Things you realise in the wee hours

I have always been an insomniac – a residual effect of night terrors that started in childhood and still persist. I actually began to sleep quite well when I met my husband; there’s something about his presence in bed that stops me fully surfacing after nightmares. But feeding baby has reintroduced me to the wee hours of the night again and like an old friend insomnia has forgiven me my absence and taken up our relationship where we left off. It’s rather cruel; bad enough to be awake and exhausted without knowing that you’ll be unable to sleep when you get back into bed.

Anyway, there are things one learns at night. Lessons both esoteric and mundane, profound and trivial. Firstly you learn that ghosts are real; you know this because they visit you unbidden, flickering in your mind’s eye and beckoning you down corridors to memories you would prefer to ignore. Secondly, while night time television is horribly bad if you have enough channels you will find either Murder She Wrote or a documentary on mummies. Learn to love these programs and you can survive the night watch.

Thirdly, between 11pm and 3 am you can listen to the bones of your house swell and settle, twist and creak. You will never truly know a dwelling until you have listened to it’s heartbeat at midnight.

Fourth, a sleeping baby will ignore tv, car horns, house alarms and raised voices but if you try to take a digestive biscuit out of a packet he will be stark staring awake at the first crinkle.

Fifth, my neighbours teenaged children fight a lot; even by teenage sibling standards. But they are talented pianists.

There’s a lot more but it’s almost half eleven and I need to watch Jessica Fletcher now. Or the darkness will come crashing in and the Dungeon Dimensions reach through to our reality. I’m only half joking…

This time 25 years ago…

This time of year, 25 years ago I got my acceptance into University College Dublin, to do my BA. This week, Mr Bodhránbanger’s niece got her acceptance into Trinity College Dublin. Leaving aside the obvious  shock that she choose Trinity over my beloved UCD, it’s been a great week. And it has brought back so many memories.

In my day one poured over the morning edition of the newspapers, searching through lists and lists of CAO numbers – issued to each Leaving Certificate candidate before their exams – to find one’s number and beside it a bald statement of college and course. My hands were shaking, I felt physically sick, until I spied my number and beside it UCD, Arts BA.

My first year in UCD was halcyon….I had a fun filled, happy, upbeat year and one that ranks as the best of my teens. At 17, I was too young to drink in the pub for the first few months of my college career and by the time summer 1987 rolled around I felt as if I had grown up in UCD. (My second and third years were devoted to angst, love affairs and general drama.) There were so many possibilities and most importantly, the prospect of having to make a decision about any of them was far, far away.

In about four weeks I will have known one of my best friends 25 years. We both entered UCD together, although it would be a year before I actually got to know him properly, beyond a hello and goodbye, or a shared tutorial. He was a constant; reliable, highly intelligent, sometimes eccentric but always 100 per cent authentic.

I have a wish for Mr Bodhránbanger’s niece. I hope on her first day she talks to someone, and makes friends with them, and 25 years later, when she hears of someone going to college themselves, sits and smiles for an afternoon thinking of them, and the friendship they have shared. In the end, long after exams have ceased to matter and when all the cool luminaries of the college social scene are forgotten, that is what makes “the game worth the candle.”

When the four walls are closing in…

I adore my son, and I’m happy I get to spend a lot of time with him but recently I came to realise that the walls are closing in on me – and I’m not even a stay-at-home mother.

Let me explain. I run my own business, with family members and after 3 months went back to work, but bringing Baby in with me. He has his own area, doting grandparents and lots of my attention too. As a solution it’s actually great. Except that there are weeks where I feel I am neither doing my job nor giving him my undivided attention. Especially when there’s a deadline, or pressure (such as trying to get VAT returns and accounts done.)

And when that happens one needs to vent to friends. Except many friends are working mothers with their kids in creches. And the response was sharp and judgemental. “You’re lucky you get to have him with you all day. I have to leave my baby in a creche.” So one realises one is not allowed to complain.

We went through hell to have Baby. Years of treatment, miscarriage and then finally a surprise natural pregnancy. If one complains that things are hard, sometimes, lonely or just a grind,  there is a raised eyebrow response and the general reaction that complaint is churlish, in the face of our good luck.

Friends are busy, even the sympathetic ones. Friends are also moving onto their second or third or fourth pregnancy and that creates a distance in itself. There will be no second pregnancy for us.

And I would love to just go out, with some friends, and have a pint. Just a night out, chatting and having fun. I have had one night out like that since Baby was born (10 months) but even then I was acutely aware that once I got home, I would be “on” for the evening so it was impossible to fully relax. I also miss female friends. The people I would have gone out with before are not here. For a myriad of reasons, I am pretty lonely right now.

Now, I have a great life by and large. I have good friends and I have family and I have my lovely baby. I am not crying into my beer every night. But increasingly I have been a bit jinxed where socialising is concerned. It takes so much effort to arrange everyone and meet in the one place at the same time. Everyone is on for it in principle but in practice it’s herding cats.

I have learned over the last few weeks that being sensitive about it is pointless. In the pre-baby days if I had tried to meet someon twice and they cancelled I would have shrugged and met someone else. done something else. Now I give it a third and fourth go. I meet any mother with a child remotely Dara’s age simply because as an only child I want him to have friends, as many as possible, growing up. Now I am applying the same ruthless and relentless appraoch to my own social life.

I am saying yes to anything going (except the pity date with my sisters-in-law that my well-meaning husband arranged. I love them but really, that was just embarrassing.) I’ve become the person who rings around and arranges a night out. I’ve even on occasion employed a dash of emotional blackmail (“it’s been aaaages…”) and I try not to feel hurt by refusals or cancellations.

It’s hard. I am not naturally pushy especially where my own interests are concerned. In truth I am a shy person, who masks it with a lot of chatter. Given my druthers, I’d no more push people to meet up and I am given to a default assumption that no one really likes me. But for my own sanity I am trying. I want to look back in a few years and see this period as a blip, and have a healthy social life with friends to talk to.

I’ll let you know if I succeed