Surviving Not Thriving

The days, they are so long

A week before the Leaving Cert, I bumped into a teacher outside our school and she asked me how the study was going.

“Ah, good days and bad”, I said.

“Well, I suppose it’s the same for life, isn’t it?” she replied.

I knew what she'd meant, but I’d lived too sheltered and charmed a life up to that point to have ever had any bad days. And I was too focused on the looming exams to transfer the same words I’d just used, onto anything other than my current obsession which was getting as much information as possible to stick in my head before I released it onto the blank page the following week.

But there are good days and bad days. Of course there are. Often one after the other, I find.

I wish I had remembered these words the first day of the kids’ school summer holidays. A day which I would chalk up to being a bad day. A moderately bad day, on reflection, though one that seemed cataclysmically bad, in the moment. One of those days where you think “I’m so bad at this”. Then another voice goes “Don’t be so hard on yourself” but the first voice says “Ah, but you are though”. Then you turn to Instagram for a bit of escapism but your targeted ads are suddenly “Are you raising your voice to your children? Are you sneaking away to scroll on your phone? If yes, feel ashamed. Feel very ashamed. UNTIL! You download this app we're selling you!” - and you’re left wondering if you're getting these ads simply because they know you have kids and it’s the summer holidays or if they have access to your microphone and livelink CCTV footage to your apartment?

I had been really looking forward to the summer holidays and maybe that was my first mistake. Expectation levels count for a lot. A friend of mine had her first baby around the same time as me and on the newborn stage, she said to me: “WHY AREN’T WOMEN TELLING EACH OTHER HOW HARD IT IS?”. I wondered who else she was friends with and what the hell media she was consuming that was so different to me because the absolute horrors was exactly how it had been portrayed to me. I expected it to be a total shitshow and was pleasantly surprised when it fell somewhere slightly short of that.

I’m not someone who ever wanted to be home with their kids. If you had told me at 15, 25 - even 35 - that I would be home with kids, I simply would not have believed you. I loved my maternity leaves and I loved how long they were (One year, baby. Read it and weep, USA) but I also loved going back to work. So, when in June 2022, our visa application for our move to the USA was delayed by three months, my reaction was not “3 months? No biggie”, it was “WHAT? I've just handed in my notice at work. And at the creche! What do you mean I’ll have to mind my own children for three whole months…what do you mean?!?!”

I was nervous. I doubted my ability and my inclination to get through it. I immediately started to look up childminders, thinking I'd need at least one to two day’s respite a week but the astronomical cost of two kids in childcare, even one day a week, quickly put paid to that.

So, we were home for the summer. A one year old and a three year old and me. And you think you know yourself but I had the happiest few months I had had in years. We found our rhythm and we enjoyed each other's company. I loved them milling around underfoot. (Don’t get me wrong, I cried actual tears four months later when the receptionist of the New York pre-school we applied to said “Yeah, we’ve got space”).

And then there was last summer. A gloriously long summer. Knowing that our eldest would be off to big school in September, I was hit with such a pang of nostalgia that she was growing up too quickly, that I took her out of pre-school earlier than they even officially broke up and the three of us again settled into a lovely summer together. That was a summer of two halves. The first half, we went out every single day. I packed our lunchboxes and we were out the door by 9:30 to explore different corners of New York. Leaving the apartment was necessary for my sanity, and theirs. The second half of the summer, we tacitly agreed that we were tired of exploring and we traded our big adventures for more local ones: trips to the bank, the grocery store, the dry cleaners, the post office. We hung out at home. We got bored, we played, we enjoyed it.

It was a great summer though it of course, also had its moments. Most memorably, when our eldest daughter told me that she wished that I would go to work and Daddy could stay at home.

“WHY?” I asked, not even pretending to play it cool.

“Because he brings us fun places”.

“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU ARE LITERALLY ON GOVERNOR’S ISLAND RIGHT NOW, PICNICKING WITH A VIEW OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY”.

She shrugged. “Yeah, but Daddy brings us swimming”.

It all counts for nought because of that God damned swimming.

I like that David is the designated swim parent and also that my time is golden when they go swimming. They don't even bother to ask me any more if I’m going. I joined the pool for the summer though, just to pass some of the hours I knew we had ahead of us. And no time like the present, we went first thing on the very first day of the holidays…but there was nobody there. We had the pool to ourselves. “Where is everyone?” the kids asked. “Did you text them?”

Photo by Clark Tai on Unsplash

I don’t know if it was the constant whining of my kids or the total absence of other kids but I started to rethink the strength of my own “Just let them be kids” and “Don’t over schedule them” beliefs. It was 10:30am on the first day of the break and I couldn’t help but wonder if I should “just let them be kids”...with other kids….at a camp.

