They are oh so quick at their times tables these days. Even if you don’t want them to be.
’45’ marque two pipes up cheerfully on Sunday morning.
’45 what?’ I ask.
’45 months you spent pregnant with us’.
‘What?’ I ask, desperately trying to pluck my nine times tables from my porous brain. He can’t be right. That just sounds like an obscene amount of time. I spend the morning multiplying, adding and dividing.
9 x 5. Plus the breastfeeding months. Divided by 12. I come up with a figure which seems to be a third of my life. That can’t be right. I run it past the mathematical children. They return the same verdict. One third. Good god. I feel like reaching for a stiff drink – if we had such a thing – to help me over it.

There’s another tonic out there to help us muse upon the years. Which is what I opt for. We bring them into town for brunch and a meander up Grafton Street. We are flooded with images of our former selves. This street does that to us. Pulls us right back with its coffee roasting smells and unchanging structures, despite all the years of change. Our youthful, dating, meeting at a specific spot, full of promise selves are put back in front of us. So we have to bite our tongues. Otherwise we’d be filling them with :’and this is the spot where Daddy and Mummy used to meet on a Saturday afternoon, and this is where Daddy used to busk, and this is where we used to have a slice of pizza, and this is where we got our engagement ring and this is where…’ And perhaps we silently wonder where we are now, and if we were back there would we do it all the same way again. Or if we can just sneak back sometime and retrace ourselves. Perhaps we should promise that much.

We are surprised by the waves of emotion we feel being here with the brood. Sharing bits of us silently that they don’t know.
‘Look what we’ve done’ he says as we watch them watch the soon to be illegal flame thrower, pivoting himself high on an un-held two legged ladder. Their minds whizz with the excitement of this street theatre. With the imminent dangers before them. Our precarious ladder trickster could fall forwards onto them as he juggles with flames, not to mention a dagger. They don’t see this though. This parents’ view. They see only the magic as we pull them back a bit further and scan the mesmerised crowd for pick-pockets. Oh to have that pure child’s view again.

We meander on, proud to be showing the street to them and them to it. We imagine an upper window or two looking down and winking. Look what you’ve done. We stop in the crowd for a solo guitarist and marque 5 dances and clicks his fingers to the beat. They take turns to toss coins in the hats of the performers. Every cell is stimulated, growing with this taste of the great big world before them.

The magic of a rope swishing bubble maker has them snared. A ginormous rainbow coloured bubble floats above them and they stretch in amazement to embrace it. The adults restrain themselves from doing likewise. The bubble morphs into a spectre and sprays it’s remnants over them. Somebody is perhaps thinking about the transience taking place before us. The bringing to life, the swift beautiful existence, the bursting, the spread back to earth. The sane people are just enjoying the moment.

Back in the shopping centre I duck into Mothercare while the others occupy Tiger. Moments later I’m greeted by an ashen faced marque 1. He has recently turned 14.
‘What are you doing in here?’ he asks.
‘Just looking around’ I reply.
‘Why?’ he asks.
‘Research for a story I’m writing, sssh’ I whisper and he’s smiling again now, the colour returning to his cheeks.
‘What did you think I was doing?’
‘I had a dream that you were pregnant again and when Dad said you were in Mothercare, I thought it was true’ he says, twinkling, unembarrassed, such is his relief, when I fling my arms around him.

Not on my watch sweetheart.

The man in the sauna offers little home maintenance tips. He has just sanded and re-varnished his front door. Ah yes. The joy of a lick of varnish before the winter takes a grip. I think of our front door. Of the hole where the doorbell is supposed to be. Of the austere faced knocker which has to be hammered on to win our attention. If I join in on this conversation the whole de-stressing point of the sauna will be gone. I bide my time. He moves on to how he’ll give the wood around the windows a good old lick too. Just on the outside, mind you. I think of our windows. I feel the stress levels go in the wrong direction. The window where the burglars got in. They just had to sneeze at it, I’d say. How we taped it back together on the outside. Lovely brown duct tape. So that when it rains it sounds like several mice pit pattering across the floor. All right, all right. Time to join in. Maybe I’ll pick up a trick or two.

