boots. I was comfortable and felt like myself, not some other version of me that's not around any more or never was. And I looked as if I'd made an effort, which is all that "proper attire" turned out to mean.

My name was called. I followed the lady back to her room, where she shuffled and hole-punched and checkmarked pieces of paper as she asked me rote questions in a routine voice. First I had to stand up and promise to tell the truth, as if that would make any difference to an unscrupulous person. She wrote with her left hand at right angles to the pages, initialing and circling and numbering in red ink as she went, checking a whole row of boxes at once to catch up to what I'd already answered. I remained calm and collected and was a model student, getting all my civics questions right first time, even that elusively random number of Representatives in the House: 435. I wanted to say "Guam. Ask me the one about Guam. And that Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General of the United States. Those are my favourites," but I didn't, and she didn't.

Then she asked me about my family, and whether I'd ever been in prison, and whether I'd ever conspired against the goverment, or been a Communist, and some other questions. And then told me that she'd be recommending that I be granted what I had come for. I could take the Oath at two this afternoon if I liked.

I didn't like. My town has a Naturalization ceremony once a month and I'd assumed I'd do it at that; I hadn't planned to be away all day. Beyond that, I wasn't ready to seal the deal just yet. One step at a time, without thinking too hard, is the way I'm doing this.

Midway through the questions, I had almost started thinking about what I was doing, as she leafed through my Irish passport looking for stamps and dates. I don't have to give my passport to them, I'm allowed to keep it. I'll never not be Irish. I just don't like that one line that goes "I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen..." That's a lot to take on. That's a lot to ask.

I'm just going to say it and not think about it, which I'm sure is exactly not what the people intended, but there you go. It makes sense to do this, it's the practical thing to do for our family, to make sure we can stay here, where we've made our home, as long as we want to rather than finding ourselves chucked out at some sudden date if things go wrong and funding goes away and the letter of the law must be adhered to. I'm a sensible person. In the end, it makes no difference to my day-to-day life. America needs me, I tell myself, to be a sensible liberal-leaning democrat-voting, atheist, lactivist supporter for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

I'll say it, and I'll do it.

But always and forever, if you cut me, I'll bleed green.

Bare brick and polished wood

Mabel was wide awake for THREE AND A HALF HOURS last night, alternately wailing "I caaaan't get to sleeeeeeeeep withouuuuuut boooooobboooooo" and "Reeeeeead meeeee a boooooooook", and I had the theme tune to Go, Diego, Go stuck in my head; and I was all set to rant about it at length but then it ocurred to me that just maybe it was something to do with the booster vaccinations she got yesterday, and lo, apparently a possible side effect of the Varicella vaccine is insomnia, so I'm going with that because otherwise she's been sleeping unprecedentedly well and I didn't even want to talk about that for fear of breaking the streak, so we'll just move on now...

I just made Dash an appointment for an eye exam, because I noticed that he's holding the book very close to his face when he reads, and on questioning he said that he finds it hard to make out what's on the visualizer in school (I think this is the projector thingy that saves the teacher actually writing on the board). Genetically, glasses are highly likely if not inevitable, though I hoped the kids would manage not to need them for a few more years yet. However, it would be lovely if something as simple and fixable as that suddenly turned reading and writing from a chore to a pleasure for him, and I am now fantasizing that being able to see clearly would also make him so happy that The Rage would be a thing of the past and homework would be a breeze.

Just let me dream, okay? If he needs glasses, he'll get glasses, that's all. (Not like the last time.)

****************

Meanwhile, what I was going to say...

Yesterday we had ocassion to go to the local high school, because they were offering free flu-mist vaccinations (the sort they squirt up your nose instead of an injection), and both the children needed them. I'd never been on the premises before, though I drove past it multiple times a day before we moved up the road to this house. In fact, I've never been in any American high school before.

I know high schools tend to be big, and this is a particularly big one, but I was still surprised by the memories that were kindled when we walked through the doors: not thoughts of my secondary school (grades 7 to 12), but instead a strong sense of the Arts Building in my alma mater, UCD. (That's University College Dublin, not the University of California at Davis or the University of Colorado, Denver.) Partly it was the size, but mostly it was the architecture: the late-1960s style and exposed brick made me feel that if I opened a door I'd be faced with not a classroom but a vertiginously terraced lecture theatre.

