Is My Mother Being Groomed by a Bridge Player in Berlin?

What Did You Do Yesterday?

A Monday in May

5:15am: My phone alarm goes off. I left it charging in the kitchen overnight, so I have to get up. By the time I reach the kitchen, I’m awake enough to stay up. I take out my Morning Pages notebook, turn on the coffee machine and sit down to journal. I started the Artist’s Way (which consists of journaling three pages first thing in the morning and going on a solo date every week) last year but after two weeks, I was inspired enough to start this Substack, so I stopped. It’s also really hard to fit in. I know it’s just “set your alarm half hour earlier than usual” but life is full of so many things I’m already trying to fit in. I have re-prioritised it for now and am three weeks back on the wagon and I love it! I mean, I hate getting up and it’s often difficult to do but it’s hard to explain how good it makes you feel. It’s like therapy. (I should probably also be in therapy, but the Artist’s Way is my latest attempt to postpone that a while longer).

5:20: My journaling is interrupted by the groceries I ordered last night which have arrived. 5am was an ambitious slot to pick but I knew I'd be up with my failsafe alarm-clock-in-the kitchen trick. I take the groceries in from outside the apartment door, where the delivery man left them. I say good morning to him but he doesn't reply. I put away anything for the fridge or freezer and leave the rest.

5:55: I end the morning pages with about a third of a page left to go but I have to go get dressed because I have a 6:15 yoga sculpt class.

06:05: I leave the apartment, sending David a voicenote on the way to say coffee’s made and giving him a list of jobs he could do if he’s up before I get back. They are: finish putting away the groceries, empty the dishwasher, make the lunches, bath the youngest and wash her hair because we missed the Sunday evening bath for both kids but if I'm honest, we missed the previous mid-week bath for the youngest and it’s a real necessity at this stage.

I send my Mam a mirror selfie while I wait for the lift because we are Morning Pages buddies. I tell her I’ve done mine and am off to yoga.

6:15: Really enjoy this class. I must book in for next week. I especially love that it’s only 45 minutes long. I forgot to bring a towel though and the room is really hot so when I think no one’s looking, I pick up one of my socks to wipe my face because the sweat dripping off it and onto the mat is starting to become a health and safety issue. 6:55: The instructor says that if we don’t have time to stay for stretches, that’s OK but we should “because our body deserves it”. Most of the people start to leave and I think “Feck it, I will too. I need to get home and get cracking on the porridge. I’ll stretch at some point later in the day”. (LOL. I definitely won't).

As I walk out, I stop briefly to read a poster on the wall (the yoga studio shares a floor with a co-working space/daycare centre) about how women in heterosexual couples do the invisible work of keeping track of the mental list of endless tasks that are necessary to keep a house and family going.

I look at my phone on the way home and see a message from my Mam. She says “Pages not done but I will do tonight. On train into Berlin”. This is accompanied by an 8 second video of the view out of a train window, with German coming over the tannoy on the platform. She plays bridge online and is going to meet someone she plays with in Germany. As I write this, I realise this is the precise nightmare situation you would want your children to avoid. Going to meet up with someone they have met from playing computer games online. In Berlin. Note to self: check in on Mam later.

7:07: I’m walking back in the door. David said he’s just up and just got my voicenote. He has a call at 7:30 so I crack on. I make the kids’ porridge (with peanut butter, sprinkles and raspberries) and sit them up at the breakfast bar, so that they can better observe me carry out the role of a woman in the home. I put the oven on to make chicken breasts for their lunch, empty the dishwasher, make their lunches, pack their bags, put away the rest of the groceries. The eldest dresses herself and I tell her it’s perfect but could she change from sandals into runners because she has PE today. I run a bath for the youngest and even though I’m not hungry, I eat a breakfast muffin and an orange because I have an annual physical check-up at midday and have to fast for four hours beforehand and my fear of ever going hungry is strong. I take a vitamin D tablet too because it was the only thing I was deficient in last year and even though I haven’t been taking them for weeks, I hope this one is enough to get me over the line.

While the youngest is in the bath, I email her teacher pictures of the weekend and bullet points on her weekend news so she can share with the class. I think how lovely it would be to be woken up and have breakfast prepared and a bath run for you before you begin your day.

8:00: David comes off his call and says he can bring the girls to school. Wahoo! It’s an easy job but God it’s great if someone else does it. He cuts the youngest’s nails while I dress her. The 5 year old says she brushed her teeth but I don't have faith in her efforts and because she has so many adult teeth now (She’s “dentally advanced” according to her dentist…I don’t mean to brag), my usual excuse for being lax enough with their dental hygiene (“Ah they’ll be falling out anyway”) no longer applies. So I do them again. I wash her face, tie up her hair and her shoelaces and wave them all out at 8:15.

