Rain. It’s been raining for about three days straight which, to the Irish among you, is nothing, I know. But in the winter, us Hoosiers (Indiana residents, no one knows why) have to endure months upon months of freezing cold, such cold that the snow – which falls in abundance during these months – doesn’t melt, and car parks all over the place end up piled high with filthy mounds of snow-turned-to-ice, and there is truly no respite from this cold and this snow, and sometimes it snows past April into May, and the one compensation we get for this is that the summer, at least, is hot, and dry.

So. I’m sick of the rain.

I’m sick of men. I keep seeing the joke that men should have to start their lives in prison and work their way out and it doesn’t really seem like a joke to me? (Except not my angel baby boys, they’re fine. So maybe “not all men” is accurate. How about this: all men who don’t live in my house.)

The other day, I sat in a cafe doing my work and a man sat down at the counter and started to tell people – people he didn’t know, at least not that I could tell – that “knowledge isn’t the only thing that goes into our decision making” at a volume that implied he was rehearsing for a TED talk and I just thought, guillotine. I’m sure, if given the option, he’d choose prison over certain death (but I’ve been wrong before).

It would be nice if there were women-only hours in cafes, and bars, and libraries. Sometimes, men sit beside me, and I think, please don’t talk to me, and then, mere minutes later, I think, why hasn’t he tried to talk to me? Is it because I’m over 40? Is it because my boobs look terrible in this top? What if he hasn’t even looked at my boobs? Is it because I have a resting bitch face? I should smile at him. Then I think, no, I definitely shouldn’t smile at him. But my traitor brain has already had the first thought and already I feel like a simp for the patriarchy, a wolf in feminist’s clothing.

Maybe I’m just sick of my own brain.

I’m sick of being told what to do by men I don’t know, which has been happening a lot this past week. (Gosh, I wonder why?!)

To be perfectly fair, there have been women telling me what to do, too. Somehow, that rankles less; the internalised misogyny is hard to get away from, sometimes, quite aside from which, women spend so much of their lives considering all avenues, carefully manoeuvering their way around other people’s feelings, managing the emotions of their partners and their children and their partner’s children (and their partner’s parents) and their friends and their friend’s partners and and and… they’re allowed to get it wrong sometimes.

But men* have no such excuse. They’ve been at the top of the pecking order for so long that they have no excuse for making the wrong choice. Jail first, remember?

All week, men have been telling me to be quiet, to go away, or both, but in far less polite terms. Today, a man came into my Instagram comments and called me “mate”; a few exchanges later, when I responded in kind, “good job not engaging with a single point, mate”, he said, “I’m not your mate”. Can they… hear themselves? Read themselves? What happens in those brains of theirs?

He started out asking a question I’d already answered, many times over; why didn’t I “come out” and make my “accusations” about Glen Hansard before he died? As if defamation law doesn’t exist; as if those who know don’t know that Hansard was extraordinarily litigious (in a way that feels very anti-Irish, by the way); as if it’s really easy to accuse someone of something and not be made small, or poor, or criminalised (or all three) as a result.

I’m never more patient than I am when I’m in the middle of a social media firestorm, so I answered him, repeating all of the above, despite having repeated it many times already, in the same comment thread; he stated (erroneously; men love to be loudly wrong, in my experience) that “defamation exists when someone dies mate” (wrong), that “his family can sue you” (wrong), that “you were all too worried about career repercussions, not lawsuits” (also wrong).

I’m sorry, sir, what career repercussions do you think I would have incurred, had I spoken out about Glen Hansard’s proclivities while he was still alive? I mean, it might have been hard to have a career from prison, although, had he sued me, I would’ve been rendered bankrupt, and I actually think bankruptcy would be good for my subscriber numbers. People love a rags-to-riches story, almost as much as they love to see a broke person make bad purchasing decisions, and I’m very good at that last bit.

I told him I “couldn’t give a shit about the impact on my career of calling out powrful men who are also creepy, pedophilic pieces of shit, but I’ve been threatened with lawsuits enough times to know that it’s not always possible” and then I asked, “what is it you think you’re fixing by trying to silence women speaking out about abusers, though?”

His response? “Keep yapping.”

All of this – the reaction to the “revelations” (sometimes we need a revelation, amirite) about Glen Hansard – has really activated me, I must confess. I am really sick of men telling me why, exactly, I chose to speak out about this; telling me I’m money-hungry (lol) and don’t care about the friends and family of Glen Hansard, who are grieving (timing is a big issue with these people); telling me that I’m making this up, that I’m trying to destroy a man’s reputation for no reason; telling me that I’m a failed journalist and pathetic loser who self-describes as a “content creator” and is, therefore, a loser and an idiot.

You’d probably be sick of this, too.

But the reaction has also made me think, wow, this is necessary. We need to speak up more about the terrible behaviour of powerful men. We need to push back more against men who tell us to shut up or sit down or be small, and honestly, when I talk about men, here, I’m not even talking about men in terms of biology or anatomy or gender identity I’m talking about patriarchy, and the tools of same, the people who feel as though we have roles in life that are tied to gender and that we shouldn’t stray from those roles lest we disturb Elton John’s great circle of life, or some such ridiculousness.

Those are the “men” I’m talking about (and therefore I’m talking about some women, too).

The idea of patriarchy; the idea of gender roles; the strict, rigid confines of masculinity and femininity and women’s roles and men’s roles and how those definitions inform our lives serve only to restrict and hurt and hinder not just women, by the way, but all of us.

These are the rules that make men feel they can’t cry; these are the rules that make women think complaining makes them shrill; these are the rules that cause children to say they can’t wear this, or that; these are the rules that make it so that women are less likely to become CEOs and men are less likely to become teachers and women are more likely to feel competitive with other women because they are told, all along, that there’s not enough room at the top for more than one.

These are the rules that keep us quiet and fearful and prevent us from being open and tender and honest, because we’re all too afraid of showing up in a role that’s not for us, in a way that’s not for us, in an identity that jars, that rankles, that rattles and shakes and scratches and doesn’t “fit”, and it all serves to make us – all of us – feel less free to be ourselves. It makes us all less free.

So yeah, keep yapping, mate. Keep yapping. I know I’m going to.

*Please, never forget that “men” is shorthand for cishet, white men and cishet white men, alone. Everyone else is great.

It’s not as if I’ve ever thought to myself, wow, single parenting seems like a walk in the park, but it’s not until I’m left to my own devices with my children that I realise just how relentlessly draining it can be, when you have absolutely no respite from the demands of your children, day in, day out.

All of that is to say: this week my husband went away for almost six full days, and I just barely survived it.

Monday

I’ve signed Atlas up for another week of zoo camp, very much motivated by my feelings of guilt at the summer being over and us having done very little (the holiday to Ireland is but a distant memory and, as it rained non-stop, didn’t feel much like a holiday anyway), so all this week I’m going to drop him there for 8.30am and pick him up at 3pm (a long day for a four-year-old, I will admit, especially in 30-degree weather).

This morning, I remember, as soon as I turn on the car – or, rather, the car reminds me – that I’m entirely out of petrol, so I stop on the way to put enough in the tank to get us through the day (surprise, surprise, we’re running late as it is, and I don’t have time to fill it). ($20.06)

He’s very enthusiastic this morning as he arrives at the zoo, mostly because he has to bring a packed lunch this time, as it’s a full day camp, and he’s got a brand new dinosaur lunchbox. He sat with the lunchbox on his lap in the car, opening and closing the zipper so that he could gaze upon the Lunchables within.

Once I’ve dropped him off, I do my makeup in the car (I’m loving the Vieve Skin Nova primer at the moment; it makes my skin super glowy and makeup goes on top if it really nicely) and then head to Snail to do some work for the morning. I get a tomato sandwich and a coffee and then, a little later, a second coffee. ($32.52 including tip)

I get an email reminder to pay my Midi bill ($40 co-pay with our insurance) and I also remember to order some cleaning and baby wipes from Biom ($82.37), who sent me some free products a few months ago. They basically do these refillable wipe dispensers that are very chic and look lovely on your kitchen counters, and their all-purpose wipes are biodegradable, which makes me feel a lot better about using them than the previous, plastic-laden, chemical wipes we’d been using.

Yes, they’re more expensive, but to just get this out of the way: I got paid from a new role I took on a few weeks ago and am now somehow under the impression that I am rich. This won’t last forever, I’m sure, but it’s definitely having an impact (understatement) on my spending.

To whit! Brandin suggested, last week, that we buy the little boys some sort of ride-on power wheels situation. When our older boys were little, they had one at their grandma’s house that they loved going on, and Brandin has a real sense of nostalgia about it. So I decide to order them a little two-person jeep from Wayfair, which comes with two speed modes and a remote control, should you decide you don’t trust your child to drive it on their own. ($195.75)

With that out of the way, I spend the day getting, actually, loads of work done. I’m never more productive than when I’m (a) incredibly busy and (b) on a time crunch, and knowing that I’ve to pick Atlas up at 3pm is very motivating.

Once I’ve got him, I head home and relieve the older boys’ mum, who’s been watching Roman for the day (our eldest has band camp every day this week and our 11-year-old is working at the bowling alley his grandma owns on Mondays), then we have dinner (Brandin makes hamburger helper) and chill out for the evening.

My Book of the Month subscription comes out. ($18.18)

Daily total: $388.88

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1. A family calendar

A few months ago, I was sent a Hearth Display family calendar*, with the promise that this was about to transform all of our lives. (The 2026 starter pack must be an ADHD diagnosis and a digital calendar, but I digress.) Transform our lives, it did not – at least, not really – but it did make a massive difference in terms of having the children do their chores without being asked, begged, cajoled, multiple times. There’s something in taking out the us of it all; sadly, I do suspect they’re more likely to do things when instructed by a piece of tech than when instructed by a parental figure.

Still, who cares?! They’re actually doing the chores we used to have to beg them to do (even then, with a 50/50 success rate), as we assigned each one a points value within the calendar, points they can then “cash in” for things they want (we set up the rewards shelf to include things like Robux, McDonald’s, a trip to their favourite sushi restaurant, $20 to spend at the bookshop etc…), and aside from the fact that I truly dread the day they try to cash all of their points in, it’s been a great success.

2. White noise at night

I used to be a bit of a white noise skeptic, thinking it just another crutch to prevent one’s children from sleeping independently, but now that I have four of them, each of whom goes to bed at a different time and, crucially, is constitutionally unable (or unwilling?!) to be quiet when their younger sibling is abed, I have found our white noise machines absolutely invaluable.

The two littlest children have Hatch sound machines in their rooms; Atlas’ is the new Hatch Baby*, which has sleep stories (narrated by the moon, or a cat, his two favourites) while Roman has the rest of us drowned out by the Hatch Rest*, both of which have light as well as sound features.

As for the rest of us, the Calm app is my new obsession (having had a lifetime membership for about five years now, I’ve just started using it). I like to listen to rain on a window at night time, or thunderstorm sounds, although I’m currently staying with my sister, and the thunder effect had the unfortunate result of rousing her from her bed in the middle of the night to look out at the lightning which was, obviously, nowhere to be seen. So you can infer: it’s very realistic.

3. Sowing seeds in the minds of the older children

There’s nothing more relaxing – for me, you understand – than when some (or all) of my children have been plucked from my loving arms and taken out of the house, so that I may watch my shows or listen to my music or otherwise enjoy my house without being asked to make food or wash clothes or find dinosaurs, missing among the 300 other dinosaurs in the dinosaur bin.

This past week, I suggested to our older boys that they might want to go to see the new Spider-Man movie. “I’m sure your Dad would love to take you,” said I, cunningly, knowing that, once a seed has been sown, it will take root and flourish, never to be forgotten or neglected, at least not until the task has been completed. And so, off to the cinema they went (without me). I’m already thinking of next week’s seed.

4. Bedtime vitamins

For a while there, we’d gone down the melatonin gummy route with the kids in an attempt to get them to bed at bedtime, rather than 90 minutes past bedtime, when each and every avenue of distraction had been exhausted. But the jury is most firmly out on the long-term safety of giving melatonin to children, so when Hiya Health sent us their Bedtime Essentials* I was only delighted to make the switch.

I’m not sure if it’s a placebo effect – I firmly believe children to be disgustingly impressionable, not unlike myself – or if the combination of magnesium and chamomile is really sending them off to sleep, but I’ve learned not to question it when things work, and this works.

I’ve also managed to get two of our kids, including Atlas, whose diet is basically cheese, meaning he’s the one who most needs greens, to take daily “chocolate shakes” in the form of the Daily Greens + Superfoods* powder, which is alleviating a lot of my guilt over his diet.

5. Forcing the children to choose their clothes the night before

In the moment of forcing them to do this – “go on, get your clothes out, no, not in the morning, right now please, yes, right now” – this is no fun, and has caused more than one argument. But we’re finally getting to a place of acceptance, and the way the morning is far less stressful now… This is probably, actually, my top tip to improve family life and reduce stress in the mornings, already a stressful time trying to get everyone out the door on time and with everything they need.

6. Childcare!!!

Okay, this might be obvious, but taking a break from having childcare – we moved house in December and I decided to just see how we did if I was the full-time stay-at-home parent alongside having a pretty much full-time job and guess what?! WE DIDN’T DO GREAT – showed me just how important it is for me to be able to leave the house without my children every now and then.

From this week on, with Atlas starting back at school, we’ll have full-time childcare, but for the last few weeks, we enlisted the help of our older boys’ Mum to mind the boys three days a week, and we also got their granddad to come over one morning a week and when I tell you I felt like I could finally breathe again, I’m ot exaggerating.

If you can at all, please, enlist a friend or family member to help you out, even if all they can manage is an hour a week. Because we all deserve to have that time to breathe or shower or stare at our phones without having to answer endless questions or listen to a (tiny, adorable, adored) voice asking “Mom? Mammy? Mam? Mum?” over and over again.

7. Physical activity (for the children okay; leave me alone!!!)

A few months before we moved house, our trampoline fell afoul of a heavy gust of wind, collided with our fence and ended up in our neighborhood pond. It was eventually retrieved with the help of a neighbour, some ratchet straps and Brandin’s truck, but one of the legs was bent, meaning it took us a while after we moved to order the new leg and reassemble it.

And when I tell you I’m now raging at us for the delay, I’m not over-egging it. I know people are very divided about trampolines, and concerned about the injury risk – and while that is a very real concern (although apparently we did choose the world’s safest trampoline), I feel like, if we ran a cost-benefit analysis, we’d still come out on the pro side.

Our kids will honestly spend hours jumping around outside on the trampoline – the older boys practice flips and WWE moves (questionable), while the littles run around and practice landing on their bums and balancing on one leg (also questionable) and it’s all so cute and wholesome! Not a screen in sight!

8. Making friends with the neighbours

Another wholesome activity – and, granted, not one that’s available to everyone (my childhood was spent bemoaning my parents’ decision to buy a house in the middle of nowhere, when all I wanted was to live in an estate where I could bazz around with my mates) – befriending our next door neighbours is one of the best things we’ve done.

Along with the trampoline, seeing the neighbour’s son outside is the number one best way to get Atlas up off the couch and outside in the fresh air, and seeing them play in the sandpit or at the water table or with the myriad outdoor toys in ours or our neighbours’ garages is just the cutest thing.

9. Bulk buying snacks

If there’s one phrase guaranteed to send me into a fit of rage, it is “there’s nothing to eeeeeat”, said, almost always, by a child who is standing, at that second, in front of an array of things they could, in fact, be eating. It’s almost as irritating to me as “I’m bored”, the ultimate non-problem (oh, to be bored! what a luxury!).