‘We’ve a few bits to do ourselves’ I admit. And it sort of pours out of me. Except for the subsidence. I spare him the image of mid-section subsidence which has literally been dragging us down. It would be unkind to inflict that on a poor old soul doing his best to lift the general load with varnish. Anyhow, we’ll get the subsidence sorted ‘presently’ as my darling English grandmother used to say. Presently, so full of action and promise. I tell my sauna man instead about how we were supposed to do a whole lot when we got the house at first. Even the estate agent selling the house told us we’d need to put an immediate 60 K into it. It had been owned by an elderly lady and, on her passing, it was let to students. For years. The picture is, perhaps, a little clearer now. So I tell him about how we chuckled at the lurid green lino in the poorly built kitchen extension. How the kids kept coming and everything got put off. How we really need a bit of insulation. Re-wiring. A functioning kitchen. Windows. Etc., etc.,
‘You have double glazing though?’ he asks, eyes widening as I shake my sorry head.
‘Well that’s where you start. Do a few at a time’ he suggests.
I feel the stress levels evening off. Yes, yes, take your time, I say to myself. But then again, that’s what has got us where we are. The laughter about the green lino eleven years ago has dissipated and transformed into a tacit acceptance. We’ve even managed to lead ourselves to believe that it has acquired a certain retro-charm. The cortisol surges in the blood again.
He mentions a couple of good window suppliers. I nod and thank him, reminding myself to play the lotto, and he wishes me the best of luck with it all.

I arrive home after my de-stress swim and sauna, bowing my head, trying not to look at the windows or the front door. But then it opens and I am greeted by a gaggle of sunny sons. There are hugs. They wish to show me what they have done with their bedrooms. Furniture has been re-arranged. Marque 2’s tiny room looks double the size with the bed along the window now. It is bright and clear and he is thrilled. Marque 3 & 4 call theirs an apartment. They have thrown down colourful rugs and cushions.

Downstairs in the make-shift kitchen marque 1 is busy preparing a surprise Sunday lunch. Garlic and steak wafts all around the house. Marque 5 is running around with an orange butterfly net. He is throwing objects up in the air and catching them in it. He comes up to me asking if I’d like a hairbrush – maybe I look a little dishevelled after the sauna – and he tosses one up out of the net and hands it to me.
‘Love ya’ he says and runs off again.

So thank-you sauna man. For making me take stock and realise, once again, where things are really at. That behind the dour faced door, within these topsy-turvy walls there’s an abundance of colour, energy and light. That the new windows etc., etc., can most certainly wait. I think I might just get that doorbell though. Presently.

It strikes. I knew it was out there and they were instructed to be extra vigilant with the old hand washing. Not allowed to eat a morsel without scrubbing first. It is not funny when a vomiting bug hits a house of seven. So when marque 4 saunters out of school, guitar in hand, and announces that someone threw up all over the shared desk I let out a little yelp. Or perhaps a loud shreik.
Aargh.
‘Did you wash your hands before you ate your lunch?’ I ask, hopefully.
‘Yes, and the vomit splashed everywhere, it even landed on someone’s school bag’ he says chortling away.
‘But you washed your hands?’
‘Yes. I don’t think it’s a vomiting bug. It looked like porridge. I think he just didn’t digest his porridge properly’, he says reassuringly. So I know from then on that it is lurking. It is lurking waiting to pounce.