I loved the UCD Arts Block. (That's Liberal Arts, if you're American.) It was my place in the world from October 1991 till May 1995, when I left partly because I feared if I didn't go then I never would. I might have stayed, and done a master's in Spanish Linguistics, or English Lit, and ended up... well, an unemployed MA instead of an unemployed BA, I suppose. In the Arts Block, I could roam the halls with impunity and claim a sun-drenched low, wide windowsill to read in, or snooze in, or, if lucky and with boyfriend, canoodle in. From the overpriced Finnegan's Break (oh, har har) cafe to the orange lockers in the LGs, past Dramsoc at the bottom of the stairs and sashaying to the strains of the jukebox from The Trap, where those majoring in pool hung out, to giant Theatre L for my English lectures or an L&H debate on a Friday night, and upstairs again to the Modern Languages corridor where the secretary of the Spanish Department was never around if you needed her, I was on home ground.

There was a wooden set of sculptures in the middle of the building that people could sit on, or around, or arrange to meet up at. The first time I saw them they struck a particular chord, somewhere deep in my memory, and the informative plaque confirmed it: the piece is called Pangur Bán, by Imogen Stuart, and it was first displayed in Dun Laoghaire Shopping Centre in 1976.

When I was three and four years old, I had regularly climbed that very sculpture, peered through its low-down spaces, found the tiny mouse hiding in a corner, delighted in stroking its smooth, cool, dark wood and laying my cheek against it - and here it was in a new location, stirring my sense memories a decade and a half later. It felt like a special, personal discovery, linking me to this new place before I'd even arrived. (Me and every other student from South County Dublin, maybe. But I don't know if they all remembered it the way I did.)

I felt like a very obvious interloper if I ever ventured into the Engineering Building, I'd only been in Ag once, and Science - despite the fact that my father had helped design it, the ugliest building on campus (it was the 60s; they couldn't help it) - was just about somewhere I was allowed be once I was dating one of its number, but the Arts (and Commerce, I suppose, grudgingly) Block was mine.

I didn't realise how right I felt there until I was about to leave. Just standing between the double set of doors at the main entrance by the "Information" desk (I use the term lightly), I knew that I couldn't hold on to it - I had to move on and make room for the students coming after me. I had no grand plans for the future; I didn't really know yet what I'd be doing in September, but it was time to go. Closing a chapter, wondering where the next one would open.

Sinking

Sometimes I feel like I'm functioning just a knife-edge away from mutiny, and that all I can do is to keep the crew (inmates, whatever) happy, whatever the cost, because if they lose it, then we're all down the tubes.

This is not a good long-term parenting strategy.

As captain/first-mate of the ship, I should wield some authority. But that assumes my crew is formed of rational adults who chose the job. In fact, the inmates almost in charge of the asylum are immature, irrational, and incapable of the simplest actions of self-preservation (eating food so that you don't go ballistic, for instance; sleeping during the night so that you can function reasonably during the day; using the bathroom when your bladder's full, for pete's sake). Not to mention the fact that they didn't ask to be born, not that anyone has thrown that one up at me yet, but it's only a matter of time.

So empathetic parenting is only part of the battle. There's also the part about teaching them to be reasonable human beings, doing things that are judged to be civilized and acceptable to the rest of society.

Sometimes I'm hanging on by my fingertips, wondering how I'm going to get myself out of this one, wondering who would win if it came down to just sitting it out, wondering why, with all my years of education and experience more than they have, it's not easier.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Rituals

There was a white bowl that was perfectly round, with no flat bottom to stand it on, with blue edges. I imagine it was enamel, though maybe that only sounds as if it might be right. It clearly hailed from the days before plastic bowls, when if something unbreakable was needed, this clanky item was the thing. When I fell off my bike and came into the house with a face red and ugly with tears and wails, it was filled with warm water mixed from the hot and cold taps in the bathroom. Then the bottle of Dettol - squat, with rounded shoulders - or the taller bottle of TCP with the ridged cap, came down from the high shelf above the loo, and a dash of it - no, that sounds too casual: maybe a capful carefully measured - was added, the golden liquid clouding briefly in the water before it dispersed.