Anyway, the only way I’ve managed to solve this – and of course I’ll still hear that dreaded phrase every once in a while – is by bulk buying snacks in Costco and telling them that they can have one snack of their choice between each meal. (Otherwise, they can have fruit, cheese or yogurt, because snacks are expensive and we’re not made of money.)

Current favourites include Nutella snack packs (although, annoyingly, two of our children like the breadsticks and the other will only eat the pretzels, while Roman can’t see anyone eating a Nutella snack pack or he loses his mind entirely and we can’t just give him one because he ends up with Nutella everywhere), apple sauce packets and veggie straws (ranch flavoured, so gross).

10. Searching “Nuuly” on Anthropologie

Okay, this is only stress-relieving for me, but as the household manager (unwilling) and most important member of the household (clearly), being able to buy otherwise expensive clothes at a mega discount relieves some of my own stress, okay?! Anyway, I recently discovered, thanks to my friend L, that if you search “Nuuly” on Anthropologie.com*, you find previously-rented items at a major discount (e.g. Citizens of Humanity jeans reduced from $260 to $60). I can’t guarantee how great the condition of the pieces will be (they’re esentially pre-owned / pre-worn), but at that hefty a discount*, can you really complain?!

This post is supported by Hiya Health, a 100% made-for-kids vitamin brand developed with pediatricians and nutritionists. Save 50% on your first order at hiyahealth.com and get a FREE sunscreen with the code SUMMERSUN.

*These are affiliate links. If you click through and buy something, I’ll make a small commission. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Content warning: This piece contains reference to sexual assault. It will not be suitable for all readers or listeners. First (always), protect your own peace. xo (Normal service – ie, money diaries! – will resume soon, I promise.)

In the early months of 2017, the year I turned 32, I wrote a piece about a sexual assault I had experienced – suffered? endured? unsure of the terminology which, I’m sure, has to change to fit the wearer – in my college years.

I titled it, “Why I Didn’t Report My Rapist”. You can read it, in full, at this footnote1.

The headline I’d chosen was with two important aspects in mind: firstly, I wanted it to be clear, from the off, what I was writing about, so that anyone who chose to click through was doing so knowingly. Secondly, as someone who had been publishing her writing online for a decade by then, it was chosen to get clicks. Of course it was.

I wasn’t trying to be sensationalist, necessarily, but anyone who publishes their work online and claims not to want as many people as possible to read it is lying or, at the very least, exercising willful ignorance.

In the wake of its publication, there was a wide variety of responses. Some – the accusation that the headline was clickbait, for one – weren’t exactly shocking. Others were.

A well-known and then-popular podcast, fronted by two self-described “feminists”, released an entire episode in which, without naming me, they called my experience into question. They asked whether I was really raped, because I hadn’t kicked or screamed; because I had simply stopped saying anything; because I’d let him into my bed, not for the first time. Don’t these kinds of accusations, they asked, hurt men?

They would later retract the episode, and made an apology “for it”, although it would be years before they would apologise to me directly.

I was horrified, at the time, by their questions – but, as I think about it now, a year later, they were the same questions I’d asked myself. Was it really rape-rape, if there was no violence? I had no scratches, no bruises, no skin beneath my fingernails.

Was it really rape-rape, if the man in question didn’t realise that’s what it was? Was it really rape-rape, if I’d slept with him before? Was I harming other women by categorising my assault (was it assault at all?!) with theirs, when they – so many women, whose stories we read in headlines all the time – had suffered so much more than I had?

This wasn’t the only assault I would suffer in my life. Of course it wasn’t; according to the comprehensive Central Statistics Office (CSO) Sexual Violence Survey, 52% of women in Ireland have experienced some form of sexual violence (including non-contact abuse, harassment, assault, or rape) in their lifetime.

In a Dublin bar one night, I was surrounded by a group of young men, pints in hand. One of them reached out and groped my breast; his friends laughed. I laughed, too (what was the alternative?), then moved out of their trap and back to my own group of friends. I didn’t tell them what had happened; it felt significant, but also like something I was making a big deal out of.

In another Dublin bar, another man-with-pint asked if my breasts were real. It was a rude question, but I was young and potentially more carefree than I am now (potentially! lol) and so I laughed it off. He reached out and gave them a rough squeeze, then laughed, too, and walked away.

That time, I did tell a male friend, who immediately tried to find the man in question. “I’ll fucking kill him,” he told me. Male violence begetting male violence.

A third incident: in a Galway bar this time, walking up – or down, I’m not sure (“why aren’t you sure? Could you be misremembering?”) – a man reached his hand up the back of my (short…) skirt and inside my underwear, touching my flesh. I didn’t even react quickly enough to give him a shove; we were carried off in the throngs going up (or down) and away from one another.

A fourth: I punched a man in the face for grabbing my breast once, then twice, refusing to stop even when I told him to, pushed him away. A bouncer found me within minutes and asked, “Did you just punch someone in the face?” I told him yes; he’d grabbed me, and I’d told him to stop, he’d done it again, so I’d hit him. “Well,” he said, “there were better ways to handle that.” He walked away before I could ask what they were. Please, sir, that feels like something I need to know.

A survey by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre reveals that “a staggering 71% of victims did not report the incident(s) to the Gardaí; 70% did not seek medical treatment following the experience and 59% did not seek counselling or support services”. These figures are likely to be higher; a lot of women don’t realise they’ve been assaulted until days, months, years after the fact, if even then.

And when it comes to grooming, things are even more complicated. According to research by RAINN, “Many women do not realize they have been groomed because the process is slow, subtle, and disguised as care, love, or mentorship. Groomers build deep trust by fulfilling emotional needs, making the manipulation feel like a special connection rather than a threat.”

In response to the piece I wrote this week about Glen Hansard’s problematic behaviour over the years (yes, I chose that headline carefully, too), hundreds, if not thousands, of people protested my assertions on the basis that his victims don’t believe themselves to be victims. This belies a fundamental misunderstanding of how grooming works, and the effect it has on victims. Not to mention the fact that, when a man confesses to falling in love with a child, the important part of the story is not how that child feels about him, at the time or even years later, when he or she is an adult.

There are myriad reasons why any woman might choose not to report her assault, and for the avoidance of any doubt: that is her right. She is not under any obligation to speak to anyone about anything unless and until she feels ready.

And while people frequently talk about how important it is to keep these predators off the streets, make no mistake: the onus there is on the pepetrators themselves, the people who knew (and know) about their behaviour, and the authorities, who need to find a way to better support victims and ensure their safety throughout the process, because right now neither of those things is assured.

I asked this week, on Instagram, for women to share with me – anonymously why they chose not to report their assaults. I used an anonymous question-asking app I’ve used before; I didn’t realise that it has a limit when it comes to how many responses you receive before it starts booting older answers off and into the unrecoverable ether.

I tried to capture as many responses as I could, but I’m sorry if yours got lost. I’ve never got this many replies to anything I’ve ever shared, and they were hard to keep up with.

Please know that I read every single one that I could. I believe you. I’m with you. I hate the man (and men, and women) who did this to you. I hope they rot in whatever hell exists out there for them. I hope you live the best life you can, and find a way to heal and be happy despite (and in spite of!) them. I believe you.

These responses have been copied and pasted and published as they were sent in to me. No edits have been made.

I was 17, in shock and didn’t want to upset anyone. I’m 49 and still won’t walk in parks/closed off spaces alone.

Fear of not being believed because previously I had had a lot of crushes/boyfriend’s

It was at a house party in my home so felt a sense of blame. Also fear of backlash from the friend group as he was popular.

I was inebriated. I didn’t even know I had, had sex, only for the fact I was naked. I felt it was my stupidity that resulted in it happening.

because it was one of my best friends brother at the end of a night out and my entire friend group would be destroyed

As a child, didn’t understand it. As a teenager, I fancied him despite being older than me. As an adult, he was my boss. 3 different men. Also, 2 cousins “tried” and I kicked them (was an older teen then)

He was my partner at the time. I was scared of him and didn’t think anyone would believe me. I was afraid of what he would do to me if I ever told anyone

It was my stepfather, my mother married him after he assaulted me, he went on to continue to assault and rape me after she died for almost ten years. His son was a Garda Sergeant and my stepfather was a retired school principal. No faith that I would be believed by anyone after the marriage happened

W my rape I never actually said no I just panicked and completely froze . I think this is really missunderstood- that fight/flight are nor the only responses and freeze and fawn are v common. It took months for me to even realise it was an assault and not a bad date bcos of freeze response.

I was 10. I didn’t want my family to know. I didn’t want to keep going over it. It didn’t seem as big a thing then as I know it is now age 41

The trauma of reporting/statements/court case and nothing happens to them anyway. Spend the time/money on therapy to heal yourself. Legal system no good 😢

I also have a history of depression and knew this would be used against me somehow. And seeing how awful the legal process can be meant I never even considered reporting it. Didn’t want to have to relive it and have everything questioned to within inch of life. Thanks Rosemary

Was on Erasmus, guy offered to give me a lift home- drove me somewhere else. I was scared but went along with it. I never reported as i had been a bit drunk and it would seem I allowed it to happen. Also I was in a foreign country.

Because it was a friend and alcohol was taken

He worked in UCD and my dad said that the university would close ranks because it was just his word against mine

Statutory rape. Was too scared to go through the process of reporting. Myself and my friends had been physically threatened after the “relationship” ended. Wanted him out of my life!

Acceptance of what happened.

Grief

Guilt

People pleasing

Impact on other ppl

Fall out

Victim blaming

Exposing

Whats the point?

Judgement

Scapegoat

Hi Rosemary, i didnt report it years ago cause I was drunk and he was my friend. I felt I shouldn’t have gotten so drunk, he must have thought I was leading him on, it was a mess. It’s the shame of it.

He was friend of my friend. My friend had said he had a gf. He told me they had split. Following morning woke me with SA, I pushed him away. He rang me a taxi as his gf was on the way. Thought it was my fault for believing him and had consensual sx beforehand so was ashamed of myself

I didn’t want our kids to know their dad was capable of doing that, and it only happened once

Felt like I wouldnt be listened to by the Gardai, and I downplayed it. I think it was sadly normalised at the time (early 2000s)

It was a neighbours father and he rubbed my fanny through my trousers. I was 13 and knew it was wrong. His four daughters were there at the time and I was so stunned. I never really went to their house again if he was around. Never told anyone because I didn’t think I’d be believed and you are the first person I’ve ever told. He’s dead now but I always wondered had he done anything to his daughters

Victim shaming

Because everyone knew I fancied him so who would believe me

I was a 14 yo lad, i worked in a pub at weekends collecting glasses, a drunk woman shoved her tongue down my mouth & slapped my ass in front of everyone, they all laughed, I quit the next day after i came in & a photo from the cctv of it was posted behind the bar, thats why i didnt report it

I was 15. He was 31. He worked at a local swimming pool. His girlfriend was 19/20 and people would 100% have believed that I encouraged him to cheat on his girlfriend with me rather than what actually happened. Months of grooming in the lead up to it. I would have believed I was wrong, too.

I got sexually assaulted by a friend of a friend at a house party 20 yrs ago. I had taken to bed, hadnt had any interaction with the guy that night or before. I woke up to him sexually asaulting me. I didnt tell anyone the extent to what happened as I was utterly convinced I wouldn’t be believed.

I felt like i had put myself in that unsafe situation so couldnt say anything

He was much older and got me alone at 16 in the daytime and I thought it was my fault such was the shame I carried for years. Took a lot of time for me to realise what had happened.

Because I fully thought at the time I would not be believed. And that was perpetuated by the language and narrative around the brave women who reported their attackers both in society and media (in the 90s/00s)

As a young teen, my best friend’s Dad, when I’d have to kiss his cheek st xmas or a bday, would turn his head at last second so he could kiss me on the lips. My mother later told me when she was out with him and others socially, she was returning to her seat & he had his open palm of his hand on it

Because I was married to him, another one was my boss… and because I didn’t trust the police and the system to operate in a way that my safety was garanteed

He is a neighbour,would open can of worms.I see him around most days.I was 15, he was 40.groomed me and lasted 3 years.Cant wait for him to die and never have to see him.

My mum was abused by her brother when she was young. No one knew about it until our lives blew up, my Dad left and she shared her experiences of abuse with me. I’m stunned she survived. She’s now happily remarried and our lives are great. I won’t risk that by sharing my experience.

1. I think I blamed myself , I thought initially I’d drank tooo much but I def think I was spiked , girls targeted myself and my friend who were out for a quiet drink and asked us if we wanted to go to a party after in the upstairs of a local house in south Dublin after a late night bar. 2. We’d not drank much but I woke up with someone on top of me in a mezzanine type cozy area up a stairs .. I managed to get him off me and got out and flagged a taxi , got home and was like a blood bath , went to women’s health for STI screening and they were great but I never reported it 3. Felt awful for years - I’m sure it’s happened to so many others and I should have reported but knew even next am that once I’d had a shower etc the evidence probably was limited

I was sexually assaulted by a then male friend in my own bed in my very own home after a party I held. I was drunk & sleepy. The “friend” figured it was an invitation. It was not. I was seeing his best mate at the time. I woke to find him on top of me, biting my breasts & fingering me. He got off me & left.

I didn’t report it at the time because I was a mix of emotions....guilt, mortification, shame, rage, disbelief. I buried it deep down until it raises its head a couple of years ago. This time the rage was all encompassing.

Family friend. I didnt want the further turmoil it would have caused in my life and my family’s life

Last year. Pregnant. Twins. Married. 32 weeks, husband violently assaulted. Preeclampsia admitted. Elderly parents know. Complicated can’t leave. V well educated, both good jobs. Would never have believed I would be in this situation.

Shame. Feeling as though I’m wrong, could be proved wrong, a slut, promiscuous. The idea of someone saying I’m lying. Reputation at the idea of someone telling stories about me. I’d prefer to take it to the grave than have the it kept alive during prosecution. My family knowing.

He’s my best friends brother. It would devastate her.

I did and a judge said she didn’t believe me even though all the evidence was there (the crime, breach of a protection order) oh and the judge was a woman. He got worse after that, sure he felt invincible. That day was probably the worst of my life.

Because I think it would cause me more trauma ,going to court can take up to 5 years ,and I wanted to start my healing journey

Lack of physical proof/marks

Thinking their behaviour was normal, expected, not a big deal, “it happens to everyone...”

Also thinking it must have been MY fault, I must have done something.... Shame

I didnt report SA when i was 16 because , it was my my aunts husband, i was ashsmed , embarrassed, thought no one would believe me, it was my fault , felt it would cause trouble in the extended family. Im 52 now , still get really sad for 16 yr old me

I was 17 and had been drinking and he was the captain of the rugby team and even then I knew that nobody would believe me/care so I said nothing and developed a drug addiction that lasted years. I’m able to say what happened to me now but I’ve never once told anyone who he is cause of the fear.

Abused by my brother 30yrs ago, how do you prove it?? Ive blocked alot of it out so dont remember majority of it. How do you report something youve no proof of and hardly remember

My best friend’s mother passed away. Her dad was really down, and asked for help with a creative project which I offered, once a week in their kitchen. I came to see him as a second father, until he assaulted me and told me his dead wife sent me as an angel to be with him.

A friend reported a man she invited to her apartment. Consented to oral sex but when it came to penetration she said no and in the moment he didnt take no for an answer and proceeded to force himself on her. It went to court and was dismissed because she had consented to oral sex.