3.30am Saturday morning. Wine coursing through the veins after an evening of the Late Late, a fire and a curry. I love Friday night more than any other. It’s intoxicating just thinking about not having to find uniform bits, make lunches, cajole them into finishing homework, sign notebooks. I’m on a high every Friday before a drop of wine enters into it. I love Friday and I love the weekends, more so every year. So when at 3.30 marque 5 comes running into us calling ‘come quick, he’s choking, he’s choking’ a little part of my maternal instinct is reluctant to kick in. I go in to view the extent of it, and like all middle of the night projectile surprises it’s gruesome and my first thought is not ‘you poor little mite’ as it should be. It is ‘well that’s it. The weekend is ruined. We’ll all go down now’. I peel the PJs off him, strip the bed, clean him up, get a bowl and set about the washing downstairs. Of course it’s not as simple as bunging it all in the machine. All the lumps need to be washed free first. So I’m up to my neck in the sink, with poorly digested Friday treat Domino’s pizza chunks, moaning to myself about the loss of the promise of the relaxing weekend. I must be talking out loud because suddenly from the corner of the kitchen the pale little waif pipes up.
‘We all were Mum’.
‘All were what?’
‘We all were SO looking FORWARD to the week-end’.
Oh dear. That’s when it kicks in, the old instinct. Full throttle. The poor little fella. And he gets it bad. Every half hour for 12 hours solid the bile chokes out of him. We offer teaspoons of dioralyte and flattened 7up and watch for the signs in everyone else.

It’s a sneaky one and it takes its time. Waits until you are feeling a little bit smug. That your bleaching and scrubbing must be supreme because no-one else is getting it. Ha. Strike two. Three and a half days later. Makes sense. He was sharing a room with marque 4. Strike three. One and a half days later. This is poor little marque 5.
‘Sorry Mum’ marque 4 chimes staring at marque 5.
‘Sorry for what?’
‘Sorry for brining the vomiting bug home, look at him, he’s so sick’ he says.
‘It’s not your fault, anyone could’ve caught it’ I say a tad guiltily. Somewhere in my message about vigilant hand washing a little blame game is being played. ‘Especially if someone throws up at their table’ I add and he laughs.

It is sneaky and misleading, giving false hope and laughing at us all. Particularly now. It laughs hard and loud. Because we’re eight days into it and wise mother that I am I’ve booked last minute to get us out of the big smoke for three nights of the mid-term break. From tomorrow. I’m sure we’ve beaten it. We’re running out of bleach after all. I’m packing the bags. Strike four. Wake up and smell the coffee. There’s still three to go. Cancel. But somehow I’m crossing my fingers. Coming out with ludicrous wishful thinking statements like ‘maybe it’s only the younger kids that will get it. Maybe it’s just a young kids’ bug’. I’m eight days tending to the sick and cleaning up. No sign. Neither for himself nor for marque one. Maybe once you’re over a certain body weight it just can’t get a hold, the wise mother think-eth. It’s a discerning clever bug and selects the under twelves only.

There’s a vote. We all agree. We must go. We head off with just in case sick bowls and disinfectant wipes planted about the car, risk takers that we are.

It’s bank holiday Monday and we are knee deep in storm strewn seaweed on our favourite beach. We walk the length and breath of it. Stop to marvel at the colours, the giant bird’s footprints in the sand, the peculiar witches’ hat pattern cast at our feet.

It is a hand holding, hoods up excursion blowing away the cobwebs of the first term. Marque 1 wonders out loud if he’ll have to go to the Gaeltacht next summer. He does not want to go. We preach mindfulness at him, tell him to just be here in the moment, noticing and breathing in all that surrounds him. He is not to be fast forwarding to next summer. Not here. Not now. Especially when the notion of the Gaeltacht hasn’t even occurred to his parents yet.

Strike 5. Twelve days in. Marque 1 succumbs on a glorious holiday Tuesday. But it has lost it’s power over us. We don’t care any more. We defied it. We’ve had a just what the doctor ordered couple of days. It will get the parents yet and we’re here waiting, finger beckoning it. Come on you bastard. We’re ready for you.

It’s the least of our concerns. There are many, many things to pre-occupy us at the moment. The NCT on the old juggernaut doesn’t even enter the space. We just want it done before that date in December. The penalty points date. We most certainly want it done before then.

Somehow though it has crept in. It has crept in and taken hold. The real life issues are squashed to the peripheries. It’s a whole new world I’ve entered into. A dipetane fuelled rev obsessed world.

