Presents. Not really my forte. If you received any of the following items from me for your wedding, please accept my belated apologies: fluffy blanket/bog oak birds/tool box/hammock/photo of a mountain/what the fuck is that? do you know what it is? Me neither/picnic hamper/lamp etc.

Ditto if you went out with me for five years and received a one-way ticket to East Midlands Airport with Ryanair as a Christmas present. For £2.99 (inc. tax), I thought it would be a laugh to recreate that magical scene when someone lights up on receiving a surprise plane ticket. Until they open it. I still think it’s funny when I remember how you let that wan from your class pluck your eyebrows a week later. It will always be one step removed from a blowjob in my world of intimacy.

And, if you’re related to me, please pretend you didn’t hear me saying blowjob, and cast your mind back to a few clangers that awaited you under the tree from me over the years. Ah, yes. Remember enthusiastically ripping open the paper to find your spanking new copy of….Bunreacht na  hEireann? We’ll say no more about it, or the brew-your-own-beer-kits. But, I stand proudly by providing you all with a copy of this seminal, critically acclaimed, tour de force:

Not only can you do everything it says on the cover, but you can also deliver a baby in the back of a taxi, defuse a bomb, and escape a shoot-out; even if it’s me doing the shooting, which some of you continually try to provoke me into doing.

Since Becoming a Parent™, I’ve noticed danger lurks round every corner. Other parents. My parents. My reflection in the mirror. Daddy Pig. Playgrounds. Cake shops. Parenting forums. Life insurance policies. Savings accounts. Justin from Cbeebies. It’s a fucking jungle out there, which is why I’ve got a quick preview from my soon-to-be-published Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: The Early Years.

How to…

1. Hide all the junk in the shopping trolley

It’s going well. One more aisle to load up from. Your wee one is placated by the chocolate biscuit she’s helped herself to from the stack behind her. That coordination. Those motor skills. Thata girl. You’re rounding the corner into the ice-cream area and you clock the fruit teeming from the basket matching the “vibrant” colours worn by the local Mother Earth. Check behind you for the all clear and do a quick five-point turn. Whizz your way in the opposite direction whilst simultaneously lashing a few healthier products on top of the biscuits. Good luck with trying to replace the biscuit in the child’s paw with a baton carrot. The screaming will only draw attention to yourself so best avoid that and get the fuck out of there. In extreme instances, like when your hair is having a particularly anti-gravity day, feel free to hide the basket in the cereal aisle and return to it later. To avoid any repeat trauma, just do your shopping in the neighbouring town.

2. Perform CPR on someone who has just learned you didn’t baptise your child

“But…what school will they go to?”

It’s highly likely this person is already having difficulties breathing at this stage. Be sure to stand back, so when they do keel over you don’t risk an injury from the fall. Diall 999 and put the body into the recovery position. Only perform CPR if you’re adequately trained. There’s probably little more you could’ve done. It’s the biggest killer in Ireland today along with obesity and hypocrisy.

3. Get away with bringing your child to care wearing the same thing 3 days in a row

When you arrive at the crèche, unzip your child’s coat and exclaim aloud “Oh silly Daddy for not putting on your nice clean dress”

4. Combat the gaze of a fellow diner in the restaurant burrowing holes in your head while your child has a canary

To overcome the gaze, you must become the gaze. You weren’t the staring match champion of 1986 for no reason. As you engage in this visual duel, lift up the bottle with one hand and liberally apply the stuff you swore blind you wouldn’t have next or near your child onto his or her plate: ketchup. It’s like Calpol, only it goes with chips, and grapes (apparently).

5. Distract attention from your child pointing out your “belly” to everyone that visits

Explain it’s all the running around after a toddler and that you’ve hardly any time to eat so the rest of you has practically withered away to nothing. Point to your wrists and ankles and demonstrate by showing how you can now wrap you hand around them.

Other advice in the book: How to combat the embarrassment of more-or-less telling your parents you had sex when announcing a pregnancy; how to conduct your own guardian speed-dating event; how to strenuously judge parents on-line while strenuously appearing not to.

Out soon in every woeful bargain basket.

(image: Amazon)

Our girl turns four today, and I don’t know what to say.

I thought of writing a send-up of the nativity in which her three wise aunties appear with goodies (true story, riveting) but I wandered off down a corridor of memories and couldn’t find my way back.

I thought of writing how the celebration of her birth starts at the end of November when the lights go up around the park, and the air would give you a cheap shot of botox if you stayed out in it long enough. The type of air forever swollen since with anticipation.

I thought of writing about all the significant fours in her life thus far. Her defiant, if out-of-tune, sing-along with The Beatles that features in every long distance drive. But I couldn’t pick just four friends. Or four furry animals. Or four dominant characteristics. Or top four things I love about her.

I thought of addressing this to her directly but my heart was so full and heavy it would’ve spilled all over the page had I attempted to pour just one drop.

I thought of writing about how her Dad is perplexed by the notion of me writing to her here at all. And how he rolled his eyes in response to a moving post written by a father to his son I read aloud. “Why doesn’t he just tell him directly?”