Thank you for doing this. I didn’t report an assault because I just didn’t want the thoughts of the event in my head. I was also concerned about disgracing the company where the man was employed (a somewhat charitable organisation that rely on their good name). I am sure the man was using this To his advantage. I believe he is retired now so somewhat hoping people are not still at risk.

Nobody would believe it & in my mind I lead him on as I brought him back to my place. I said we weren’t going to have sex and I didn’t want to and he said don’t worry we are just hanging out but we had sex. It wasn’t violent or abusive but I said no and I didn’t want to. Is this rape? It’s my fault

It was my own fault and nobody would believe it.

Because it would completely break my whole immediate family apart and Dad would die of shame

I was 9 months pregnant and at my friends fathers funeral the afters in a hotel it was a particularly large funeral when I was leaving a man in his sixties literally fingered me from behind I hate that word but there is no other word to describe it…a very respected person in parish I wasn’t believed

Fear of hurting or losing people I love. Fearing being seen as overly dramatic or misunderstanding social cues even though his actions were forceful. Fear of my own anger.

Honestly, at the time i knew it was yuck but i didnt know it was rape. Only now with a mature mind i see what it was , not sure i trust the system to report now if it even happened again but i would speak out and seek support.

It was a family member and I was too afraid of what it would do to my family. I was also very young (10ish) so for a long time I didn’t even know what it was & felt I was somehow to blame? When I was old enough to realise, it felt like too much for me and I would still hate to rip my family apart.

I was in disbelief that it could happen to a smart street wise girl (me). I was ashamed and embarrassed and convinced myself that I’m tough and I’ll get through this. If I turned back the clock I know I still wouldn’t report it as the legal system is not good enough for he said / she said cases.

I was a child and felt ashamed

Because i was so drunk. Knew i didnt want anything to happen, had my period and a tampon in. I didnt even know he had gone there until he realised the tampon was in the way. I was way too drunk, he took advantage. I was embarassed. Trying to retrieve tampon was an ordeal 😵

Because he was best friends with my best friend’s husband. And i felt it would put them in an uncomfortable position and ruin our friendship. I wasn’t positive they would believe me and didn’t want to risk it.

Don’t consider myself as been raped.the narrative on my situation has changed in the 30 years since it happened and some people would argue now as to what sexual assault is. I was having sex with someone consensually, they took condom off, without my consent. Looking back I didn’t know it was so wrong

First month living in Canada, one of the roomates. It was so coersive, alcohol was involved, I said no 20 times but because I didnt think I said it forcefully enough, I didnt think id done enough to prevent it and therefore how could I report it.

I didn’t know what was happening when it was happening to me

Re SA cases - I work in law and if my friend came to me and said I was SA’d by the rugby lads/GAA lads/Jason Da Rula’s entourage whatever and asked should she report, I would say no. As a feminist and activist, that is horrific but it is the truth. It’s too hard, the system is broken and it will break her. So if the perpatrator offers cash , take it , pay for therapy and recover and live your life well.

What’s the point. Lot of drink had. Knew it would have caused so much drama. Wanted it forgotten immediately

He was a family friend and a neighbour next door so I was afraid of issues down the line and his family were also helping mine after my father died when I was 12.

I’m a female guard.I was out socialising with 5+ other guards. All male.1 of them, 20 yrs my snr put his hand up my skirt, inside my underwear&essentially SA me. Lasted few secs.I pushed his hand away embarrassed. He did this multiple times. I didn’t share bc I didnt want to be THAT girl who caused

Because I thought it “didn’t count” and felt like it was “my fault” - a situation where I withdrew consent or didn’t consent for certain aspects (unprotected sex)

Two families (related) would have been destroyed by me telling my story, and I couldn’t destroy all their lives and see their devastation. Sexually abused at age 9.

I didn’t want to blow my world up.

I was drunk with work colleagues and didn’t remember how I ended up in his bed

Because I was afraid I had caused it and I deserved it

Drinking , wouldn’t be believed, friends not even believing ,small town ( so my life ruined if I did ) so many reasons

Because the circumstances in which it happened there was a lot of fun and flirting & drink so why would anyone believe? Unsure if I really believe…maybe I wasn’t totally clear? plus really don’t want to cause an event or a situation.

Shame that I put myself in a position where it could happen in the first place. And knowing it would be my word against his

Woke up to my ex trying to force ‘himself’ into my mouth,tried to diminish it at the time,needless to say i got out,never told anyone for ages

I don’t really know why. Back then (15 years ago) it was normal behaviour, or acceptable behaviour, which now makes me feel so sad.

Because he was in a position of power over me at work and I, as a junior, had no hope of being believed over him

Because surviving came before speaking.

I buried it to cope.

Afraid I was to blame even though I said no about 20times

Wanted to forget it asap (I never forgot)

Thought people would not believe me or that I was being foolish

Didn’t want to relive it

Didn’t want to be viewed as no craic or a dry shite

Felt ashamed and like people would blame me for drinking and think I played some part in instigating it despite the fact my drink was spiked and I ened up ni hospital

I didnt report childhood SA that I went through until I had a breakdown as an adult. I blocked it out until I was 19, and it took me intil 26 to fully report. I was in denial, and he was in me and my familys life until he fled the country when i was 21 due to a SA incident. When he fled, my family still defemded him so i felt huge guilt. Eventually i reported him to Tusla/ the Guards.

I was SA’d in my sleep, woke to a stranger digitally penetrating me. I froze, literally until he stopped. I didnt report him because I fell asleep in his bed, drunk and high and felt it was my fault. I also didnt want my boyfriend to find out.

Because I was so drunk I didn’t remember details and he was someone my friend was dating. I honestly just wanted to ignore it and pretend like the whole thing never happened because I didn’t want to lose my friend. She never found out and I just tried to avoid him as much as possible.

Embarrassed, fear of upsetting family, fear of backlash/no one believing you.

#1 i was 7yo. He was elderly neighbour. Didn’t report because I didn’t know the words. Only admitted it when I read his death notice. # friend of my mother. 13yo. He was pillar of community. # is/was a Garda. Self explanatory.

I didn’t think anyone would believe me. Separate situation, I told parents when I was young maybe 7 about a family member that was inappropriate and it never dealt with.

I was afraid i wouldn’t be believed. My family didn’t believe my drink was spiked (it most assuredly has been). I couldn’t quite believe it myself but it happe. I was so young and innocent that I didn’t even have the vocabulary to articulate or understand what had happened me. 1990s Ireland was shit

I thought it wasn’t ‘bad enough’ to report

🚘So I’ve 2 separate stories about not reporting. I put a car so you can link them.

When we were teenagers we didn’t even know we were being assaulted. We used to call it the pity/safety fuck. No we didn’t want it.They knew.But it was so much easier to give in than face the violence that might come 🚘 I was in a relationship with a married man. We were “exploring” BDSM (see exploiting me). I liked it for the most part. Told him some fantasies. Then he raped me in a car park because he said that’s what I said I’d like. Untrue but also not the point. I can’t report. Sure he’d say I asked for it. 🚘 and he’s married. I’d be setting my life on fire. Everyone would blame me. It was easier and safer for me to just try and leave the “relationship”. I couldn’t deal with the fallout 🚘 a man also put his hands inside my underwear as I was walking up the stairs in a club. Like between my Labia. 🚘last one. I am a nurse. I was walking down the hall with a box so my hands were full. A male nurse stepped out from a side room and slapped my arse. I said it to the boss and he said “ah go way girl, you loved it”. How could I report it then?

I didnt report my SA as i was scared it would impact my career (he was older more established etc) also i had been drinking alcohol at this work event. He entered my hotel room at the conference having had a key made. I felt shame. He apologised by email. Wtf.

Because who would have cared?

Woke up to a ‘friend’ (who I’d never had a sexual relationship with) with their hand in my pants, I made such a fuss that other friends came in and told him how unacceptable it was. Didn’t take it further because at the time I was quite ‘promiscuous’, and also what would the point have been….

Because the line between creepy, criminal and convictable is so blurred. Women surviving really severe assault rarely get justice so anyone with anything deemed less serious would absolutely never. Also, embarrassment and just wanting to forget about it and move on.

My uncle (aunt’s husband) acted really weird, not inappropriate necessarily, but odd, with me about 20 years ago and I didn’t want to be responsible for ruining our entire family with accusations when there was no proof and it wasn’t concrete, just enough to make me uncomfortable

Overwhelming feeling at first in a vunerable position! How do you prove? Self blame! Was it the clothes i was wearing? Does being friendly look like flirting? Shame it happened? Lack of emotional support to face it and backlash? Are women just sex toys? Effected me for life 😪

Believing you did something to deserve it!

People thinking your just looking for attention? Embarressing for anyine to know ot happened to you! People knowing it happened is not going to reverse the effects! Are we asking for it by dressing good and looking good?

Abused by Uncle, didn’t report because afraid of family rejection, upheaval, chaos

He was friends with everyone

I would have been blamed for sleeping at a party

There was no evidence

In Dublin 40 year’s ago I was beaten to crap by ex husband. It was shameful then so I said nothing. Now I would 💯 if anyone laid a hand on me. No second chance.

I was violently attacked by an ex who broke into my house while i was sleeping with a knife. I went to the Garda station to report it and the Garda wanted me to explain it at the desk witj other people waiting there. I walked out.

I think for me it would make it bigger than it was, as in I’m coping better without everyone knowing

Assaulted by a childhood friend while I slept. I didn’t want to embarrass him. I didn’t think I would be believed by others. Felt I’d be blamed for allowing him to sleep beside me after a night out. I still hate that I didn’t raise it with him. He moved abroad not long afterwards.

Shame because I was drunk 😢

I didn’t report the grooming, the rape & my abuser because in spite of being left with a feeling of shame, & knowing that something very wrong had happened to me, it took me years to fully realise & I just had no idea what to do. I didn’t think anyone would believe me either.

My husband hit me once in a drunken argument, gave me a concussion and two black eyes as a result. He never did it before and hadn’t done it since. I didn’t tell a soul because I was embarrassed. That he did it & I forgave him. I didn’t report it because I didn’t want that trouble in my own house.

Not enough evidence, my word against his

Too traumatic to go through it all again and not get a conviction

I was raped as a child, by many men, my mam knew. When I was 16, I confronted her. She told me it was all my fault and she would have me arrested for lying! I believed her. I was very naive. She killed herself 3 years ago and I live with this, I’m now 61. I was raped and assaulted as an adult.

As an adult I was assaulted by a man and had to prove I was on my period before he would stop. I called the Gard, they said he was such a good man in the community. How could I do that to his family?

Mostly happened to me on nights out. I was always made feel that I put myself in that position of being assaulted. Also I was reared never to bring trouble to the door so reporting would definitely be a no go.

My rape: I was blackout drunk, woke up to him inside me, somehow thought it was my fault for being so drunk. My abusive partner: He was so charming and nice to everyone else. I didnt think anyone would believe me.

It was my 1st cousin and I didn’t want to hurt my dad or family with his (my cousins) actions. My dad and my aunt are very close!

I went to a victim support counsellor and I was advise To consider if I had the capacity mentally and financially to fight this. I battled with this decision in the future but now that I am older I realise that she was right. I didn’t have the support network around me to survive going to the cop

Ran into difficulties with gardai & doctor. It was 2004. Was told basically that it was too difficult to prove and to give up.

I was 🍇 by cousin. I was 8 he was 15. Possible grooming also. Family have intimidated me into staying quiet about it. He’s also Garda Sergent now so chances are i would not be believed.

I knew I would not survive it. I also believed that it was my fault for about 10 years

Being treated like the villain and dragging it out any further. No way I ever wanted to relive that never mind publicly in front of everyone in court if I would have been lucky enough to get that far. Also a massive fear of not being believed but trust me it happened I was there.

The main reason I never reported domestic violence for both physical and verbal was that because I was afraid nobody would believe me and that I would lose access to our then 2 year old. He was the nice guy, the upstanding citizen, a real people person who went out of his way to help others! I was a stay at home mom from a broken family who felt thats all the love I deserved. When it got really bad I did report it and showed the cops my bruises . They showed up to our hse that evening to question him. Without my permission. Which made things a lot worse. He convinced them I was lying … now they believe me. But only after his life fell apart and I am now thriving. Even my free legal aid lawyer at the time was taking his side. I had to find a stronger one who saw through him. It was really really hard. But nobody wants to believe it.

Was abused by my neighbour as a child. Embarrassed and never told my parents because of this embarrassment. Also my previous boss pinned me against a wall at a work night out. Put his hand up my skirt.. he is a very well known car dealer. He is a narcissist and a bully.

I thought people would say it was my fault

I was embarrassed. Years ago and I think differently now but I felt like I’d let myself get into the situation (I was seeing the guy when he raped me).

He was in a position of power over me in the company. When I tried to report to HR they didn’t believe me so I never went further. Years later I had to be interviewed by him for my own job during a company restructure (different company) and he made me redundant.

I didnt realise it was rape at the time, it wasn violent. Didnt happen down a dark alley. It was a partner.

I repeatedly said no, he ignored, pushed my legs open and just did it. I didnt scream or run away. And when I finally did realise I had been raped it was too late to report and tbh I didnt think I would be believed.

I was abused as a child and thought I could take the secret to the grave because they only harmed me. Also the shame of having to tell someone was too much. Then, 20 years later, the shame manifested into physical and psychological illness till I broke and had to share what happened.

Once I shared the details with friends and family. They urged me to report this as it could have been done to someone else. That’s the only reason I reported it, to ensure it didn’t happen to anyone else or at least showed a repetitive nature of abuser

1st time as child- Didn’t understand fully what had happened/that is was assault, until older. Although always knew/suspected wasn’t ok. 2nd time as adult-Victim blamed myself for being drunk, the shock, went away the next day and time passed so just “got on with it”

Afraid my sexual choices would get brought up and go against me

I was embarrassed as I was drunk there was implied consent the person took it further than I was comfortable. I was 15 and so were they

Hi Rosemary, I did report it. It was by an ex and I never heard a word after. I was told not to follow it up from a lawyer because it could have negative effects on me but I guess that he was contacted because he stopped contacting me. It’s crazy for something so serious that it plays out like this

He still lives in the same city as me. I can’t cope with going to the guards, having to give a statement and go through the whole process of a possible conviction- or lack there of. Choosing to put my health and energy back into myself

If you were affected by any of the content in this essay, please reach out to help. Your local rape crisis centre is a good place to start.

The world has gone mad.

This past week, a 56-year-old singer-songwriter from Dublin died in a 4.30am motorbike accident after a lively seisiún in a Dublin pub – an incident that’s being investigated by gardaí as if there’s a mystery to uncover, which does make me wonder if this is a courtesy afforded to all dead road users – and the outpouring of grief and adulation was almost instantaneous.

Social media was full of posts about his impact on Irish music (he was in a band called The Frames, another called The Swell Season and, perhaps most significantly, won an Oscar for the song Falling Slowly, which featured in the popular 2006 film, Once); the activism he was involved in for Dublin’s homeless community (he organised Dublin’s annual Christmas charity busk in aid of the Dublin Simon Community and was also one of the people who, in 2016, occupied Dublin’s Apollo House in protest at the city’s homeless crisis); the mentorship and support he provided to young (this is significant) singer-songwriters, many of whom were quick to credit him with encouraging, fostering and boosting their profiles.

What social media wasn’t full of, though, was posts about the other side of Glen Hansard: the side that was, I thought, well known, as it was to me, a millennial woman who spent a lot of time in Dublin in my teens and early twenties, going to gigs or nightclubs (or both).