‘Just mix some dipetane in with your diesel the next time’ the kind man says over the phone when I book in for a pre-test. Ah yes, dipetane. Never heard of it. Didn’t think you could ‘mix’ anything in with the fuel. Surely that’ll cause little explosions or seizures or something untoward.
‘People do it all the time. It’s used on boats an’ all. You can even throw some in with your home heating fuel’ he says. None of these scenarios do anything to re-assure me. I take him at his word, purchase a bottle from him and receive more little pearls in person.

‘Put in .4 of a litre for a quarter tank. Then drive in low until the revs are up around 3-4000. Then slip it into 2’. I feel as if I should be jotting all this gobbledygook down. I nod sagely instead, repeating all the numbers in my head. I tell him I’ll see him next week for the pre-test.

The eye contact from my new mechanic friend is not so hot after the pre-test. He knows it’s going to fail.
‘It’s very smokey’ he says. ‘You didn’t use much of the dipetane’. Well, I used what you said. Just we didn’t get out that much over the weekend. Vomiting bug and all that jazz.

‘It looks like it hasn’t been serviced in a good while’ my frenemy continues. Ah yes, the old service situation. It’s just that I’ve noticed when I put it in for one, things are found. Hundreds of euros worth of things. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Or your pocket. I prefer to wait until brought to a halt by something clanging off the ground. Much more economical.
‘If it was my car, I’d put €5 of petrol in the next time with the diesel’, he says without batting an eyelid. Is that even legal?
‘Are you serious? Dipatene and petrol and diesel. Wouldn’t that harm the engine?’ He laughs. Ha, ha. But I have a vague memory of somebody putting diesel into a petrol car and the car going kaput. Paying not too insignificant a sum to get every last drop sucked out. Didn’t seem too funny at the time. It’s the only chance left for getting the smokiness down he says. It’s the last resort. He’s only saying that’s what he’d do. Is all. If it were his. I can take or leave his tip.
‘What if I get a quick service then, would that help?’ and he’s given up smirking at my naivety. The car will fail no matter what. Best to see what they come back with and work from there he suggests. He charges not a cent for his time and tips. Sure I’ll be seeing him directly after it anyhow.

I rev on up to the nearest garage and position myself at the diesel and petrol pump while whipping the dipatene out and plonking it alongside the others. An elderly man and lady pull up behind me in a modest silver micra. He gets their fuel while she gazes unflinchingly at me working the diesel, then swapping to work the petrol which fails because, of course, you have to pay for the one you’ve finished with first. I toss a load of dipetane in instead and feel the poor lady’s eyes widening on me. I think about popping over to her window to explain. No, I’m not in the middle of a nervous breakdown. I know how it looks. Juggling with three nozzles. As if any old thing will do to get this thing moving. I’d frighten the life out of her if I knocked on her window. So I run in to pay the guy for the diesel and back out again to try my luck with the petrol. My lady friend is still there, still staring. What the hell is taking her husband so long? I mix my cocktail, run back in to pay, with a niggle that I poured in too much dipatene for the amount of diesel – should’ve jotted those figures down – and I announce to the nice young dead-pan faced guy that I’m going to get another tenner’s worth of diesel. For the hell of it. Oh, and I’d like to pay in advance this time. I run back out, wrestle with the diesel pump again, ignoring the gob-smacked lady. At last. It is done. I do not expect the engine to start after all the mixing and messing around. But it does. And I drive all the way across the yard to the hoover. The less said about hoovering the thing -which hasn’t been done since the summer – the better. Suffice it to say that there are socks being wrenched back out of the hose. And that one €2 shot doesn’t do it. Not at all. Oh well. It’s the shells that get me. All the little shells of the day from the holidays, filling the door pockets and under the mats.