8:15: I don't have a Full Girl Shower but it’s not a quick shower so I'd say it’s a Medium Girl Shower. I wash my hair and shave my legs. I use Kiehl’s face wash in the shower and when I get out, I brush my teeth, floss and apply a teeth whitening strip. I turn on a podcast and land in right in the middle of Joanne McNally talking about how teeth whitening strips are only available in the USA. I sometimes think the EU looks after us really well, doesn’t it? It gave us nice things like good roads and it lifted the marriage bar. Today, they don’t let us whiten our teeth or our eyeballs, and the EU authorises only 338 food additives while the USA lashes in more than 10,000. I feel like a bold kid doing my teeth whitening strips, the first time I’m out from under my parent’s watchful eye. I wonder does our 5 year old drink the 23-grams-of-added-sugar chocolate milk in her school cafeteria every day, even though we’ve asked her not to. I kind of hope she does. But I know she doesn’t. She has an obsession with not getting “cavities” and possesses a natural moderation to her consumption, which she didn’t get from us.

8:35: I tidy up. Wash the porridge pot and breakfast dishes, fill the dishwasher and put it on. Deconstruct the kid-made fort that is taking up the entire sitting room. Put on a wash. Fold and put away 3 loads of laundry. I bring the paper bags from the groceries down to the trash room at the end of the corridor and check the New York Times headlines on the way. No, not on my phone. One apartment on our floor gets the paper delivered every day and every day, I pick it up off the corridor floor and have a quick scan of the front page. If they ever open up their door while I’m doing this, I will look insane. I’m sure they can hear me though. The doors are very thin and I don’t bend down to replace it on the floor when I'm done but simply drop it from a four foot height. I’m kinda starting to see why the neighbours don’t like us. Maybe I can't blame it all on the kids.

8:50: The clinic calls to say the nurse has called in sick so my 12pm appointment is cancelled. I’m actually disappointed. I was all geared up for it and haven’t decided yet what I will do with my time. But at least I'm no longer fasting. To celebrate, I have a peanut butter, chocolate chip Larabar (breaking my one hour fast). I re-schedule for two weeks away and am happy I have two extra weeks to build up my Vitamin D levels. Not that they gave one shit last year that I was Vitamin D deficient. I don’t really believe in Vitamin D anyway and their apathy towards my deficiency in it confirmed my suspicions. It’s all a giant conspiracy by Big Supplement, Big Milk and Big Sun.

8:55: I play Wordle and the Mini Crossword and send my time to David (2:14). I also ask him how drop-off went and he said it was grand. I return to the tidy-up and this time stick on Oliver Callan to keep me company. It’s a show from a few days ago and he plays a clip from his favourite Liveline episode which is the one in 2020, where people rang in to complain that Normal People was like “something you would expect to see in a porno movie, Joe”. It is so hilarious that I would swear it is a sketch scripted by Oliver Callan himself if I didn’t know that it isn't.

9:47: The doorbell rings, heralding the end to my tidying up because it is the arrival of the cleaner. We chat about the weekend, what she did for mother’s day, how we went to Coney Island, how the girls were traumatised by the Ghost Train. I tell her there’s no need to go into the spare room because my brother is asleep in there. I go to my room and iron my clothes, put on make-up and straighten my hair. Any long-time friends reading that I’ve ironed my clothes: no, this is not a sign that I have been abducted and my Substack is now being written by my captors. I very occasionally iron my clothes now after a lifetime of never, ever, ever ironing a single thing, ever. Maybe it’s because I’m 40. Maybe it’s because satin skirts are in fashion and you really have to.

10:12: I leave the apartment.

10:13: I leave the apartment again because I'd forgotten my water bottle and banana the first time. I’m heading for the library and I’m crossing Lincoln Center to get there. What a lovely commute on a beautiful day but I only get halfway across before I'm stopped by a security guard who says it’s closed for a private event. No big deal. I walk round the side of Lincoln Center, which happens to be my favourite view in all of New York. A colourful mural by Nina Chanel Abney on the back wall of the David Geffen Hall, paying homage to San Juan Hill, the neighbourhood displaced by the construction of the Lincoln Center in the 1950s and 60s.

I pass Julliard on the way - a world famous school for the performing arts but every time I hear the name, all I can think of is Julia Style’s audition in Save the Last Dance.

10:22: I’m in the library and check out a book I’d requested, ‘Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come’ by

Jess Pan

and ask for a new card for my 5 year old for her upcoming field trip to the library, because she lost hers.

10:31: I’m at my desk and start writing this. I set an alarm for 60 minutes.

11:33: It is now 2 and half hours since I’ve eaten so I head outside to eat my banana. There’s a Starbucks one block up and I go in and order an iced latte with a pump of caramel. I don't know where that order came from. It just came out of me.

“What size?”

“The smallest”

I refuse to learn their stupid sizes which never make any sense to me any time I do pay them any attention. I check Substack while I'm waiting because Substack is not like other social media and I definitely don't regularly check for numbers of likes and followers. The latte for Ashley arrives and I kind of hate it but I stick with it with the perseverance of a 13 year old drinking brandy (or whatever it is they pilfered from their parents drink cabinet) for the first time, even though there is no one around to see me and the social pressure is not to drink in Starbucks, if anything.

Me in the library restroom in my ironed clothes. Don't look too closely at the quality of the ironing.

11:49: I’m back at my desk and set a timer for 40 minutes. I leave this post alone and finish a post I started on Friday. I really like it.