It was the side that meant you just knew, as a woman in your teens, to be wary around him; it was the side that meant you had a friend who had “been with” him when she was far too young (in my then-friend’s case, 15) to have been able to consent to it; it was the side that had him confessing, in a major US publication, to falling in love with a child he had met when she was just 13, and he 31. “I think we fell in love a couple of years ago, but nothing happened until recently,” he said of his Once co-star, Marketa Irglova, in 2007, when she was 19. “I kept telling myself she’s just a kid,” he said of Irglova, whom he had first met at the age of 13.

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I’m in a cafe, “working”. That’s in inverted commas because I forgot to take my ADHD medication this morning, so now working looks a lot like scrolling the internet and chatting to my mates and wondering why I can’t seem to find any fun clothes right now that aren’t from Next. (Also searching for new kids’ clothes because kids’ clothes are so fun to buy but truly my children have more than enough clothes so what am I even doing?!)

A woman has come in and sat across from me. She’s drinking an iced latte, which I suppose is a choice I understand, as it’s 30 degrees outside today (and it’s not even noon), but I’m just not an iced latte person, especially since I went on a GLP-1 and became someone who’s cold almost all of the time. (The only exception is when I’m sitting directly in the sun, like a snake.)

She’s drinking her iced latte and she’s swaying from side to side and it’s kind of noticeable because it’s, you know, a kind of dramatic sway. And while I generally try not to stare at people in cafes, I look up and I realise she’s got a tiny baby in a Solly Baby wrap on her chest and suddenly the swaying makes sense.

I swayed for the first nine months of Roman’s life, mostly because I was wearing or holding him for 20 out of every 24 hours. But then I did it even when I wasn’t, because when you get in the rhythm of something it’s hard to get out. I’d find myself standing and swaying, or standing and rocking the buggy, or standing and tapping my arm because tapping his bum also seemed to soothe him and sometimes I was so tired I couldn’t quite figure out whether he was in the buggy or out, or in the wrap or out, and the risk of not swaying was much greater than the risk of swaying, just in case.

When I was in it – in those heady, colicky days when he didn’t want to be put down at all, whether it was on someone or beside someone – I wished for very little other than for this time to be over, even though so many (well-meaning, I’m sure) arseholes would say things to you like, “just don’t wish the days away; they’ll go by so quickly!” and you’d think, yeah, with any fucking luck they will, you dickhead.

Why should I be forced to feel bad for wishing away a time in my life that is exhausting and draining and stressful?! And no matter how many people tell you that some babies just cry, and some babies just don’t like to be put down, and some babies just don’t sleep for long stretches (or even medium stretches), when you’re in it – in the mire of sleeplessness and aching shoulders and worry and holding your pee because when you sit down, even on the toilet, even for two minutes, the baby wakes up – it’s hard not to think there’s something wrong. Wrong with the baby, and wrong with whatever it is you’re doing (you can’t call it parenting or mothering, because those words imply correctness and, like I said, you’re definitely doing something wrong, because why else would your baby be crying non-stop?!). Just wrong.

(She’s stopped swaying now and is eating a sandwich and seems not to be dropping crumbs on the baby which, honestly, is Olympic-level skill, right there, and I would tell her, except that I remember the time I went to the library with Atlas and Roman and Roman was crying and Atlas didn’t want to leave so he was running from me – and then started crying – and a woman came up and told me I was doing a good job and then I was crying, too.)

It’s weird, though, how biology or our brains (or both?) work, because now, when I see a woman with a baby in a sling, I don’t really remember – not properly, not viscerally – the back pain or the exhaustion, I just remember the smell of Roman’s head and the feel of his soft little body cocooned against mine, and I think, not with any small amount of sadness (I wouldn’t go so far as to call it grief), I miss that.

He’s 19 months old now and we don’t really cuddle much, unless the conditions are absolutely ideal: we must be sitting on the couch, in the evening, or right before nap time; he must have his little rag in hand, a burp cloth that’s turned into a comforting blankie by virtue of its always being present when I was breastfeeding, to mop up the excess milk that would inevitably drip down the side of his face; there must be nothing more exciting going on in the house, a condition that is more rare than ever now that we have kittens running around, kittens who are never more entertaining to him than when they’re being squashed, sat on, or some combination of both.

He’s still nursing, before naps and bedtime if – and this is a big if – I’m in the house. When I’m not, he doesn’t really seem to miss me. He gets put in a long-sleeved onesie and zipped into a sleep sack and someone who’s not me holds him and rocks him and sings him a song or two, and he closes his eyes and sucks his thumb while the other hand holds his rag and rubs it over his eyes and his nose and his cheeks and, once those three things have happened, he’s ready to be put down and he rarely complains.

When I’m there, the nursing takes the place of the singing – although I suppose I do sometimes sing to him while I’m nursing – and when he’s done nursing he replaces me with his thumb and he rolls away from me to indicate, “okay, now, I’m ready now”.

When Atlas was his age, he would nurse all day long. We’d sit on the couch, side by side, and he’d start to rummage my top until it was up and the bra was down and he’d press his sticky little body up against mine with my boob in his mouth and he’d watch the TV while he nursed, his face slightly angled to the side, eyes firmly affixed on the screen.

Sometimes, I’d have to gently tell him that I thought he’d had enough – usually around the time Dwayne Johnson says “well, honestly I could go on and on” (if you know, you know) – and he’d grumble a bit but he’d accept that, until, inevitably, an hour later, the boob would be back in the mouth again and he’d be happy, suckling away as he watched Moana for the hundredth time.

Roman is a different child altogether. He has zero interest in my boobs – or in me, I suspect – except when he’s in his room, with the lights off, about to lay down for a nap. Even when he puts his hands up to be lifted, mouth open, saying “aah! aah!” which I could interpret as “up” but also could mean pretty much anything, as it’s the only sound he makes, the main way he communicates what he wants, no matter what that thing is, he is using me as a means to an end.

He wants to get up to reach whatever contraband has caught his eye at any given moment: the remote, maybe, or the unsuspecting kitten, or the packet of grated cheese someone has left out on the counter, not remembering how quickly that cheese will disappear, 50% of it in the bellies of my small children, the other 50% on the floor, or in the crevices of the high chair (or both).

His appeals to me – to be held or to get up or to get down or to get this or that – always feel like means to a different end. He is, as my friend C once remarked (about my dog, to be fair) “always on the take”.

This doesn’t hurt my feelings (although perhaps that statement in itself is telling), but I do think it contributes to my sense that Roman’s and my relationship is somehow less close than my relationship with Atlas was, at the same age, and is now, as a result of that continuing closeness.

Roman has recently started sleeping through the night, having, until about two weeks ago, been consistently waking up three times nightly to nurse (again, a perfunctory exercise).

We decided we’d like to wean him, not just because I couldn’t remember the last time I slept a whole night through, but also because I have some upcoming travel as part of one of my new social media gigs, and I’d rather not have to bring my 19-month-old along. (There’s nothing I like more than a solo flight – several undisturbed hours in which to read my book.)

When I told my husband that it was time, that we needed to night wean him which – because I couldn’t see another way to do it – would involve him going in to Roman whenever he woke up, instead of me, rocking or singing or soothing him back to sleep without the aid of nursing, he responded, “Well, that’s going to be very tough on me.”

There have been a handful of moments in my marriage (thus far) that, I think, could have ended in justifiable homicide, and this was one of them.

“The last four years,” I responded, “have been pretty tough on me too, you know.”

“I do know!” he protested. “And I’m not denying that. I’m just saying this is going to be tough on me.”

As it happens, it was tough on us both. For 10 days, Roman woke up twice or three times, a night, and cried – and when Brandin went in to calm him down, he cried harder, and when, eventually, he fell into a fitful sleep and Brandin tried to put him back down in his crib, he woke up and screamed.

I’d told myself that the most important thing was not to give in, not to go into him – even though I lay awake in bed, listening to him crying, and found myself dying to go in, knowing that I had in my possession the thing that would stop his crying, that would put him back to sleep in an instant, that would make him feel loved and held and comforted, all at once, and sure, I thought to myself, what harm is it doing me?

But, like I said, I have this travel coming up – and while I could, I suppose, bring him (free flights for under-twos, you know), there would then be the issue of what to do with him once we got there. It’s not like he’d be happy to sit on the floor and play with blocks while I went to meetings and, in any case, he can’t be within two feet of a keyboard or he loses his mind altogether, just dying to tap, tap, tap at the keys.

So we toughed it out, and he’s now sleeping through the night, waking some mornings at 9.30am, even 10. He’s been unzipping his sleep sack and getting his legs out, although the arms are proving a greater challenge.

I’m still nursing him before naps, when I’m there, and at bedtime (I’m almost always there) – but next weekend, I will go to the airport for a five-day work trip, and he’ll be left to fend for himself (or, rather, Brandin will be fending for them both).

I don’t have a breast pump any more (I gave it away in a Facebook group for moms), so I won’t be pumping while I’m away; I do have a little vacuum pump I can stick on my boobs if and when they become uncomfortable, so I’ll pack that in my carry-on and hope for the best. When I get back, five days later, I won’t offer to nurse him again.

As I say this, I feel immense guilt. I feel like I’m forcing him to grow up too fast, as though I’m severing this last link between us before he’s ready, because I just had to take this job, because I have to take this trip, because I need to feel as though my body is my own again, after almost half a decade of its being dedicated to someone else. (Two someone elses.)

I’m prioritising my own health and happiness over his, and that feels wrong. (I’m doing mothering wrong, remember?)

Atlas breastfed until he was two and a half, at which point I was pregnant with Roman and was too uncomfortable to carry on. Considering he’d been so attached to the boob, he adjusted well.

Occasionally, now, he’ll come in while I’m nursing Roman to sleep and he’ll ask if he can have some milk, too, and I’ll say “sure”, but when he puts his mouth to my breast, it’s as if he’s forgotten what to do. He blows raspberries; we laugh. He goes back to whatever else he was doing.

In a way, it’s galling to me that neither of them will remember these months, years I gave over to their needs – although, as I write that, I suppose I had needs, too. I craved their closeness (even when I didn’t); breastfeeding releases oxytocin, which I could always do with more of; it gave me a great excuse to come home early, to give into my homebody tendencies, to turn down invitations I didn’t really want to accept, anyway.

Things are different now. I no longer want to hide from the world (I don’t think I suffered from postpartum depression, but the depression that I’ve always suffered from has definitely been present throughout), and I yearn for a freedom that means being able to stay out even if it means missing bedtime.

As an avid declutterer – sometimes as a sign, honestly, of my ailing mental health, which in the past has manifested as my divesting myself of every item of clothing that made me feel fun or as though I might ever have somewhere to go – I’m also very excited to throw all of my nursing bras in the bin (although that also feels wasteful; as I type this, I can’t help but wonder, could I not use them to make some keepsake bears?!).

I recently invested in some grown-up bras – I own this Panache bra in two colours and it’s supportive and cute and keeps my boobs completely separated, which is important as, of late, I can’t bear anything to be touching them, even each other; I also own two of these Elomi bras, which also boast full bra separation and come in quite nice colours (in the battle of Elomi vs Panache I would say I feel like the Elomi is marginally more comfortable but the Panache gives a slightly nicer shape, which feels a manifestation of the eternal bra struggle) – and am looking forward to the day I can wear them without having to unfasten them from the back in order feed Roman to sleep (nursing in a non-nursing-specific bra is especially annoying because the boob I’m not nursing from often leaks, and unlike my trusty Target nursing bras, my glam bras are all handwash only).

This all feels rather self-serving, and selfish, in the way that, I suspect, only women feel that prioritising their needs is selfish. I think, too, that this is a sense of guilt that is heavily emphasised by the Irish, a kind of don’t you love yourself insinuation that makes any decision based in what you, as an individual human being, want – rather than, say, what’s best for your kids, or your family, or your community in a more general sense – feel somehow dirty, or tainted.

Anyway – here we are. I’m not taking Roman with me on my upcoming trip. And when I get back, I’m not going to offer him “milk?” at nap or bedtime any more. I’m not sure I’ll ever not feel a tinge of guilt at this decision, but I do know that, with time, that tinge will fade to an echo.

The true irony of motherhood is that, while two pregnancies and the subsequent sleep deprivation and stress have absolutely decimated my memory, and often my ability to remember the word I want to use, or the point I’m trying to make, that kind of maternal amnesia never strikes in a way that would be helpful. If there was a god, wouldn’t I forget all about these moments of guilt and shame and feelings of maternal inadequacy, instead of the names of women I’ve met half a dozen times (and quite like), or whether or not I’ve read this or that novel?! (Between this and the success of Mel Robbins, though, it’s clear that god does not exist. In this TED Talk I shall, etc.)

As you may be able to tell from this week’s profligate spending, I got paid by two of my freelance social media jobs, and therefore loosened the purse strings (er… lol? were they ever tightened, you may ask?) and allowed myself to buy a few bits I’d been wanting to buy.

I should also disclose that, having opened up a special offer for a discounted annual subscription to this very newsletter (25% off forever), in an effort to pay a fairly hefty $1,300 bill we got for Roman’s ear surgery (he had tubes inserted, which I think we called grommets growing up!?), we got a notice from our insurance company that the $1,300 we paid is actually going to be refunded to us.

So, once it is, I’m going to donate 50% of the income I make from that special offer (which you can still avail of below until the end of July) to the PCRF, or the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

Get 25% off forever

Anyway! On with the (consumerist) show!

Monday

This morning, the older boys’ mum arrives at around 9am to watch the littles – the older boys are working at their grandma’s bowling alley each Monday, with the result that one of them has become very wealthy (for an 11-year-old) while the 13-year-old has been spending every cent he earns (relatable) on The Amazing Digital Circus plushies (which, granted, wouldn’t be my choice, but variety is, after all, the spice of life).

I head straight to Snail*, which has become my absolute favourite place to work from, not because the seats are especially comfortable (in fact, my bum would report the opposite) but because the staff are lovely, the coffee is great and there are both indoor and outdoor seating options with good WiFi and it’s not so busy that I feel bad taking up a space. (I’ve decided, in fact, that if ever it gets full, I’ll leave and go work elsewhere, because I really don’t want to be that person.)

The one downside is that it’s quite expensive; the breakfast sandwich, which I indulge in today, is $15, and a latte with cardamom vanilla syrup (incredible) is $8. So, of course, I spend a fortune. ($33.89)

I also do something I hate doing, and make an actual phone call, to Fort Wayne Zoo, to sign Atlas up for another week of zoo camp in two weeks’ time. He loved it when he did the half-day camp a few weeks ago, and I feel guilty that the summer is ending so soon (he’s back to school on August 5th) and it doesn’t really feel like we’ve done all that much.

Of course, I missed the sign-up window – they close two weeks ahead of the camp date, so they can finalise numbers and order T-shirts etc – but, because when I checked last night, there were still spots, I decide to see if I can sign up over the phone. And I can! ($200)

I’m slightly concerned about how exhausted he’s going to be – this one is 8.30am to 3pm every day – and how he’ll deal with having to eat a packed lunch, but I decide he’ll survive.

I get quite a lot of work done this morning (I do think the Ritalin works, the medical community will be reassured to hear this), and then head home at around 1pm, where I finish some work in the office while Roman is asleep, and then come out in time to join in his speech therapy session at 2.30pm.