A chunk of rough cotton wool was torn from the big roll, kept for no other purpose, it seemed, though it was singularly unsuited to this one, with all the little fibres to stick and be left behind; dunked, and used to wash the grit of tarmac out of the grazed knees, the skinned elbow. The warm water was soothing, but the Dettol stung like mad. "It'll hurt a little," she'd say, and I'd grit my teeth and wait for it. Or maybe I'd scrunch up my eyes in defence, but I always let her do it, because it was part of the ritual. This is what would make it heal, make it dry up nicely under the dusky-pink fabric plaster that was never the tone of anyone's flesh, least of all my pale white freckle-dusted red-head hue.

Then came a gentle dab of the violently pink antiseptic ointment, applied with the tip of the ring finger, the selection of the right size bandage from what remained of the assortment in the box, the pulling of the tiny red thread to remove the outer wrapper. Next, the careful lining up of the pad over the affected area, and the neat pulling off of the thin paper tabs, to make the sticky arms embrace my skin in perfect symmetry.

My father would advise, always, that the plaster should come off at night to let the wound dry out, even though the ads on telly proved, with one half of the little boy's neat cut covered and the other half exposed, that scrapes healed faster with Band-Aid. I still believed my Dad, though, because he knew everything.

------------------------------------

Much of this is the same, even here, even now. The canny symmetry of the band-aid and the magical way the sticky parts are uncovered and covering almost at the same moment never fails to provide solace. The fiddly red thread has gone, the pink ointment is still in my parents' house in Dublin, probably never to be used up, and I don't even know what Americans use in place of Dettol or TCP. I've heard tell of putting hydrogen peroxide on cuts, but that sounds unsafe to my still-Irish ears.

The plasters have to be called band-aids here or nobody understands you, and nowadays they're more often than not adorned with Dora or Buzz Lightyear or Spider-Man. My children are not so willing to let me wash their cuts as I was, and then they grab the band-aid and demand to do it themselves. It stays in place until it falls off in the pool or the bath, and I tell them, "There, that means it's better."

But the kiss, the final seal, the kiss-it-better: that never changes.

Days

Some days, it all seems too fragile to possibly hold together. Everything could spin off its axis at any moment, and we'd all go flying into the great beyond, scattered like seeds, inconsequential tiny parts no longer of a whole. We've shored things up here and there, piecemeal, against slings and arrows, but fortune is outrageous and doesn't care much. One gust of wind, a wrong turn, a decision made by someone else, might throw it all off.

(I don't know how people who don't have all that I have stay in the game at all. I would just sit in a corner and cry. No, I wouldn't. I'd do what I had to, but I wouldn't have time to think fancy thoughts and write them down.)

Other days, everything hums along nicely, and life is easy. (A little too easy. Nemesis must be waiting to clobber me.) Time stretches out to include the things we want to include; a trip to the playground can last as long as everyone's happy. Then, snap. The lack of a snack makes one turn on a dime and casts a long, shouting, crying, kicking shadow over the rest of the day.

As Alexander's wise mother said, some days are just like that.

Freeze frame

Green and pink and blonde and sunshine. A small warm body pressed against me, smooth skin and laughing grey-green eyes three inches from mine. A breeze dappling the shadows of the leaves and the swoop of a swing.

Yesterday, Mabel and I were killing some time in the playground. I sat on the swing beside hers, and she immediately hopped down and demanded a "spider". (This is what they call it when one child sits astride another on the swing, so their legs all dangle down to look like a four-legged arachnid. When she sits on me, it's not so even, but it's very cosy.) She sat up on my lap and hugged me tight as I launched us off the ground, her head nestled into my chest.

After a few minutes she moved her hands from my back to the chains of the swing and leaned out from me, laughing as we swung up so high and swept down so low. The viewfinder of my mind captured her hot-pink tutu frothing out under a minty-green smock, the intermittent September sunshine, tiny lens flares on my speckled glasses. An uncomplicated few minutes of simple love after a difficult morning.