I truly thought the whining would have stopped by now. They are 4 and 5. When does it stop?

The first full day of the school holidays saw me say my first prayer in about 15 years when, in the middle of the kids bickering, I closed my eyes, looked up to the sky and said aloud: “Give me the strength to get through today”. God answered my prayer because through divine intervention, I had an idea I'd never had before. I said to the kids “I’m going to swim to the end of the pool and back and while I'm gone, I want you to think about how this day is going and how it could get better”. I set off on my head-out-of-the-water-breaststroke way, looking back over my shoulder to say “Leave me alone for five minutes". I was back in about one minute because the pool is actually only 15 metres long and when I got back, I said to the 5 year old “Well?” “I'll stop being mean to my sister”, she said. Then I looked at the 4 year old, who had given up whining in favour of sulking and she said “I didn't like when you said ‘Leave me alone’”. “I didn't say leave me alone I said leave me alone for five minutes”, I corrected her and so she corrected herself: “I didn’t like when you said leave me alone for five minutes”.

*Give me the strength to get through today*

“Isn’t it great that I go swimming now?”, I said to them. That was a mistake. Never fish for compliments from your kids. I promise you, it will not go well. Because “Yes, even though you’re boring” was the honest feedback that I got to that question.

“They won't be this small forever” etc

“The days are long but the years are short” etc (But the days…they are so long).

The kids were bored. I was bored. I’d forgotten that this was our first day and that there are good days and bad days and maybe we just needed a chance to find our groove. By 3pm, I’d booked the eldest into a math camp the following week. I was desperate and this was already giving me hope. It was only two hours in the morning but I would have put her in for ten if they’d had any availability. When I told her she was going to camp she was as relieved as I was and told me she was looking forward to “having some time to myself”. (She is 5). It was only after I’d already booked that I said “You like math, right?” “What’s math?” she said (even though I had deliberately said it the American way so she’d know what I was talking about). When I explained to her what math was, she answered in horror: “NO!”

We didn’t really recover that day but we recovered the week. Without doing anything too differently, the other days were good days.

Highlights included watching them play in the sprinklers on the Natural History Museum terrace and noticing the museum visitors inside, stopping to look out at their playful innocence. They have an ability to bring so much joy to so many people and they’re not even aware of it. Another day, we stopped to admire a water feature in a corner garden of a beautiful brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. “It’s like Niagara Falls!”, the 5 year old said “because there’s three fountains!”. A passing German family also stopped for a look. I don’t speak German but I’d wager the little boy in that family wasn't blessed with as much optimism or imagination because he turned to his mother and said: “Das ist ein fish tank”.

Continued….

I was going to finish this piece here. It followed the rhythm of a typical piece of mine: ‘Some things are hard but oh look at this cute thing my kid said isn't life great’. I was thinking how this post I wrote on a week spent Upstate sounded like domestic bliss, and while the scene it ended on - “Isn’t this heaven?” - did happen exactly like that, that was just one moment. It would also be accurate to say that the predominant feeling that week was boredom.

Boredom & Overwhelm

There’s a line in E.B. White’s essay ‘This is New York’ where he suggests that people who choose to reside in New York might suffer from lack of imagination: because of the constant entertainment that the city provides, they never have to entertain themselves. This rankled with me when I read it, thinking how my memory of my childhood is of being bored and it made me think, not for the first time, that maybe I just suffered from lack of imagination. I thought of the line again when we were upstate for just one week and without New York City on our doorstep to entertain us, we were so, so bored.

When a friend complimented that piece on Upstate Americana, I told them that I’d left out the bit about how the kids arguing over who owned a stick they had found on the ground drove me so bananas that when one of them (accidentally) hit me on the head with the stick, I took it off them and fired it in a bush¹. “That’s what you should write about!”, my friend said, “It’s relatable! Everyone feels that”. It’s always a risk writing anything ‘relatable’. You’re putting yourself out there but you wonder “Is this relatable? Or do I have a mental illness?” . Relatable parenting stories add the worry: “Is this relatable? Or will my children be taken off me?”.

And so, while the rest of the first fortnight of the summer holidays did go much better, I would still say that my most common feeling for those first two weeks was overwhelm. I felt overwhelmed the moment I woke and often throughout the day. Overwhelmed by their fighting, their whining, how much I had to do, how little time I had to myself, how hot it was, how tired I was, how I was never getting round to anything, how much I was needed, how badly I thought the whole thing was going.

I can’t say I figured it out but arranging time to yourself is key. Tag team parent at the weekends, arrange a babysitter. The Instagram moms were right all along. You DO have to get up before your kids, even if it’s to do some jobs on your to-do list, because you will feel better for it.

This post is coming to you right now from a booth in the corner of a quiet diner at 9pm. It feels good.

1. Maybe with some added expletives