I’d forgotten how slowly speech therapy goes in those early days, and how hard it is not to feel a bit despondent at the lack of progress – but I’m encouraged by the fact that he’s started to use a few signs (for “more”, “all done” and “please”), so at least he’s managing to communicate a bit better than he was when we started.

The older boys get dropped off by their grandma, their mom heads home and then Brandin gets back and we start into dinnertime – tacos – and then play outside for a bit (I read my book) before it’s time to do baths and bedtimes etc.

Our Chewy autoship order comes out ($106.35), although I realised too late that we need to modify it to add kitten food and double the amount of cat litter we usually get, as these kittens are very regular, if you know what I mean (vom).

Also, though I swear I am getting better at resisting the lure of the online ads and incessant social media-based influencing, I do firmly believe that there’s only a certain number of very alluring ads one can see – say, a dozen – before one cannot but give in. As such, I finally allow myself to click through to the EBY site to take a closer look at this adorable leopard-print bra-and-knicker set and, before you know it… ($84.91, and this was with a first-time-buyer discount and some kind of “special offer” which, in hindsight, no longer feels like a bargain)

I go up to bed right after the little boys go down, at around 8.30pm, and read my book – Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, one of my favourite books of all time, which I’m re-reading for book club on Sunday week – for an hour or so before I go to sleep.

Daily total: $425.15 (starting off… strong?!)

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When Atlas was 18 months old, we paid privately to have him assessed for autism. At first, I was only really worried about his speech; we were being told that, at 18 months, he should have between 10 and 20 words, and he had precisely none, not even “mama” or “dada”, at least not said in any meaningful way.

So I set up a call with a speech therapist. She had worked with my sister’s youngest when, during Covid, his speech was delayed, and they’d had dozens of fruitful Zoom meetings (I have no idea how they managed it), ultimately resulting in him being the chattiest little boy with a massive vocabulary – “that was almost a disaster!” he told me, once, at the age of four, when I uncharacteristically reacted in time to prevent a bag of flour falling off a high shelf – and I felt comfortable expressing some of my concerns to her.

During the call, though, it became clear that perhaps what we were seeing wasn’t just a speech delay. She asked if he was pointing at things (he wasn’t), whether he looked when you pointed (he didn’t), if he imitated gestures or expressions (not really). She suggested we have him assessed for autism, which we could do through our doctor, where there would be a waiting list as long as he’d been alive thus far, or we could go privately.

We decided to go privately (we put it on a credit card, of course).

The morning of the assessment, we stopped for coffee. I carried Atlas in my arms. I was really scared for what a positive autism diagnosis might mean. I’d heard so many stories about children who were developing as expected and then, all of a sudden, woke up one day and no longer smiled or put their arms up for hugs or allowed their parents to touch them at all. I felt like I needed to take as much affection from him as he was willing to give, while he was willing to give it.

As we walked from the car to the cafe, his pudgy little legs wrapped around my waist, I tripped over one of those bumpers they have in place to tell cars they’re approaching an obstacle. I fell forwards. Atlas fell backwards. The back of his head fell straight into a (possibly faux; this is America) stone column. He immediately started wailing. So did I.

Things were off to a great start.

Brandin went in to get our coffees and I sat on the curb, rocking Atlas back and forth. We were both crying. I suspect that, at some point, he stopped, but I couldn’t. A woman asked if we were okay. I told her yes (but meant no).

It probably didn’t help that I then proceeded to drink my enormous coffee on the way to our appointment. Caffeine probably wasn’t what I needed in that moment, although even now, years later, I’m not sure what I did need. A crystal ball. A hug. Both? Neither?

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I can’t help but wonder…

Is this only possible because of the cocktail of drugs I’m on for my depression, anxiety, ADHD? Because, if you’d given me this schedule a decade ago, and tacked on four kids, an at-times difficult relationship with my husband, told me I’d be doing it all thousands of miles from family and (old) friends, and that my sister wouldn’t even be around, I’m sure I would have simply expired on the spot.

But here we are. I’m doing it (almost) all. Some of it I think I’m doing really well (the social media clients are thriving and it’s working wonders for my ego) while other bits I’m feeling a little less great about (the time I’m spending with my kids, the fact that my own writing has fallen a bit behind), but I’m doing it. We’re getting there.

Monday

This week I have a very full roster of work to get done: social media content to create and schedule for three brands; podcasts to edit and schedule; writing to do; emails to respond to; random life admin (bills to pay, appointments to make…); and, of course, a garden to obsess over (more on which later).

Our older boys’ mum, Kasey, comes over this morning at 8.30am to watch the boys for the day and I jet off pretty much straight away, heading to a nearby cafe where I get a coffee and a water and bed down for the morning. ($9.61)

After a few hours of meetings and writing and a modicum of stress-panicking (the hardest part about my work life right now is trying to move between brands and personas and remember to do x for this person while also having to do y for that person and, oh yes, somehow think about writing my Substack at the same time), I decide to get up and move to grab a sandwich at Jimmy John’s. ($13.17 for a sandwich, drink and packet of crisps)

After Jimmy John’s, I have a moment of wondering where I’ll go next. I have yet to find a truly comfortable place to work in Fort Wayne; every coffee shop seems to have very hard wooden or metal seats (or benches! horror) and I can only do a few hours before my bum starts killing me.

I decide I’ll try the library near our house, which is actually a pretty okay shout except for the fact that it’s freezing (air con is at max in Fort Wayne these days) and the person next to me keeps burping. Next time I’ll bring a cardi and my noise-cancelling headphones.

I get home at around 4pm and see that Kasey has cleaned and tidied the kitchen (an angel?!?) as well as keeping all of our children alive and happy. Once again I feel really guilty about how delighted Atlas and Roman are to see me, but I clearly get over that after dinner when I escape out front to read my book in the heat for a bit (our house is also oppressively air conditioned, but as I’m the only person who feels this way, my discomfort is not the priority).

Please take a moment for my #gifted Hanna Andersson x Ouef PJ shorts which, yes, I just wear as shorts-shorts these days. They coordinate really well with my Free Palestine T-shirt by Irish artist Em Blake.

Daily total: $22.77

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Monday

I feel like I need to get something out of the way early, and hope that you won’t judge me (any more harshly than I’m judging myself, at least): I signed Atlas up to vacation Bible school this week at a nearby church, at the urging of my friend (whose son is also going).

She’s very involved in the Church in Fort Wayne, which explains why she’s sending her son, and while initially I was hesitant, thinking it would just be taking advantage of free childcare, when she literally says to me, “it’s free babysitting!” I think, sure what harm? Plus, I’m sure they want all the impressionable young kids they can get!

So this morning, though our older boys’ mom is coming over to watch Atlas and Roman for the day, I do go first to drop Atlas off at the first day of camp, after which I double back home to swap cars with her so that she can go and pick him up when he’s done.

After camp drop-off, I head to a local daycare center I’ve scheduled a tour at, to see about sending Atlas and Roman there once school starts. I’ve been grappling with what to do – Atlas’ teacher recommended sending him to somewhere with a preschool / learning focus, and I’m trying to figure out where would be best to send both boys (to avoid two drop-offs and pickups) that’s also serviced by the bus which would bring Atlas to school and back for three hours each day.

This place fits the bill: it’s very learning-focused, “learning through play”, they say; it has super small room sizes; the teachers all seem lovely; and it’s serviced by the school buses, BUT, for both boys to attend full-time, it would cost us around $650 a week, so the full month would pretty much decimate my earnings from my social media clients.

I feel really stressed about all of this, honestly; I’ve spent so much time researching different options and trying to figure out logistics, messaging people with in-home daycares, asking if they require vaccination (those who don’t are an immediate no), and now I’ve found somewhere that seems ideal but if we go for it, it feels like it’ll just wipe out any positive impact that could come from my working more. WE JUST CAN’T WIN.

Anyway, I fret about this for a bit and then remember it’s my first day as social media manager for a new company (oops!), so while Atlas is at camp and Roman is being entertained at home I have work to do!

I head to a local cafe. There’s a moment of slight awkwardness when I order a breakfast sandwich, listed on the menu as being available on a wrap, a croissant or a bagel. I, being awkward, ask, “Can I just get a breakfast sandwich on regular bread please?”

I’d like to caveat this by telling you there are also sandwiches – with regular bread – on the menu.

The cashier points at the menu. “You can have a wrap, a croissant or a bagel.” Okay. I choose a wrap, and ask for my eggs scrambled.

“The eggs,” she tells me, “are pre-cooked in a patty.”

It’s at this point that I should, honestly, have just told her to forget about it, but I’m too chicken to say or do anything that feels confrontational, so I go, “oh, okay! That’s fine!” (It’s not fine.) I get my pre-made-egg-patty-in-a-wrap with a coffee. ($14.35 INCLUDING TIP I can’t with myself)

Once I’ve ordered, I take my table number and go to the adjoining room where the tables are, only to see that every single table has a “reserved” sign on it – every single table, that is, with the exception of a high top (with stools, so help me) at which there is a man already sitting.

I ask if I can sit with him (what choice do I have?! And, by that same token, what choice does he have but to say yes?!) and we sit at our respective laptops, earphones in, waiting to see whether these reserved tables will begin to fill up, and with whom.

Well, it turns out – maybe I should have guessed this – that it’s Mahjong Monday for the white ladies of Fort Wayne, and soon there are scores (fine, maybe one score) of mahjong players in situ, sipping drinks and eating pre-made egg patties. I am not pleasantly surprised by the egg patty, by the way, and though I take several big, brave bites, I don’t finish my breakfast “sandwich” – in inverted commas as I do not believe that a wrap qualifies.

Anyway, I’ve eaten a third of my wrap and drunk two thirds of my coffee when a member of staff comes over to ask me to move from the high-top table I’ve been sitting at and to a very tiny two-person table in the front room, right by the door and the noisy kitchen, because a large group has just come in, so I just decide I’ll leave.

I may be willing to suffer through the indignity of eating a pre-made egg patty, but asking me to move from the second-worst table in the place to the worst? No, thank you.

Instead, I go across the road to the big chain coffee place (I was trying to support local, which in hindsight I regret!) and get a huge coffee and a water and (I’m not proud of this but I’m RATTLED okay) a bag of Khloe Kardashian’s Khloud protein popcorn, which is predictably disgusting. ($18.47)

After my terrible snack, I text a friend who lives nearby and had, previously, told me I was more than welcome to come and work from her house while my children were being minded at home. “Would you mind if I came over?!” She wouldn’t.

I spend the rest of the afternoon at her house, where she feeds me dumplings and fizzy drinks and iced water and I sit on her back patio and listen to the birds (my birding app tells me there are 12 different species!: a blue jay and a red-bellied woodpecker and a cedar waxwing and a great crested flycatcher and a European starling and a mourning dove and an American goldfinch and a field sparrow and a black-capped chickadee and an American robin – different to an Irish robin, in case you weren’t aware) and a house finch and a house sparrow and it’s kind of idyllic and I wish I’d never bothered trying to find space for myself and my work in the midst of mahjong Monday but I guess you don’t know what you don’t know.

By the time I get home, a little after 4pm, I’m feeling a lot calmer about everything. We’ll figure out the childcare situation, I’ll figure out this new role (many Zoom meetings occurred today, much to wrap my head around), everything will get figured out eventually.

I think it’s the birds, honestly. It’s hard to hold on to your feelings of stress and panic when the birds are just singing all around you. (You guys… Have I cured anxiety?!?)

I have absolutely no memory of what we did for the evening, but I’d imagine it involved dinner and fighting about bedtime, as it almost always does.

In an expense I’d entirely forgotten about, I do pay for my prescription via Midi today. ($375)

Daily total: $407.82

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Anyway, here are the things I’m not buying lately (although I really want to).

This Yellow Top by Essentiel Antwerp (€135 €94.50)

Luckily, this one isn’t just hampered by my financial inadequacies; it’s sold out in all but size S, and though she be designed to be oversized, I always like to wear my oversized things as they are designed to be worn; that is to say, GIANT. Still, the colour of this top calls to me, as does almost everything on the Essentiel Antwerp site. Case in point: this incredible cardigan, reduced from €245 to €196. (Buy the yellow top in the US here.)

Damson Madder’s Multi-Wear Myrtle Trench (€200 €83)

If there’s one thing I can’t resist, it’s a bargain, and this is less than half-price! And if there’s a second thing I can’t resist, it’s an interesting / fun coat, and this is an interesting / fun coat! Still, the truth of the matter is, I very rarely wear coats here, except in the depths of winter, and then they must be down-lined winter coats. The in-between seasons – the time when the weather is cool enough for you to wear a coat like this – are just too short, and the rest of the time it’s either too hot or too cold for it. But if you live in Ireland, I feel like you’d get loads of wear out of this (and you’d look cool doing it…). I also love their Liu raincoat, but I truly can’t remember the last time I got caught in the rain here, so there would be no justifying that purchase whatsoever.

Seminal x Lauren Emmet Dogs PJ set from Next (€34.50)

Yes, these are described as PJs but honestly, ever since I started wearing my Hanna Anderssoon x Oeuf pyjamas (currently reduced from $150 to $51.79!!!) around the place, I’ve finally accepted the delightful truth: you can wear whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want, no matter what that item was originally intended to be worn as. I would be slightly worried about the (very short) length of these shorts, but I’d be willing to give it a go if I wasn’t on a strict budget. You know yourself. (Buy them in the US here.)

Faherty’s Laidback Linen Pants from Evereve ($168 $134.99)

I lately scratched my itch for a pair of dopamine-laden linen drawstring trousers when I found the Rails pants I’d been coveting in a downtown Fort Wayne boutique’s moving sale, but if I hadn’t, I would be seriously considering investing in these Faherty pants. They’re 100% linen, which means they’d be borderline sweat-proof, and even though I tend to avoid clothes I can’t throw in the dryer, I think I’d make an exception for these!

Long-Sleeved Boat-Neck Top from H&M ($19.99)

I can’t find this top on the Irish H&M site, but it’s probably just as well cos I’d be raging if you all got it and I didn’t. Do I think I’d also have to buy the blue shirt to go underneath it? Yes. Do I think I’d never ever wear that shirt except with that top? No, I don’t. Would that stop me?! NO IT WOULD NOT.

Toddler Balloon Pants from Hanna Andersson ($45 $31.50)

More stripes – and more Hanna Andersson – here in the form of these adorable trousers, which I would absolutely love to buy for Roman, but won’t, because (a) he has more clothes than the rest of the family combined but also (b) he won’t be wearing trousers again until October. But if I lived in a more temperate climate I would be seriously considering buying these. Any Hanna Andersson stuff I’ve bought has lasted so well, and Roman is currently wearing several pairs of pyjamas that Atlas wore (a lot!) at his age, so I do feel like it’s a good brand to buy if you have a few kids you can hand things down to.

Caroline Hirons’ Firm and Glow Kit ($160)

Late last year, I invested in Caroline Hirons’ Kitmas kit; it cost £140, contained skincare worth £488, and while I have no idea whether or not it made any real difference to my skin, I do know that having this little twice-daily skincare routine just felt like a lovely way to spoil myself. Now, she’s come out with her latest drop, right as I’ve drained the last bit of my eye cream, and I’m very tempted… This latest kit is aimed at people who are worried about dehydration, loss of firmness (who isn’t!) and tired-looking skin, and contains five cult skincare products with a combined value of £324, being sold together – with a cute little kit bag – for £120. (My one complaint would be that not every kit needs an eye cream because, in my experience at least, any eye cream I’ve ever owned has lasted at least twice as long as any other product! Maybe I’m not using enough, I don’t know.)