It was one of those moments. You think you'll never forget them, but you'd like a camera just in case.

I didn't have my camera, but I can write it and keep it here, and that will have to do.

Tendrils

Okay, so Dash is back at school, B is gone to work, Mabel is taking an early nap (because she was up at 4.15am - thank you, time difference), and I have a cup of tea. I suppose I'm meant to get back to blogging every day or something.

But I can't bake anything until the fridge is fixed, and the man to look at it is only coming now in a few minutes or two hours depending on where in his window he deigns to arrive, and I've just finished the last of the delicious homemade choc-chip oatmeal cookies that my lovely friend brought to help ease in the transition back to being USAians, and I don't know what you want me to talk about.

Way back three weeks or so ago, I had nothing to blog about. Now my brain is full of this and that, deep thoughts and shallow, and I'm not sure yet how - or if - I want to corral them into segments to talk about here.

Three of my friends have announced pregnancies in the past month or so. I'm absolutely delighted for them, and there's nothing more reassuring or lovlier to hear about when you're dealing with death than the prospect of tiny new thrilling life. I don't feel the urge to join in, mind you.

---------

Readjustment is quick. The no-man's-land of being between homes is confusing to the soul, when each feels like the only possible reality and perhaps we have both and perhaps we have neither. Coming back to a cold, slightly musty house, with rooms that are too big and do not embrace you with your own history is disorienting. Leaving the soft air of Ireland to find torrential rain on the other side of the Atlantic is not welcoming. It's hard to turn your back on the comforting phalanx of elders, people who will stand behind you and look after you and feed you dinner - because you are the babies of the family, after all - and come home to stand on your own feet, a small (but perfectly formed) team of two functioning independently for your own babies, fixing your own damn fridge, making the world go round, again.

It will take a few days for the rambling threads of my consciousness to follow me back over the ocean and make sense of who I am, again.

a.m.

Thud.  Monkey gets out of his mini-loft bed.
Click. Bang. Click. Monkey carefully opens his door and closes it again behind him. He has not yet figured out how to do it quietly.
Muffled tromp tromp tromp. He goes into the bathroom.
Whsssshhhhhhhhh. Water hitting water.
Clunk. He bounces the lid of the toilet off the cistern, or the seat off the lid.
Clunk. Clunk-clunk.
Long period of silence while he stares into space, probably having a super-hero battle in his head. Possibly using his fingers to illustrate it.
Chhhhhhh. Water into basin.
Long period of silence while he washes his hands ritualistically and with many stops to stare into space. Click. Bang. Click. He opens the bathroom door, closes it behind him.
Excited tromp tromp. Moving towards me, not away from me. Bad sign.

"Mummy!"
"Yes."
"Mummy, I just have to tell you something really amazing!"
"Really."
"I just heard a train whistle!"
"Amazing."

What's amazing is that this doesn't rouse Mabel enough to make her decide it's time to get up. Also that he goes away again.

Tromp tromp decrescendo.
Click bang click. Opens his bedroom door and closes it carefully, but not quietly, behind him.
Rrrrrr. Rumble of top drawer opening smoothly but not silently. Selection of underwear and socks.
Rrrrr. Bump. Rumble of top drawer rolling to a close.
Repeat for t-shirt drawer and trouser drawer.
Long period of silence while he gets dressed, stares into space.
Click, bang, click.

"Boo, Daddy! Can I watch Avengers now?"

Mabel decides it's time to get up too. She scrambles across me, all elbows and knees in my soft parts, eager to see her brother and start the day.
"Wait for me!"

I roll over and go back to sleep until the decibels rise again.

Salon

You enter, lank and harried, searching for refreshment that goes beyond mere water; in need of revitalization.

First, the ritual laying-on of hands. You close your eyes as your head is massaged by strong, trustworthy fingers. The dirt is washed away.

Then the examination of conscience: how long has it been since your last haircut? You think back, you estimate, you fudge some dates, you come up with something that might sound reasonable.

The readings: will it be Cosmo, InStyle, or Us Weekly this time?

Now the sermon: you should really think about trying a Brazilian kerawhatsit treatment, because your hair tends to be a bit fuzzy. And don't even think about going swimming without some deep conditioner.