I thought of writing of the opportunities the internet gives parents and guardians for expressing love for their children. A file for documents of it. And those many souls ravaged by emotional stoicism that deserved to be just as sentimentalised but were condemned to similar suffocation in their capacity as fathers and mothers.

Sometimes, I think of writing about my own parents; to speculate on what they might’ve written had they had this instrument at their disposal. But of course they did not have the time, or the means, or the grammar of out-loud parenting as we know it; and often fear (Is it just me?).

I thought of writing about the underrated value of the mystery of children and childbirth, and parental love, and the savage lows and transcendental highs of parenting. That for every heart-beat halting observation caught on keyboard, there are vastly more consigned to memory where the best of all of lived experience resides more vividly. Pictures beating words with photo albums.

Had I managed a ‘best of’ round-up from the year, I would’ve included Boyhood, Where’d You Go, Bernadette? and Catastrophe when writing about my cultural highs. They succeeded in capturing something  relatable to my experience of motherhood better than any instructive published piece ever could.

Occasionally, I’ve thought of writing about wondering what it would be like to be a teenager…young adult…grown-up…woman-child… reading back over the externalised thoughts of my parents.  Would I want to read them? I’m not sure. I don’t think so. It’s a dilemma I’m told I overthink. With good reason, I think. The telling-off and the over-thinking. And yet I am now in a race against time to retrieve data from their archives to file in the annals of family history; the oral storybook, the pages of which I intend turning for our own one. How I have been lucky to have run the long distance alongside them while others are less fortunate.

Inevitably, I think of writing of the shame I feel when thinking of the torment I once casually unleashed on my own mother for not utilising her fine mind better. The worst at the peak of my youthful arrogance. How I burn when I think of the sacrifices made without bitterness or mention. For she knew these are the jobs of parenting, the mysteries of which can only attempt to be solved by the off-spring with time and wisdom. Shelter has a broad meaning. Parents are obliged to keep the word small between them and their children…teenagers…young adults…grown-ups. My respect renewed with reminders of how they avoided invading those phases with worries from their parenthood. The unsaid reveals itself eventually, when and where it matters. I understand now how brilliantly her mind was used and what it reaped for the rest of us.

So often I think of writing about the challenges of reconciling writing on parenting and children with these seemingly old-fashioned notions of mystery and discretion I can’t seem to ever let go of. Some day.

For one brief nanosecond, I even thought about posting a picture of her. Kitted out in her new school uniform eagerly licking the bowl used to toss rice krispies and chocolate around. For a party. For our Nollaig na mBan. She’s lovely. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Our one’s teacher doesn’t walk, she glides. I imagine birds circle her head every morning chirping Taylor Swift songs as she clicks her fingers to summon the perfect hair-bun before fiddling her gossamer wings into a timeless dress that floats behind her like a magic carpet tucked into her knickers. I haven’t had a crush on a teacher since Miss O’Shea when I was 13, yet here I am kneeling next to a three-year old smiling just as inanely up at one without the excuse of an inability to go the toilet unaccompanied, or distinguish between the sleuth talents of our neighbour’s jack russell and Scooby Doo.

Stepping into her enchanted castle  office for the parent/teacher meeting, I was presented with a detailed progress report. After initial thoughts of “what the fuck?”, I concluded it was a good job since I was mesmerised by her green liquid eyeliner. So evenly applied. So compatible with her skin tone. So not more than 28 …Sorry, what was that?.. Oh yes… hand-to-eye coordination. I nodded earnestly, equal parts impressed and alarmed by the A4 breakdown. Impressed they’d obviously paid her considerable attention since arrival; alarmed she’d only been there a matter of weeks but was already firmly lodged in The System. Not to mention disappointed my own mother never got to experience a thumbs-up report on me.

In my day *pipe lip-smacks* reports were strictly the preserve of secondary school; intercepted, of course. At three years of age, there was a good chance I hadn’t yet reached the developmental milestone of helping myself to an extended lunch-break. We’re in the golden age of school reports, I reasoned; an opportune time to register any non-threatening concerns either of us have. Enjoy it while it lasts. Ten years from now I’ll be drowning in thought infested waters struggling to offer a reasonable explanation for why she fired soggy bog-roll up at the gym ceiling.

Unsurprisingly, I learned she waits until she’s home to externalise her thoughts on all of life’s injustices. Her Dad will be proud she isn’t bringing shame on the family, I scoffed. Following in his footsteps, she looked bewildered as her Granny later commended her on the report. Oh no, here comes the merits-of-a-career-in-medicine talk. I jest. That’s not for another year.

I maintained a steady ambivalence about it all, interrupted by an irrational rant on the dangers of making pat assessments so early on in a child’s life. Then I bumped into Ashleen, who supervises the breakfast club. We get to call her by her first name so already we’re on the level, and I don’t smile like I’m on something, like sleep deprivation, or Skype. Without a desk between us, she reminisced about the quiet girl that turned up in the first week compared to the one full of chat now, who gets the jokes and is not afraid to a crack a few of her own. Sounded to me like she had her down pat.