Ruggable x Jonathan Adler Venom Sapphire Rug ($299 $239.20)

I want a cool runner for our entryway, and while I do – of course – need this runner to be cool and colourful and spark joy (lol), I also need it to be washable. Which is why I’ve been looking at Ruggable. Their Jonathan Adler collaboration is very much up my street – snakes! tigers! colour! – and this runner is seriously tempting me, especially as they’ve recently reconfigured their rugs so that you no longer need a rug pad + rug. This is an all-in-one machine washable runner that would look so cute in our house… (This may also be the ADHD talking but that picture above is making me think I should take a paintbrush and some black paint and start splashing it at my wall…)

Varley’s Half-Zip Sweat ($148) and Matching Shorts ($98)

Okay, I know these are a million dollars, but I’m here to give you some terrible news: Varley’s Doublesoft fabric is worth every single cent. I was recently at The Find downtown in Fort Wayne, a boutique that was having a massive moving sale (yes, that’s where I found my beloved Rails trousers), and I tried on some Varley stuff and when I tell you it felt like butter… I’m not exaggerating. They didn’t have the right sizes for me (these run small!), but if they had I’m almost positive I would have indulged. I’ll be keeping an eye on any and all chances to buy Varley on sale from now until the day I die.

And that’s all, folks! Am I getting less covetous? Have I just stumbled upon fewer cute things? (Could it be both?!)

Monday

We’re all still recovering from our jet lag (the weekend was not, despite my hopes, enough time for us to get over it), and Roman also has a very snotty nose (his tubes were not, despite my hopes, enough to eradicate any and all future snottiness), so we take today as a chill day at home and do very little.

We spend the morning playing and watching Ms Rachel, then we go outside and play with the water table for a bit before I make toasted cheese sandwiches for lunch and put them both down for naps.

Atlas will be going back to school in the first week of August, and his session is switching from morning to afternoon, which means he won’t be able to take a nap any more, so I had been considering starting to cut his naps down once we got back from Ireland, but he’s exhausted today so I decide we can figure that out next week.

While they’re down, I do some washing – we did, honestly, a load of washing every day while we were in Ireland, and we still have seemingly endless mounds of dirty clothes to get through – and I also shower and wash my hair. I keep meaning to wash my hair in the mornings, but between the showering and the styling, it takes almost an hour, and honestly I’d always rather spend that time in bed.

I also pay for the book club retreat I’m going on in October with the newer book club I’ve joined. ($200) We’re going to a little Airbnb in Michigan for a weekend, which sounds very cute, and it’s also giving me an excellent deadline by which to (at the very least) night wean Roman.

Speaking of whom, he has his first speech therapy session this afternoon at 3.15pm, so I wake him up at around 3pm and bring him downstairs to wait for his therapist.

Things go pretty smoothly, at least until Atlas wakes up and, being very accustomed to doing speech and occupational therapy himself, struggles to understand that this session is about Roman, not about him. She’s clearly used to dealing with interfering four-year-olds though, so he doesn’t derail things too much!

The evening goes by in a but of a blur once Brandin and the older boys get home. We’re all still a bit cranky and tired, and we just try our hardest to keep everything lowkey and calm until we can start shuffling them all off to bed.

My Ryanair Pay in 4 comes out. ($23.31)

Daily total: $223.31

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• noise-cancelling headphones for the plane. Life-CHANGING.

• James by Percival Everett

• this IKEA chair

• Foster by Claire Keegan (no, I haven’t seen the film but now want to)

• flying to London for a day on your own (10/10, even on Ryanair)

• Marks & Spencer’s mid-rise barrel-leg jeans, which are just €39 and excellent (I now own three pairs)

• Aimee Connolly’s Second Skin dewy foundation (I also bought the Liquid Lights blush in Real Rosy and that’s gorgeous too)

• The Pitt, which I watched on the plane home because I just couldn’t commit to a movie with my children writhing around on my lap non-stop. I know I’m late on this one but I’m now fully invested.

• this remix of Lily Allen’s Beg for Me featuring Jade, which I have on repeat

men in groups

On a wet Thursday night on our recent trip to Ireland, we have dinner in Boco on Bolton Street. It’s a pizza restaurant that opened a decade ago in what used to be known as Bodkins, the regular haunt of (I’m told) DIT Bolton St students (the artist formerly known as DIT Bolton St, now known as one of many TU Dublins).

I used to go there a lot, when I lived a mere 10 minutes’ walk away. At a certain time of year, when wild garlic was in season – I was never sure when, and to look it up now would feel like cheating – they’d have the most incredible wild garlic pesto pizza. I was always surprised and delighted to see it make its annual appearance on the menu.

That I never missed it speaks to just how often I used to go there.

This time, I’m here with my American husband and our four (American) children. We’re coming off a long day: Avoca with my parents for breakfast; a scenic-but-long drive to Avondale afterwards, to walk high up in the trees and then to climb up the viewing tower that houses a large, cylindrical slide (down which, of course, we slid); a less-scenic-but-no-less-long drive to the Red Cow Luas afterwards; a rather fractious Luas ride with a four-year-old who insisted he didn’t need to hold the handrail and, as a result, fell over every single time the Luas stopped and every single time it started again; a mad dash around Penneys to find the shorts we’d stupidly promised we’d buy our older sons (not for the Irish weather, you understand, but for back home in the Midwest).

So when we barrel through the doors of what used to be called Bodkins, out of a rain shower that’s come – as they have all come, and will continue to come, throughout our trip – out of nowhere, we’re hardly anticipating the absolute throng of men that greets us, upon opening the doors.

As our eyes adjust to the dim light inside the building, we find ourselves – all six of us, as well as the very bulky and old-fashioned buggy my Mum has been hoarding in her downstairs utility room for God knows how long – surrounded by men with pints.

There’s something about groups of men – three or more, usually – that immediately causes me to feel my breath catch in my throat, my heart stutter momentarily as I assess the potential level of risk. This, in itself, is a fool’s errand: there is no predicting which group of men will ignore you, and which will make a “funny joke” aimed in your direction; which man will decide to usher you past him with a hand on your waist, your hip, the upper edge of your buttock; which of these men will gaze, lasciviously, at your cleavage, or your lips, or your bum, as you attempt to shuffle past.

I have been – as, I suspect, most women have been – assaulted by men in groups, as their friends looked on. I have been sexually harrassed by men in groups, as their friends joined in. I have been stroked and pushed and mocked and belittled by men in groups, enough times that a gathering of any significant number of men induces a modicum of terror, no matter how irrational that may feel in any given moment (early evening on a Thursday, with my husband and family, in the bright lights of a bar-restaurant).

As one of these (many, many) men catches my eyes, I ask him, “what’s going on?” It seems unusual that this vast quantity of men would have gathered without a single woman in attendance.

“A retirement!” he tells me, happily. I think of the time I went with a friend to the retirement of a colleague of her dad’s, who was a member of An Garda Síochána. We were too young to drink, which makes that more than 23 years ago; I suspect that a similar retirement party today would have a different gender split, although not, I’m sure, anywhere near 50/50.

As we’re being seated, because I’m deeply nosy – when I’m feeling like flattering myself, I think of this as a curiosity, “no wonder I studied journalism” etc – I ask our waitress where this person is retiring from, “that hires only men”?

She gives a wry smile. “TU Dublin,” she says. “But there are two women over there.” She nods a head in the direction of a far corner. “They work in admin.”

There is one exception to the rule that has me feeling deeply suspicious, distrusting and downright displeased at the sight of men in groups, and it is men in groups having breakfast.

In Fort Wayne, this is a pretty common occurrence at any of the city’s many diners and breakfast restaurants. I’ve seen so many groups of men in their eighties and nineties, eating eggs and shooting the shit, in Cosmos and Spyros and Sun Rise Cafe and Liberty Diner and Joanne’s and I’m sure I’m missing some because I’ve seen them every single time I’ve had breakfast in this city.

And the thing is, I’m sure they are no less chauvinistic than their younger, more spritely counterparts. They’re probably more, honestly; theirs is not a generation, in my experience, that thinks hard about how their “compliments” might make women feel unsafe. (They probably think Harvey Weinstein’s victims “knew what they were getting into”.)

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? They don’t know any better. They get a pass.

The rest of them… well. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that men shouldn’t be legally allowed to assemble in groups of three-plus (wouldn’t I?!) but I do think compulsory lessons on consent in schools would go a way towards helping men understand that, sometimes, their mere presence makes women uncomfortable.

And I mean, if you’re reading this thinking, I’m one of the good ones… I’ve never done any of that stuff, I’m thrilled for you. But if you’re really one of the good ones, you’ll be working hard to feel empathy and compassion for women’s lived experiences – and you might even be trying to have these conversations with your male friends, to help them understand, too.

TL;DR I’ll always choose the bear.

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the digital age

We’ve bought a digital upright piano. I can’t bring myself to call it a keyboard (which is probably just as well now that I’ve Googled it; they’re not, in fact, the same thing).

I grew up with a piano in the house. My Mum would regularly sit down to play Christmas carols, or the first half of Für Elise, while my sister would accompany herself while she practiced her operatic singing.

I completed my grade examinations up to seventh, then gave up, inexplicably, one level before I could say I’d “completed” the grades. I was never a huge fan of the classical music I’d have to choose from in the National Academy grade books; instead, I loved to play songs from Coldplay’s first two albums; Goodbye My Lover by James Blunt; Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles; Once Upon a Dream from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the 1959 version.

At one stage, I tried my hand at Alicia Keys’ Piano & I, but never got past the opening, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 4, which, in hindsight, I should’ve just learned to play instead. (I did not do the talky bits.)

When family came over at Christmas, someone would, inevitably, sit down at the piano and begin accompanying us as we sang Christmas carols as a group. Everyone in my family loves a good sing-song, although I always found it slightly embarrassing in its performative wholesomeness, or at least the perception that it was in some way performative.

Looking back on it now, I don’t think it was. Our family is just very musical. One of my cousins taught himself to play piano, not in the way that he can now play Let It Be from memory, but in the way that he can now play almost anything, including very impressive jazz piano. (Yes, his proficiency was – and is – annoying to me, as I struggled through learning my scales.)

The idea of buying a digital piano was, at first, horrifying to me – a snob, clearly. It felt a bit like the same sensation I got when the ebook reader was invented, and I insisted that I would never succumb; when streaming started to replace buying music, and I maintained that I’d never give up my CDs. You get the gist – with the notable exception of Twitter, I’ve never been an early adopter.

I did buy a handful of CDs recently, when the car I was then driving had a CD player, but neither Bluetooth nor an auxiliary input jack, meaning I couldn’t play music from my phone (where my streaming services live). Brand new, I bought Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. In a secondhand shop, I found a copy of James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, alongside Phil Collins’ Hits, and Bjork’s Debut. I hunted down TLC’s Crazy Sexy Cool next, and Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

I will die on the hill of telling you those five albums make up the perfect CD stack for any road trip. Maybe, if I were driving really far, I’d add the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet, and a Madonna album, probably Like a Prayer, which is my favourite Madonna album solely because it was the first album I ever owned. (This makes me sound kind of cool, but be under no illusions; the first concert I ever went to was fully seated, in the Point Theatre, headlined by The Corrs.)

Anyway, all this is to say that I simply couldn’t – wouldn’t – consider buying a glorified keyboard, no matter how much like a piano it looked (or sounded).

Instead, I’d asked my husband, for my 41st birthday, to hunt down a free-but-decent piano on Facebook Marketplace, and procure it for me. Asking for a free gift seems kind of humble, but anyone who’s ever tried transporting a piano will know that this task is actually borderline Herculean.

It took weeks. This piano fell through. That piano was up a flight of stairs, and not worth the time and effort it would take to get it down in one piece.

An aside: my Mum recently told us of a time my Dad decided to push a wardrobe down the stairs in their Kildare home, imagining, I’m sure, that it would slide right down like a pro skateboarder. Instead, it thunked and plunked and crashed right through the window at the bottom. My Dad, she recounted, stood wide-eyed and slightly mollified at the top of the stairs, one foot – the foot with which he had shoved the wardrobe – still slightly extended. “Oops,” he deadpanned.

Anyway, we finally found a piano that looked decent and we borrowed a trailer and some caster wheels and enlisted the help of a friend and her husband and went to a stranger’s home at 3pm on a Sunday to pick it up. As it was lifted out the front door, the front left leg of the piano fell clean off, revealing a large, splintered segment of wood, where the leg and the piano had cleaved from one another, something that was caused by, surely, a loud, noticeable, collision.

“Oh my goodness,” said the piano’s erstwhile owner (a Facebook marketplace piano shifts ownership the moment you touch it, in my book) as she ushered us out the door, me holding this errant piano leg while Brandin and our friend’s husband lifted the piano carefully on to the casters.

I glanced at her with, I hope, a single eyebrow raised sardonically. (This is a high hope as I cannot raise my eyebrows independently of one another. Along with rolling my tongue, this physical shortcoming has been most vexing to me throughout my life.)

It took about 30 minutes to load the piano on to the trailer. Between the broken leg and the sheer heft of it and the casters, which were helpful but also awkward to prop up in the right position beneath the base, it was all a bit Mr Bean – now that’s a show I would rewatch on repeat, and which, I’ve just learned, is available to watch on Amazon (in the US anyway; in Ireland, it seems to be available both on Amazon and on NOW).

We got it home and in situ – in our downstairs entryway; the idea of bringing it up the stairs was immediately dismissed – with another 30 minutes’ worth of elbow grease, where two further issues, one expected and one not, presented themselves.

Firstly, the piano was terribly out of tune. This is normal, with pianos that have been moved – especially in and out of a trailer, especially on and off casters, especially after years of sitting, unplayed and relatively unloved, in a house where (obviously) they’re prone to being bumped and banged and broken – and we’d known that we would, at some point, need to have the piano tuned, but I’d thought (perhaps naively?) that it would be playable, in the meantime. No such luck.

The second issue was, and I’m not quite sure how to say this delicately, or non-judgmentally… that the piano stank. I’d been aware of a slight odour from the house, when we arrived to pick it up. It smelled a bit like – and here’s a very niche reference for those of you from Kildare North – Gogarty’s, the bric-a-brac shop on Naas Main Street, which was a treasure trove of toys and antiques and the most random things you never knew you wanted until you saw them, and also seemed to have approximately a dozen cats living in there, something that will, obviously, lend a space a very particular fragrance.

If my parents had come home with this piano in 1995, I would have assumed, from my very first whiff of the ivories, that it had come directly from Gogarty’s that very day.

I started to Google “piano cleaning”, along with “piano tuning”, quickly learning that there are specialists for the former as well as for the latter, and that a very basic clean-and-tune would be setting us back the guts of $600, an amount of money we didn’t – and don’t – have to spend, at least not on a piano. (Just moments ago I received an alert that we owe $1,500 for the tubes Roman had surgically inserted into his ears a few weeks ago, in a 10-minute procedure for which our insurance company already agreed to fork out $1,600, leaving us to pay the balance.)

The piano sat in our entryway for several weeks. I attempted to play Für Elise on it, having printed out the sheet music; I tried to remember my Vanessa Carlton, the opening few bars of In My Place. It was a struggle, not just because I’m geriatric now and remember nothing (but song lyrics), but because, even when I was playing what looked like the right notes, it sounded nothing like it should.

Our 13-year-old, who plays trumpet in his school’s marching band, was immediately a very enthusiastic pianist. He downloaded the sheet music for a selection of Panic! At the Disco songs and started to work, diligently, through them.

