A Lubricated Thumb Up The Bum: Me Time!

The big thrill of little luxuries when your world is small

Photo by 3DVISU on Unsplash

A lurgy descended on our house this week. The 5 year old was the first to catch it and the 3 year old and I fell two days later.

Sickness always comes at the worst time. I've so much to do! I can't slow down! I just cannot be sick right now! I resisted it so much. Apart from the fact of the 5 year old, stuck to the couch and coughing her guts up, I desperately tried to keep everything else going as normal. Why did I resist it? Once we leaned into the sickness, we were all much happier. By leaning in, I mean, giving up pretending that we could maintain our usual schedule and not leaving the apartment for 5 days.

We’d already had a very swift set change the day after Thanksgiving (Fall: down; Christmas: up) so we nestled into Christmas at home, sprawled out on the couches under blankets, watching movie after movie. We watched Home Alone 1 and the 3 year old cried “NOT Chicago, I want New York!”. We watched Home Alone 2 and she proudly named every New York landmark as they appeared on screen until the Twin Towers put a halt to her gallop. “What are those?” she turned round to me to ask. “He looks like Daddy”, the 5 year old said of Marv and then “I didn't know Donald Trump lived in the Plaza!”

The day after the election, she had asked me “What bad things did Donald Trump do?”. I quickly tried to think of an age appropriate answer but I recoiled in as much horror as she did when the words that came out of my mouth were, somehow, “He took babies from their mothers”. “Like in ‘The Prince of Egypt?” she asked. She has a penchant for religious cartoons and she's found another one. ‘The Star’ on Netflix tells the story of the nativity and contains the following scenes where Mary frets over how she will tell Joseph that she is pregnant, as you would do if you'd made ‘being a virgin’ your entire personality.

At one point during our convalescence, I was lying in the corner of the corner couch and the 3 year old was lying beside me. The 5 year old came over and lay on top of me and I could see the 3 year old looking at her, silently raging that there had been a way to get physically closer to me when she thought she had the top spot. She tried to regain her position somewhat by wrapping both arms around my neck and whispering in my ear “I love you” and fleetingly I thought: “Is this what my deathbed will look like?”

By day four off school, the 5 year old announced “I actually like feeling sick. Because you get to rest”. This is a child who, in the full of her health, wrote a to-do list for the day that had just five things on it and two of them were ‘rest’. (The other three were ‘school’, ‘keepy uppy’ and ‘color’). She comes from a long line of resters (on my side). The other side are doers. “I can't bear to be idle”, they joke. But also: they can't bear to be idle. When we moved into our house in Dublin, both mothers came to help us out on moving day. My mother-in-law was flat out cleaning everything and my mother told me afterwards that she was so embarrassed by her industriousness, that every time she passed, my mother would pick up a cloth and pretend to clean the (already clean) windows. My side loves to be idle. We get up late, have a breakfast that goes on till lunch then someone lights the fire and we relocate our sitting down to the perfectly named, sitting room. On a nice day we'd sit in the garden but we’re sitting either way. We love a nice sit down. No one has ever accused us of being active or outdoorsy. On Christmas morning, for example, I'd be lying in bed, scrolling through the hot families that go for Christmas morning swims and the like, and only get up once I heard someone from the kitchen say “Anyone for Bailey’s?”

After 5 whole days housebound by the lurgy, I went to bed Friday night, absolutely giddy, thinking about the things I was going to do on Saturday while my husband took over the staying at home. There was nothing treat-like at all in my plans. Not even a plain croissant. I was giddy to spend two hours by myself: returning my library book, dropping off the recycling, collecting some orders, making some returns. I lay awake, planning the order I would do them all in. Errands, essentially. I was excited to do errands.

The thing about having kids is that, at times, your life becomes so small and so limited that the most mundane of activities become the greatest treat once you’re getting to do it by yourself. Imagine telling your 20 year old self that there would be a point in your life that you’d be as rejuvenated by a 9pm stroll around Lidl on a Friday night as you would be by a whole day at the spa.

In Phibsboro, there was a really great community of new mothers. One day, I was walking past three of them, gathered outside someone’s gate, all with their buggies and slings, all chatting. I was conspicuously sans bébé and they eyed me with equal parts suspicion, awe and envy. “Where are you going?” they asked. “To the dentist!” I responded cheerily and was met with a chorus of “Oh, enjoy!” and “Lucky you!”. Another day, a Dublin neighbour said to me: “I spotted you and David out for a walk without the kids, what was that about?” What that was about was my brother was watching the kids and we went around the corner to the nearest cafe and had literally one cup of tea and I remember it as being one of the greatest 15 minutes of my life. My sister babysat another day and we ran - literally ran - to the chipper down the street and had a battered sausage and chips before returning straight home. We took a selfie in the chipper and I think it’s the happiest I've ever looked in my life. Then there was the childless jaunt to the physio. Not your common or garden physio but a pelvic floor physiotherapist, specifically. As the physio donned her blue rubber gloves, applied lube from a dispenser labelled “Slippery Stuff”, put her finger up my bum and asked me to squeeze, I thought: “Me time!”

I can think of loads of examples suddenly. The very first was when the baby was just a few weeks old. I was breastfeeding and that afternoon, she just wouldn't stop feeding. I felt completely trapped by it. I got it into my head that I was going to take out the glass recycling once she’d finished. That was my treat. Take the plastic Tesco bag, full of glass jars and bottles, that was sitting in the porch and walk to the very unglamorous Tesco car park to dump it. Just as I was up and about to walk out the door, the baby started to cry and my husband said “Sorry…I think you’ll have to feed her” and I let out a frustrated: “For fuuuuck sAAAAAke”. I didn't want anything more in that moment than to be left alone with the trash.

On the same rubbish theme there was a week, in New York, that the kids were sick the whole week and my husband was away so I was really doubly stuck to the apartment. One day, I thought they were improving and I said “Right girls, we are bringing out this compost”. The compost bin is outside and around the corner so I got the kids not only dressed but dressed in good dresses and we made a complete occasion out of the trip to the compost bin. Lockdown déjà vu.

I’ve one memory from lockdown that, as I think of it, I wonder was it a fever dream. I was in the front sitting room with the baby (8 months) and we were looking out the window and she waved at a man across the street and he waved back and then he crossed the street to come closer to wave and as he was crossing it became apparent that he was a priest and had been visiting the elderly couple across the road. He stood at our garden rail and I opened the window to say hello and he said (over the railing, across the garden and through the open window) “Would you like a blessing?” and I said what anyone else in that situation i.e. in the thick of 2020 with fuck all else to be doing, and that was: “Why not?”. So this priest stood on the path of our Dublin 7 cul-de-sac and blessed my baby (who I was holding up to the window) with the sign of the cross and a smattering of holy water. It’s the closest she’s come to a baptism and was the most exciting thing to happen the whole week.