The crux of the matter: the cut. Reverent silence as the sacred duty is performed.

Then a little penance for good measure. A blast of hot air scorches; rough bristles pull. Your armpits quickly prickle with sweat and adrenalin. The urge to fight or flight is roused, but you sit and endure and offer it up, head bowed.

Finally, the collection. A tithe? You hardly begrudge it; your very soul feels relieved. As is your wallet.

And you leave: energized, relaxed, light of heart and head.

In my head, it's 2004

Hang on. I think I blinked or something.

I'm okay with the idea that my firstborn is turning five in a month's time - in fact, I've already made the mental switch, and was quite offended yesterday when somebody mentioned that I had a four-year-old. But I'm still in my early thirties.

Aren't I? I was, just a minute ago, before I had all those babies. (All both of them. I wouldn't want you to think you'd missed one or anything.) And I don't feel any older, or wiser. I know a bit more about the contraptions and vocabulary of baby-wrangling, that's all. My basic child-rearing tenets haven't changed since I was 30: love your babies and teach them good manners. I still think that's pretty much what it comes down to, it's just that now it takes up more real estate in my head, along with phrases and names like babywearing, attachment parenting, CIO, Dr Sears (good), and Ezzo (bad). I can discuss induction methods and nipple confusion with the best of them, and I even have strong feelings about some of it and a soapbox I cart out and dust off every now and then.

Of course back then I was a career girl, or at least a woman with a full-time job outside the house that paid actual money, and I slept all night every night, and I went out for dinner sometimes and watched rental movies all the way through in one go. Now, I haven't slept all night for five years. Maybe that's what happened to my sense of time passing: it fell through the gaps in the nights and floated away. Nights like a folded circle of paper with holes snipped out with a child's scissors: some big, when I wandered around the quiet house on hyperalert, or sleepwalked a crying baby for eternity; some tiny, when all I had to do was roll over and produce the other side, over and over. Open up the paper and the strong American sunlight shines through the holes and leaves behind a hundred baby photos scattered on the wooden floor.

The older I get, the thicker my metaphorical skin is - I care less and less what other people think so long as I'm comfortable with what I'm doing. But when I get three minutes at a time to look in the mirror nowadays, for the first time in a long time, it seems my real skin has got thinner. In repose I look mostly the same as I always did, with one short vertical line dug out between my brows - coincidentally enough, just in the place where my boyfriend used to say I got a cute wrinkle when I frowned. But if I animate my face, smile or talk at the mirror, I am shocked by the way it crinkles - crinkles! - at the eyes and around my mouth, and I am unnerved to see my mother's face appear fleetingly under my hair. So I quite like to hide behind my glasses, with their defensive coating of tiny scratches that make the world a little blurrier. If I can't see it, neither can you, right?

I suppose this is all part of the ongoing process of clambering out of the pleasant marshmallow of baby brain I've been enveloped in for the past several years. I need to re-embrace the world beyond, or something. And get a better haircut.

Road-trip weather

Sunny weather and blue skies make me feel like a road trip. America feels like it did when I was a visitor, full of giant roads and old-fashioned-looking highway signs and anonymous roads to nowhere and run-down diners with elderly waitresses who refill my cup and call me "hon", and trees, trees, trees.

No, this isn't quite the usual tourist impression of America: to Irish people, America comprises New York (with an addendum of Boston) and LA/San Francisco. Possibly Chicago and Florida. There isn't really anywhere in between the coasts, unless some remember JR Ewing and bring Texas to mind. And admittedly, my introductions to the US were via Boston, New York (briefly), and San Francisco, respectively.

But the road trips I'm thinking of mostly, the memories that make me inhale the clear bright air and feel like hitting the asphalt, were when I visited central Pennsylvania to see my on-again, off-again boyfriend; the one I married, eventually. They were charged with emotion - excitement, anticipation, sideways glances on the long road out from the airport; a vaguely sickening feeling of imminent depression (and a red-eye flight) while trying to squeeze every last drop out of being together on the road back again a week later. Maybe that's why I remember so piercingly clearly in the in-between seasons (when the air tickets were cheaper and the weather was nicer) how it felt to look around and see big-sky, big-tree America, at once movie-familiar and unexpectedly alien, before I lived here and it became no more than the place we are all the time.