I worried, when he started to play the trumpet, that we’d be subjected to hours of ear-splitting horror, but in fact, it’s the piano I should have been concerned about; I wanted to be encouraging, but there was simply no way you could listen to the notes coming from this untuned instrument of torture without gritting your teeth (and covering your ears).

I’m someone who – I’m not sure if this will be a surprise or not – finds it very hard to make decisions. I would, in fact, happily outsource all decision-making (any volunteers?!) for the rest of my life. I struggled, throughout these weeks, to make a decision about this piano; should we keep it, invest the money in cleaning and tuning it, and run the risk that it’s actually just a piece of shit anyway, and would need to be cleaned and tuned every six months? That seemed like an expensive decision.

But what was the alternative? Should we try to find another free piano on Facebook Marketplace? Borrow a trailer and casters and enlist the help of a friend once more and show up and hope that it didn’t have a broken leg and wasn’t infused with the stench of cat pee? Pay $600 to have that piano cleaned and tuned, and then cross our fingers that it was semi-decent?

I asked a relative who plays piano (and bassoon, interestingly) and is studying music, what he’d recommend. “You could get a digital piano,” he said, and I thought to myself, well, clearly he doesn’t know as much as I thought he did.

But here’s the thing about ideas I immediately pooh-pooh: it doesn’t take long for me to come around. See also: wedge trainers (I owned three different pairs of those Isabel Marant wedge trainers at the time they were very cool, never wore them once, and sold each one on for a profit, as I am an entrepreneur), skinny jeans, barrel leg jeans (lol).

It helped that our local music superstore, Sweetwater, had an offer on financing for the Yamaha digital piano I started looking at: pay it off over 36 months at 0% interest, meaning that, for a mere $56, paid monthly for three years, a beautiful digital piano (with built-in metronome! headphone jack! and never needing to be tuned!) could be ours. (Is this why I’m in so much debt?! Don’t answer that.)

The biggest issue, then, was what to do with the old piano – you know, the one with the cat stank and the broken leg. Do we list it on Facebook Marketplace and pass our bad piano juju on to someone else? Do we scrap it? (I’ll skip to the good part: we decided to scrap it.)

On a Friday evening, Brandin picked the new piano up on his way home from work, and once the children had gone to bed we decided to assemble it (forgetting, as we always do, that any kind of furniture assembly job we attempt to do together leads nowhere good). We wheeled the old piano – painstakingly, awkwardly – out the front door and placed it on the driveway, the plan being that we’d get someone to come and help us load it into Brandin’s truck the following morning.

The piano assembly itself took longer than the promised 45 minutes, but neither of us shouted at the other, and only one of us got injured (Brandin, scraped by an errant staple, which later on would necessitate his cleaning the “wound” out with hydrogen peroxide – how, I asked him, have Irish people survived this long without immediately panicking about potentially dying thanks to being scraped with a rusty piece of metal? He didn’t answer me). The children were predictably nonplussed.

In other unsurprising news, the old piano sat on the driveway for four days, undoubtedly enraging the neighbours (a perk). I suggested we let the boys take a baseball bat and a mallet to it, but that was immediately shot down as being “too dangerous”. (You may be surprised to hear this but I am, actually, the fun parent, despite my reputation as a feminist killjoy.)

Still, Brandin failed to enlist a friend to help him, and so, on a Monday evening at 6pm, I walked out to the piano with a screwdriver and a dream, and we commenced its disassembly.

Here’s the thing: kids love destroying things. This was an incredible bonding experience for us. With several screwdrivers and a drill and a crowbar and a mallet and some brute strength and only one injury (to Atlas’ leg, which was scratched by a piece of wood, necessitating the procurement of a bandage and three pieces of Terry’s Chocolate Orange), we finally got each part of the piano into the back of Brandin’s truck. He drew the line at letting us cut the wires that criss-crossed the back of the piano, convinced that one would spring back and split someone’s eyeball in half, which was disappointing, but there was enough destruction and chaos – “can someone please take that mallet away from the baby?!” – to make it a great time, nonetheless.

As for the digital piano, much as I’m loath to admit this… it’s really, really nice. The keys are weighted so it feels pretty much exactly the same as playing a regular piano, except that none of them stick, unlike every single piano I’ve ever played.

The volume can be adjusted, so no one needs to know what sad music you’re playing on repeat. I haven’t tried the metronome function yet – that always feels a bit too much like being told what to do, which I’m against – but the 13-year-old has, and seems to enjoy it.

The one downside is that the baby has figured out how to turn it on and how to up the volume to its highest level. But I suppose I do want to encourage him on his musical journey, so have at it, I say.

I even unearthed all of my sheet music when I was at home in Ireland, and though Vanessa Carlton was sadly missing, both James Blunt and Coldplay survived. Lucky Brandin.

One of the things we’d been hoping to do on this trip – and which we had, stupidly, told the boys about (meaning they’ve been asking about it pretty much every day) – is go to Emerald Park, but we haven’t had a single day that hasn’t promised multiple periods of rain, so we’ve been putting it off, hoping this week would provide a dry day.

Well, it looks like we’re on a hiding to nothing, as they say, so after a bit of a slow morning today where we just mooch around the house, we decide we’d better get out into the fresh air and do something.

I suggest we look up Mondello – because once, in my very distant past, I went on a press trip to Mondello to race cars and had the best time – but when Google reveals this to be a pursuit for (very) rich people, we decide to head to the Irish National Stud & Gardens, to gawk at another rich person’s pursuit instead.

We gather everyone up in the car and buy our tickets en route ($69.87). We arrive at around 12.30pm and are told that our tickets include the Irish horse racing experience (where you get to buy and train a horse, design your silks and then race against one another, apparently) and a guided tour, although the next tour doesn’t start until 2pm so we’re not sure what patience levels will be like by then.

Anyway, as we’re walking out the door to start exploring, the rain starts, so we wait under a nice tree while Brandin runs back to the car to get the raincoats a lovely neighbour lent us.

Of course, they’re on and off about 50 times throughout the 90 minutes or so we’re at the stud, which is, honestly, not the boys’ favourite.

I think that, if they were into horses, or horse racing, or maybe even gardens (lol), it would’ve been a different story, but it’s all a bit too specific to really pique their interest. They do, however, love the little playground we stumble across, and spend, easily, an hour there; the older two seem to find the horse racing experience relatively good fun (although Atlas has a mini meltdown when Brandin wins the final race, because “I wanted Mommy to win!”, what an angel); and while no one seems particularly impressed by the Japanese Gardens themselves, I’m obsessed with the landscaping more generally, and want my house in Fort Wayne to eventually have this English country garden vibe (wishful thinking…).

On our way out, we grab what are called 99s from the little ice-cream truck at the gate, and while I would (strongly) argue that a 99 must, by definition, be a whippy cone, it’s still pretty delicious. ($20)

We then decide we need to feed these guys on the way home, so we run into McDonald’s in Newbridge, where everyone complains that it’s “not the same” as it is “at home”. Atlas refuses to eat his chicken nuggets, for crying out loud! ($75.16 well spent)

We get back at around 3pm and put Roman down for a quick danger nap, while the rest of us just relax for the afternoon and evening.

Daily total: $165.03

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We arrived in Ireland yesterday after an eight-hour overnight flight with very little sleep for anyone. Roman slept for an hour and a half, which was the most anyone managed to snooze – thanks to a combination of (a) him screaming / wailing / writhing for the remainder of the flight and (b) Atlas intermittently shouting at the top of his lungs “wow! this is amazing!” as he has not yet grasped the concept of speaking at a normal volume while wearing headphones.

All that is to say we’re very tired today and on a bit of a go-slow.

The day consists of: eating Superquinn sausages, chatting to my parents, reading our books (I’m reading One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig, which was recommended by our older boys’ mum and is really good) and then, later in the day, chatting to my friend C, who calls over on her way back from a festival in… I know she told me. Roscommon? I can’t remember. (I’ve just Googled it, because I know she said the Boomtown Rats were playing, and it turns out my memory is still stunning because it was Night and Day festival which was indeed in Roscommon!)

C is my oldest friend; we met when we were in the Irish-language naíonra that was run by my Mum. I used to feel like we had more of a sisterly relationship than a friendship a lot of the time, in that we definitely spent a lot of our teens and early twenties being driven up the walls by one another, but now that we’re older I feel closer to her than ever. It’s absolutely bizarre to think that we’ve known one another for 37 years, though – longer than Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend has been alive! (among other measures)

Anyway, it’s Mum’s birthday today, and having given her the option of whether to invite people over to dinner or to go out (and she also had the pick of restaurants), she’s elected to go to Eddie Rocket’s for a burger. While Claire Mac Cabe does love a burger, I suspect this choice is motivated by the fact that she knows it’ll be a crowd-pleaser, and with four children on deck, it’s crucial that we try to mitigate the moaning that ensues when they don’t like their dinners.

As it happens, I think everyone’s a bit too jet lagged to enjoy anything; our 11-year-old doesn’t like the sauce on his burger, our 13-year-old absolutely devours his malt before his food arrives and then isn’t hungry; and Atlas refuses to eat a single thing, despite us requesting to have his chips buried under a mound of grated cheese.

Mum, most importantly, loves her burger – and the rest of us enjoy it well enough. (I choose a small malt, which I regret almost immediately, realising – too late – that half the fun is getting to pour your second round of delicious chocolatey goodness into the glass from the metal cup thing.)

When we start wrapping up, C and I run next door to Super Valu to pick up some essentials (lots of berries – the three packs of strawberries my parents had on deck were devoured within hours of our arrival), more Superquinn sausages, baby wipes and yogurts ($49.18), leaving Brandin with instructions to pay for dinner, although my Dad apparently insists on getting it.

When we get home, we unpack the groceries, say goodbye to C and start putting Atlas and Roman to bed.

Then the rest of us have some more lounging / reading time, before we all head to bed at around 10.30pm.

My subscription for humidifier filters from Canopy comes out ($59.92), along with our family YMCA membership ($92).

Daily total: $201.10

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I had initially put this segment at the end of this piece, as a sort of “and so…” conclusion. But I worry you won’t get that far, and I want to be clear – and for this to be clear to all of my subscribers.

There are certain things I believe in, wholeheartedly, and which inform the way I behave and, I think, the way I treat other people, especially those people whose services I pay for.

I believe everyone is entitled to paid time off, no matter what the reason. When our babysitter went on vacation, I paid her as if she was there, minding my children, all the while – even though she didn’t ask for or expect this (this is America). When our cleaner can’t make it – her car has broken down, her children need help, her grandchildren are sick – I pay her for those missed days.

I believe everyone is entitled to sick leave, and to compassionate leave to care for loved ones who are sick. When our babysitter’s husband had a stroke, and she closed her doors for a week, I paid her. When our cleaner put her back out and couldn’t come that day, I paid her.

I believe interns should be paid*, and I wouldn’t take on an intern until I could pay them a living (not minimum) wage. I believe, in most cases, in restorative justice. I wouldn’t call the police if I saw someone breaking the law**, unless the law they were breaking involved hurting or endangering someone: usually (unfortunately) a woman, or a child.

I believe, too, that I am entitled to all of those things, and so, from now on: I will be taking four weeks off each calendar year, during which I won’t be publishing on Substack. Similarly, if I am really unwell, and unable to work, I won’t be working.

I appreciate – so much – that (almost) each and every one of you pays to subscribe to and read my work, and I guess after almost five years of doing this here, and as many, before that, doing it on Patreon, I’m pretty confident that you’re all sound enough not to unsubscribe because I’ve decided that I can – and should – occasionally take time off.

It is day two of summer break and my baby woke up at 5am. It is day two of summer break and my 4-year-old refused to go to bed until 9pm, at which point I felt as close to tears as it’s possible to feel without actually crying. It is day two of summer break and I am panicking.

It’s one thing to be a stay at home mum with several part time jobs – that add up to one full-time job – and no childcare when your 4-year-old is in school for three hours each morning, but it is quite another when he’s not in school at all. Like I said, it’s only day two.

“I’ve no idea how or when I’m supposed to work,” I tell my husband, who leaves each morning at 6.30am to go and do his job and comes home at 4.30pm and is finished working and I’m not sure he understands or, honestly, cares all that much because he doesn’t make very sympathetic noises.

(I suppose, I think to myself as I wonder why he’s not being more caring and compassionate, I’m always complaining about something.)

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Sometimes I have to remind myself that Atlas was two before he slept through the night so I don’t totally freak out and resort to some extreme form of sleep training with Roman, who‘s still getting up twice (minimum) each night and is up for the day today at 5.15am.

With Atlas, we did work with Avril Carr, who was brilliant at helping us get into a better bedtime routine, and we use a lot of her tips with Roman now. Atlas was different though, because while Roman wakes up to nurse, he usually goes back to sleep. I remember nights where we’d end up watching Encanto at 2am because Atlas simply would not consider the possibility of going back to bed.

Anyway, with Roman awake I decide l’ll drive Atlas to school. I have some toys to give his teacher, so I can kill two birds with one stone. Afterwards, I stop by the library to return some overdue books, and even run in to Target to return the suit trousers I bought our older boys for their bowling tournament a few weeks back. (Galling that the 11-year-old will likely never wear his again! Thankfully our oldest needs black trousers for band anyway so his don’t feel as much like a wasted purchase.)

We’re back home before 9 (Atlas starts school at the ungodly hour of 7.30am, and Target’s open at 8am because Americans hate rest), and Roman goes to bed pretty much immediately, where he stays, fast asleep, until 12.15pm.

While he’s snoozing, I work, then Atlas gets home from school and I make him lunch and he watches some cartoons before I put him down for his nap, desperately trying to get him to bed before Roman wakes up.

I am just closing Atlas’ door when Roman wakes, so I go in to get him changed and dressed and bring him downstairs to play for a few hours. We also watch some Ms Rachel, which I keep hoping will help him decide to do some talking. So far, all it’s doing is making him put his hands on his head during Icky Sticky Bubble Gum, but I guess that’s a gesture, so I’ll take it!

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the (pathetic, spindly, in desperate need of light) seedlings I planted earlier this spring, hoping to just get all of my seeds planted (I’ve had most of them for a few years and just wanted to get rid of them, honestly!) and as we’re not quite ready to plan out our garden flowerbeds (the grass is still struggling and we haven’t put up a fence yet), I decide I could get some raised garden planters and do raised beds in an area beside the house.

Well, let me tell you for nothing, planters are expensive. The cheapest I can find are over $100 each, and I need at least three, which is why – and I’m not proud of this – I end up buying them on Temu, for less than $70. ($69.91)

I feel like, as I’ve kind of got deeper and deeper into the budgeting mindset (I mean, I’m not all the way in there yet, as attested to by the rest of this week), it’s become more and more tempting to buy super cheap things from places like TikTok Shop, Temu and even Shein, which ordinarily I would try to avoid on principle.

It feels like – and I know this has been said before – it’s really hard to make principled purchasing decisions on a budget. (And here I will also say that I did search on the Fort Wayne freecycle groups and on Marketplace to see if I could find anything secondhand within my budget, and found nothing.)

Once Atlas gets up, we walk Vinny around the block and then I bring the boys to the playground, as Brandin is going straight to our 13-year-old’s track meet after work.

We bring sandwiches, strawberries and goldfish, which prove a big hit with several of the children there. I feel a bit like a creepy pied piper, feeding all of the neighborhood kids – but there’s literally no circumstance in which a child is going to come over and ask if they can have something they see that I have in my hands / bag / Tupperware and I’m going to say no (with their parent’s consent, of course) – but it also feels like a good teaching moment for Atlas, who’s frequently a very bad sharer (I mean, he’s four, so it’s not a huge shock).