12:29: I was running out of steam with the writing when my alarm went off. I set another alarm for 15 minutes (these alarms are vibrations on my watch by the way, no one can hear them) and check my emails starting from the top down. I get the unread emails down from 194 to 163. I set a timer for 10 mins to read emails from the bottom up and end up with 145 unread. The last email I opened was looking for volunteers to help out at the school’s upcoming field day, (not to be confused with the upcoming field TRIP (to the library) which is also not to be confused with the very recent field trip (round the neighbourhood). Like I said, I’m never not in my kids’ school.

1:03: I leave for home and call to make a hair appointment for Wednesday on the way. I’ve discovered a trick to getting slightly cheaper trips to the hairdresser and that is that I get a gloss instead of a full colour. The woman tries to ask me about the specifics of the gloss but I’m panicking because I don't know and say “Whatever I had the last time”. She looks this up and says what I had the last time will need more time and I’ll have to come in at 11:45 instead of 09:30. That’s fine, I say. But she’s not finished. She's trying to tell me that the only person available at the 11:45 appointment is a “master stylist”. Arrrrgh…I know what this means. Master prices. No. Please, no. I don't want a master stylist. Take someone in off the street to do my hair. I don't care. Only blondes are particular about their hairdresser. I'm just a lowly brunette, trying to cover up a few greys. She quotes the master stylist prices at me which sound high but sure look, they all sound high and I say “That’s fine” because I just want to get off the phone.

I arrive home and pick up our packages. Just one. For me. A denim vest that's too big and I'll have to return.

1:15: The cleaner is finishing up as I walk in the door and I ask her did Seán get up. She laughs and says no. I tell her that I check in on him occasionally to see that he’s alive and she laughs again. (Sorry Seán, I made you the butt of a joke so that I could bond with someone I don’t know nearly as well as I know you).

1:20: I re-heat some of the leftover Chinese we had for dinner last night. Pork fried rice and duck with a can of Diet Coke. It is divine.

1:25: Seán surfaced and joined me in a re-heated Chinese. We chatted about this post and the David O’Doherty podcast and the appeal of day-in-the-life content in general and the art on the side of the Lincoln Center.

1:45: I made a cup of tea and got into bed with my new library book and some dark chocolate and raspberries. Seán’s watching The Last of Us in the sitting room and I set an alarm for 14:25 (the time I have to leave to get the kids).

14:30: We set off, collect the kids from school (2:45) and walk home. The 5 year old was holding a picture she coloured in of planet Earth and when Seán asked her where Ireland was, she got the general vicinity correct (pointed to Iceland) and when he showed her America, she said “Yeah, America's HUUUUUGE”.

Seán: “Yes, but Ireland is more impactful”

5yo: “What does ‘impactful’ mean?”

Seán: “It means it makes a bigger noise”.

3:15: We’re home. The kids have snacks of apples with peanut butter, crackers and cheese and I have watermelon. They watched Youtube on the TV while I emptied their bags and lunchboxes and generally pottered.

4:15: The kids and I go to Central Park. We go to a playground, they climb rocks, they poke things with sticks, they feed leaves to the turtles in the lake. We see a performing rat, chained to a scooter, which has been dyed pink.

5:45: We arrive home. Seán’s still here and David is home. I make three different dinners which is no big deal at all and is done in jig time: re-heated Chinese for David because amazingly there is still some left, omelette for me and homemade pizza for the kids. By homemade I mean a shop bought base with a shop bought pizza sauce and grated mozzarella. Sides of cucumber, cherry tomatoes and hummus. At 6:15 we are all sitting down to eat. Seán leaves soon after.

6:45: Kids watched TV and I popped off to my room for a lie down and a scroll while David cleaned up after dinner. When I heard him start bedtime at 7:15, I jumped up to join but he said “No, you chill. I got this”. I wasn't going to look that gift horse in the mouth and ran back to my room, got into my pyjamas and into bed and read my book. I was distracted by the story I could hear David reading to the kids though, which was about princesses in The Gambia and I drifted off to it until I was woken a few minutes later by the kids, coming in to say goodnight to me. And that's where the wheels came off. They didn't go back to bed. 15 minutes later, the eldest was going full pelt on the Peleton and the youngest was playing in our bathroom. I turned to David who was now lying on the bed beside me, and, trying to speak a language I thought he’d understand, I said “Can you close this deal?” “What do you mean?”, he said and I, gesturing generally around the noisy, child-filled room, replied: “Can you put them to bed?”

He led them off. I went back to my book, David went back to his office and at around 10:30pm, I fell asleep to the noise of the clack, clack, clack of David working in the next room.

PS: I checked in on Mam and she is alive and well. She said that three of them travelled together so the internet friend was going to be outnumbered. They played a few hands of bridge in her lovely Berlin apartment and are touring the city which she says is very “cool”.

Was it a good day?

Yes it was a fantastic day! I had breakfast with my kids, lunch with my brother and dinner with my husband, brother and kids. I got to pick my kids up from school and walk slowly home with them. The weather was beautiful. I exercised! I wrote! I read a good book! My mother is not being groomed by a Bridge player in Berlin!