So sometimes I look up from the local highway that's now as familiar to my hands on the steering wheel as the roads of suburban south Dublin once were, and try to recapture that feeling that maybe, just maybe, the rest of my life was waiting somewhere out there on the unknown roads. And other times, when the sun shines out of a cloudless blue sky and the trees are waiting for their leaves, that feeling ambushes me unbidden and makes me catch my breath with a swoop of ten-years-ago me. And I want to hit the road and teach the kids all the words to the Chicago soundtrack and all the good Billy Joel songs and the contents of all the other cassette tapes that are gathering dust in the basement.

Half past two, and because of you, I haven't slept a wink

When I was first pregnant, my sister-in-law told me that I'd never sleep through the night again. She may have been right.

At three in the morning, every morning, I am wide awake. Poised to leap, gazelle-like, from one bed to another, proffering solace here, laying on hands there. My sonar is highly attuned, alert to the smallest pre-waking mumble, the creak of a bed being sat up in, the cough of a child who is no longer sleeping through it.

At six, every morning, I am an inert blob, deep in slumber and heavily invested in dreams of taking buses from one vaguely recognised part of a city to another, or having to walk all the way home from Sandycove in the dark, or other things that rarely involve the care and feeding of small people. I think my dreams are trying to reclaim the me that's just me, before I get up and become the me that's such a seemingly vital part of everyone else, again.

[The title is from a great song by an Irish band called The Stunning. Very early-90s. Very not Nirvana. You can hear it here.]

Taste memories

I've decided that "Miss" is too boring a pseudonym for the small, blonde, talking-in-sentences firecracker who bounces around our house demanding that you read her books or find her shoes. Henceforth, she will be Mabel. That's Miss Mabel to you.

I watched her put a hot pebble to her mouth on Monday, as we played in a friend's yard, in a friend's paddling pool. Instead of shouting (pointlessly), "No, yucky! Don't eat it!" I stopped a moment and thought about how stones taste. So often in an Irish summer (that elusive creature) I would have picked up a stone on Killiney Beach or Whiterock - a stone warm from the brief sun and smoothly round from years of rolling in and out on the shelving shingle, shiny bright black or matte grey with a band of white running through the middle - and brought it to my lips to taste the salt and the hardness and the nothing that stones taste of. Maybe we should all lick a (nice clean) stone now and then and remember how it feels not to be paranoid about every little thing.

I also have a clear memory of how the strap on my pushchair (that's stroller to you, maybe) tasted - a memory that had been submerged until I caught Mabel sucking on something similar one day recently. I was a thumb sucker and my kids aren't, but I think I must have swapped out the thumb for a strap at some point, because I can vividly recall how it felt to suck my saliva back and forth through the vinyl-y webbing of the strap, and how good it tasted to my two-year-old self.

It's funny that non-food taste memories are more vivid than edible ones. But then, I was something of a picky eater myself as a child. I blame my mother's bad cooking, but that's probably not all there was to it. I can remember the day I first decided that I liked peas, so I was probably six or seven before that happened - and they were definitely an early vegetable. It's possible that I existed on rice krispies and chocolate Yoplaits (in the waxy cardboard cup, remember?) and mashed bananas for many years before I became the champion all-round eater you see before you today.

Delicious baby

Little Miss, the Small Sausage, is so delicious right now. At every stage, I think "This has got to be the cutest, right now," and then a couple of months later she starts doing something new and surpasses herself in cuteness all over again.

Today I am totally smitten with her chunky little legs, so sturdy (she's got killer glutes, you should see all the squats she does), so plump and edible - I can completely see Johnathan Swift's point when he recommended eating babies. She has a little tan on her arms and legs (lucky girl - she won't be like her mother bemoaning her snow-white limbs for an entire adolescence; but I'm sure she'll find something else to hate, like the little birthmark freckle on her right cheek, for instance) and perfect elbow dimples and wrist creases... and the toes - just right for a snack, a tiny nibble...