When we get home, I realise I’m starving, and I contemplate ordering something because I just feel so wrecked and can’t face making anything… but then I realise it’ll take just as long as it will for me to make my beloved ground meat coconut curry, so I do that instead, and have it with rice.

I get the boys in the bath (they’re both filthy from the playground) and then to bed by around 8pm, then tidy and clean up the kitchen and put up some washing. Brandin doesn’t get home with the other two until after 9pm, at which point they each have a quick snack and head to bed, too.

I watch an episode of Summer House before going to bed myself.

Daily total: $69.91

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I’d love to know what you’ve bought and recommend, if anything, lately! Because I need to be further influenced, you understand. The internet isn’t doing a good enough job of that on its own.

Oh and… this post contains affiliate links! If you click through any of these links and buy one of the items I’ve linked, or, in most cases, buy something else from that website within 30 days, I’ll receive a small percentage of your total spend. So, you know, please click on every single one.

Free People’s Chelsea Funnel-Neck Jacket ($168)

Specifically in this perfect shade of pink. Am I blaming windbreaker-gate for the fact that I want this?! I’m not sure. All I know is that the $3,200 price tag on the windbreaker Paige DeSorbo lent Hannah Berner (I know too much about the entire Summer House universe, truly) has made this $168 Free People version seem positively bargainous.

Rails Emmie Pants in Rio Stripe (€168)

Why is everything I want $168?!? Okay two things, but still. Weird. Anyway, these Rails trousers are sold out in the US, which is doing THE ABSOLUTE UTMOST in terms of whetting my appetite for them. There’s nothing like an “Almost Gone!” ticker to make me immediately hit “checkout”, I’ll tell you. Luckily for any of you who are (a) in Europe and (b) feeling flush, they’re still available on the European site, although only in size L which also feels prophetic?! WHY IN MY SIZE IF NOT DESTINED TO OWN?!

Step2 Dino Showers Water Table ($68.94 at Walmart)

Okay, I’ll accept this may result in my losing those of you who don’t have kids, but I am fully convinced – this is also one of my toxic shopping-related traits – that this Step2 water table is going to absolutely make my summer, in terms of giving my children something to do outside for hours on end, and allowing me to sit next to them (close enough to supervise, far enough to stay dry) reading my book while they do. And while, ordinarily, the items I include in these posts are things I’m not planning on buying, this might be the exception. Can I afford it without putting on a credit card?! Maybe not. So… we’ll see. I’m still debating. (I really do think that, without this, our summer is going to be terrible. See above re toxic trait.)

Kulglass bluetooth speaker lamp (€90 at Ikea)

Okay. A contrast. I accept that the lack of this cute Ikea lamp in my life is not going to affect me or my children whatsoever. No one would even notice its presence in the house except me. (Although I am the most important person who lives here, so that doesn’t really factor into things.) We absolutely do not need it. But if I was still living like a rich person, buying random things, willy-nilly, just because, I would absolutely buy this. Ergo, you should probably buy it for yourself. And if you’re in the US, buy it here.

Shiraleah Samba Neoprene Tote Bag by Anthropologie ($68)

So what’s funny about this one is that while I adore it from the pictures, even if I was about to buy it, the reviews might put me off. It’s more muted than it appears in the pics, they say, and smaller than you might think (now that I look at it, it says 10” wide, which is smaller than a ruler?! tiny). So I guess this is a… something I love in theory but probably wouldn’t love in reality. (But if you’re a bag designer and fancy “taking inspiration” from Anthropologie’s mistakes, well, you’re welcome.)

Green Top & Trousers Set from Next (€22)

Another one that’s not for the childless among us (sorry), but this little outfit is adorable and I’m very tempted to buy it for Roman. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s just so difficult to find cute, colourful, cute clothes for boys! I tend to shop in the girls’ sections a lot, and while I’m not a big fan of bows and ribbons, cutesie little outfits like this tick all of my boxes (and in fact why is this for girls?! That makes no sense). Here it is in the US.

We the Free Jet Set Pull-On Pants in Going Green by Free People ($148)

A couple of months ago (probably about three years ago, honestly, but in my mind that’s “a couple of months”), a friend of mine showed up to a barbecue in a gorgeous pair of corduroy trousers in exactly this shade. “I got them at Goodwill,” she told me, irritatingly, and I’ve been hunting for similar ever since. Well, I’ve finally found them – and they’d be perfect if it wasn’t for the $150 price tag. I’m also slightly iffy on the length (neither cropped nor full-length), but I think I could get over that, would that I had $150 to spend.

Stephanie Yeboah’s ‘Ban Male Podcasts’ tee ($35 from Girlgangshop)

Have you ever seen a more perfect T-shirt? I think not. I spotted this on Threads (cursed place, don’t ever go there) this morning and have been trying to find it ever since. I think I’ve found a similar enough version on Etsy, although who knows what it would be like if I actually ordered it. Yes, I know I could message her and ask, but I worry she’d read my message and not respond and then I’d feel embarrassed and like I could never engage with her again (is this another toxic trait?!). [Rosemary from the future: I tagged Stephanie in my IG post and she DMed me to tell me the tee is from Girlgangshop!]

HSIA Enchante Minimizer Bra ($24.99 on TikTok Shop)

I try really, really hard not to buy things on TikTok Shop because, in the past, I’ve ended up loading my cart up with way too many cheap, undoubtedly not ethically made, things, but I just can’t stop coming back to the HSIA Minimizer bra. It doesn’t help that I see ads for it approximately every four TikToks I scroll through, or that I have a friend who owns and recommends it. Having spent almost $300 (I had a gift card!) a few months ago on two bras and a pair of knickers, I’m desperately trying to find bras that are supportive, boob-separating (I cannot have them touching I just can’t) and ideally not a million dollars. So, like I said, very tempted (but I haven’t pulled the trigger just yet).

This morning, my friend D is coming over with her kids, so once Atlas has gone off on the bus I put some chocolate croissants from Trader Joe’s in the oven and try, as my mother would say, to put a bit of snas on the place.

Of course, Roman spots the croissants, cooling on the rack, the minute he’s brought down from his bedroom, and refuses all efforts to feed him anything else (“these are for the visitors!” I tell him, in my best Hyacinth Bucket voice), so I eventually relent and he gets to eat his croissant early.

When D arrives, we have a lovely morning chatting as the kids run around causing chaos. She has a three- and almost-two-year-old, and while Roman is a little bit young to play with them properly, they’re thoroughly entertained by Atlas’ toys.

By the time Atlas gets back at 11, we’ve decided we’ll go around the corner to the playground for a little bit before it’s time for naps. I make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (yes, I am fully American now) and pack them up with some sliced plums and a little zip loc of goldfish crackers, along with water bottles for everyone as it’s got really warm.

Just as we’re leaving, my friend K arrives with a few bits from Costco; she’d asked if I needed anything, and I did indeed need salted caramels (lol) and a sourdough loaf. She also got us some of these incredible Maui Monk pretzel sticks (they sound weird but are so good and addictive). I tell her I’ll Venmo her for them (then of course I forget).

We head off to the park, and stay for about an hour while the kids run around –except Roman, who is almost fully walking now, but still struggling to get up once he falls down, which is a big problem in this park as it’s all astroturf and if there’s one thing this baby hates, it’s grass (or grass-adjacent ground coverings). He kind of crawls and wails and is carried from A to B instead.

When we get home, we’re well into the nap-time danger zone – about 30 minutes after their regular nap times, and they’ve been out in the sun, running around… – so I work on first getting Roman down, then Atlas.

Once they’re asleep, I go downstairs and start picking up the many (many) toys that have been thrown around, along with the tonnes of Kinetic Sand that’s now scattered under my kitchen table (I did very deliberately tell D not to help clean up, because that way, when I come to visit her at her house, I’ll feel no obligation to do the same – sometimes, when you’ve kids at these ages, there comes a moment when you just need to go immediately or the children are going to lose it, and tacking on an extra 10 minutes to help clean up is simply not feasible), before sitting down to do some work before the boys wake up.

Roman is up first, and Atlas wakes up shortly after him. Yesterday, Brandin, my friend K, her husband and I went to pick up a piano I found for free on Marketplace – below – and when I tell you this has been an excellent distraction for the children, I’m not exaggerating. They love it so much. Now, I will say, if you’re someone who’s sensitive to loud, relentless, tuneless sounds… maybe it wouldn’t be a great idea.

Once we get it it tuned I am planning on at least trying to teach Atlas to play (fun fact about me is that I did my piano exams up to seventh grade and then inexplicably gave up?!), while also getting back to some level of proficiency myself.

(Yes, that is a pile of books holding it up, because right as the piano was lifted, the leg fell off, and the owner did a great impression of someone who had no idea that would happen… despite the fact that the leg is entirely mangled and the wood is splintered to pieces.)

In a fit of enthusiasm, I even sign up to a month of MuseScore ($19.99), but I quickly cancel it when I remember that we’re on a budget and, more importantly, I have a load of sheet music at home in Ireland that I’m planning on bringing back with us when we visit later this month.

Tonight is a very activity-heavy evening for our older boys – bowling, track, then a track meet and a baseball game – so Brandin is off with them for the evening while I’m home with Atlas and Roman. I make pizza for dinner (a reminder that this pizza dough recipe is excellent and, honestly, foolproof) and then we watch Encanto together before I start into baths and bedtime, just as the other three get home.

I do another hour’s work, this time drafting and sending posts for my social media clients to approve, once the little boys are in bed, then Brandin makes decaf and I sit down on the couch to eat some salted caramels and watch Summer House.

My subscription to ($8) comes out.

Daily total: $27.99

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I’ve been having a very up and down time lately in terms of my mental health.

There are a lot of factors I could attribute this to. I’ve been working harder than I’ve ever worked before, with less downtime than I’ve ever had at any time in my life, for one thing. I’ve introduced ADHD medication to a cocktail of “bear with me, brain” drugs, a cocktail whose efficacy I was already skeptical about.

And I’m lonely. I’m really, really lonely; trying to make friends as an adult is so hard, especially when you have little to no time to dedicate to the kinds of baby friendships that simply will not grow without time and effort.

But, more than any of that, I suffer from depression. I’m depressed. Mine is a chronic illness that ebbs and flows in how debilitating it feels, sometimes giving me weeks or months of relief from its clutches, but it’s always there, waiting to welcome me back into its arms.

So. Like I said, a lot of different factors at play.

The effect of it all is that I’ve been struggling with feeling low and overwhelmed and, at times, worthless and unlovable and kind of hopeless in the sense of believing I’ll ever get out of this mire. And when this happens? A lot of normal, everyday things get really, really hard.

Things like…

showering || don’t panic! I can wash myself, on a very basic level. I can tie my hair up in a messy bun and I can turn on the water and I can get in the shower and I can wash my body – mostly my armpits and my crotch, you know yourself – with a bar of soap and I can get out and dry myself off and put on my PJs and get into bed. That feels like a lot. But the type of shower that includes hair washing and conditioning (and then combing and styling and drying), shaving, scrubbing, face-washing… That kind of shower feels like 10,000 steps too many. The “everything shower” becomes a very, very rare occurrence.

talking on the phone || texting, voice note-ing, messaging on Instagram or on Facebook or wherever we happen to be messaging? All fine. Talking with my human voice while holding the phone or keeping headphones in (or on) my ears? Impossible. And as for an out-of-the-blue phone call, even if it’s from someone I love and would ordinarily love to talk to?! GET OUT OF HERE WITH THAT. I simply cannot answer the phone and then will spend 20 minutes panicking about what kind of message I can send that person to explain (a) why I didn’t answer the phone and (b) why I’m absolutely not calling them back.

reading || I think, for me, these moments of extremely low mood so often come hand in hand with feelings of abject panic and high anxiety that I just find it really hard to slow down and kind of unplug from my sense of ohmygodwhyhaveigotsomuchtodoandwhycantidoitwhenwilligetthetimetodoit – which is exactly what I need to do in order to plug into the world of a good book. This is why, instead, I’ve been watching hours and hours of Summer House.

making semi-decent meals || things I’ve had for dinner recently include – but are not limited to – Special K Red Berries; Greek yogurt with honey and peanut butter; many portions of beans on toast (when we found baked beans at Costco we amassed quite the stockpile); pretzel sticks (above: these are elite snacks, FYI) and Dubliner cheese (I believe this is called “girl dinner”); a hard-boiled egg and some cucumber slices; toast with butter; toast with jam; a banana; too many salted caramels (also elite snacks).

working out || there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t curse the fact that, in our new house, we don’t have a fenced-in back garden (yet) and, as a result, the dog needs to be walked several times a day – but I do recognise that actually this is a blessing in disguise, because without this dog and his godforsaken need to relieve himself at regular intervals, I’m not sure I’d be moving my body right now at all. (And yes, I know exercise would make me feel better. I know. But at the moment I feel a bit like I’m suspended in some kind of quicksand, and the more I struggle against it, the further down I sink. So I just have to kind of accept it.)

flossing || I find it hard to believe there’s anyone out there who flosses every day. I just don’t believe there is. (If you’re about to leave a comment saying you floss every day, know that I will be convinced you’re lying.) At best, I manage it maybe twice a week. At worst, like right now? lolol I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than even attempt to put a string of floss between my teeth.

But there are also things I can still do!

Things like…

showing up for work || would you believe me if I told you I’ve never missed a day’s work due to my depression? I’ve missed deadlines, but I’ve never just not produced the work I’ve said I’ll produce – similar to this Substack (sorry), I’ve just produced it a little later than promised – and I’ve never called in sick to a job because of my mental health. I’m not necessarily proud of this; I think we should be able to take time off from the capitalist machine when we’re really struggling, and the pressure I feel to be productive even when I feel like Atreyu in the swamp of sadness really does nothing but exacerbate the sadness itself.

tidying || sometimes, when I feel absolutely and totally overwhelmed by, well, everything, I go into a kind of fugue state where I just clean and tidy my house to within an inch of its life. I think this kind of thing feels easy because I know what I’m doing and I don’t need to make any decisions as I’m doing it. It’s just a kind of autopilot activity, and the rhythm of it all feels weirdly soothing.

writing to-do lists || listen, just because I’m in a total state, and feel utterly unable to get started on anything doesn’t mean I can’t sit down and write a completely overwhelming and perhaps unhelpful list of the things I should be doing. That being said, I’m not entirely convinced this is actually unhelpful; in a way, dumping everything on the page feels like opening a valve and letting a little of the pressure out.

cuddling my kids || and, truly, anyone who’ll accept cuddles. Right now, that happens to be my two youngest children and my husband. But there’s nothing that makes me feel better than being hugged by someone I love.

I’m not listing all of the millions of things I do, when I’m feeling terrible, that I know are not going to make me feel better – and may, in fact, end up making me feel worse. Things like scrolling Instagram or TikTok for hours, filling my online shopping cart with things I can’t afford, eating things I know are going to upset my stomach, or looking up people I’m jealous of, to see how much better they’re doing at life than I am. Let’s just not mention any of those.

P.S. A belated happy American Mother’s Day to all who celebrate. These kinds of days can be so fun and affirming and heartwarming but also incredibly difficult and heartbreaking and full of grief for those we’ve lost or those we never got to meet. Either way, my advice is to get someone you love to give you a big hug. Tomorrow might (might!) just be a better day.