Sometimes when I open the door a shell falls out at my feet. Brings me right back to the magic of a day at the beach in the West. They must now be hidden in readiness for the silly test. Lest they be deemed a safety hazard. Slip under the brake pedal. Jam the accelerator to the floor. So I busy myself hiding the real life. That’s how it feels as I pull and push the hose around sucking up mountains of sand. Then someone beeps me gesturing to move so he can get past. Some other absent idiot is blocking him but I’m the sitting duck. A busy sitting duck which the rude man chooses to ignore. ‘You’ve got to be kidding’ I find myself mouthing, possibly looking a tad frazzled, waving the time ticking hoover at him. How I wish I was back at that beach.

I finish off my morning at the garage with a manual car wash and a neutradol air freshener. If it smells fresh and looks clean perhaps they won’t notice the plumes of smoke out the rear. I collect the troops from their labours. They admire the new car look. Then I rev off in low, the needle tipping into the red danger zone and we screech all the way home from the school.

‘Go Mum, Go Mum, Go Mum’ the excited chorus chants to the boy racer noises. If that’s all that comes out of this, that’s good enough for me. Rock on 14.20. We’re on our way.

Ha !

It all boils down to a flashing shoe. It’s as simple as that. One irrepressibly flashing shoe turns the morning upside down. If I could take back the time that we spent choosing them in Clarke’s shoe shop I would. Go for the ones with the little gifts in the soles instead. But the lovely funny shoe man showed us the off button. If you don’t want red and green neon flashing all day in school just press the off button. Sorted. Decided. Marque 4 and 5 chose the same pair of shoes. Deadly or cool or whatever the lingo is. Until the little off button no longer works.

Marque 4’s shoe flashes from the shoe box in the porch. Each time I pass by the glass window I startle. It magnifies through the bubble glass and I think it’s the police or the fire-brigade or some sort of emergency taking place at our front door. It must take some battery to power those relentless lights. Marque 4 hurls the shoe down the kitchen in a bid to make it stop. It doesn’t. I press gently and firmly and every which way on the ‘off’ button to no effect. One of marque 5’s shoes has been flashing merrily for weeks now. He doesn’t mind. He’s a senior infant. It’s allowed.

This morning I’m up extra early. There’s an emergency dental situation for marque 2 and we have to make it there, after the school drop off, by nine or we won’t be seen. I am cruising along. I’ve located and laid out all uniform bits and shoes for everyone. Lunch boxes and drinks are deposited into the relevant bags. Breakfast things and orange juice are doing the rounds. Shoes, hair and teeth. Almost there.
‘I’m not wearing the flashing shoe. I’ll be in trouble. It’s not ok in second class’ marque 4 throws into the mix with immediate impact on my pulse.
‘Why did you insist on having the flashing shoes if you’re not allowed them?’ I say, possibly muttering something about sixty bloody euros. I should’ve gone to Lidl like I did last year. Seven euros for full leather shoes. Nothing flash.
‘Because they have an off button’ he says logically and I suppose I can’t really blame him, much as I might like to, for that seizing and rendering the shoe a permanent flasher.
I root around in the shoe box and mercifully pull out another pair of matching shoes – last year’s, but looking good.
‘Here, wear these then’ I say, we are still on track, we can still make it. He squishes his feet in and lets out an exasperated sigh – he might have learnt from me – and claims that they do not fit. He opts for the flasher instead. But now, lo and behold the flasher has gone missing. One of the brothers helpfully tries to make it stop and then loses it. Now we are getting late.
‘You’re going to have to wear the old ones for today’ I say, but his shoeless heels are dug in. He’s going nowhere without the flasher. He is on the verge of tears now. Perhaps if I leave the room it’ll all get sorted. Head on out to the car and they’ll emerge, gleaming teeth, shining hair, two shoes a piece.

It is finally located. Someone has been cheerfully sitting on it while getting their own shoes on. We are a good ten minutes late leaving. The dentist is a far off aspiration. I start a little rant in the car. Along the cringe worthy lines of ‘when I was your age going to school’. How today the parents do EVERYTHING for the kids. Hand them everything. Dress some of them. Make sure they have every last little thing. And still they manage to be late. When I was…cringe. I tell them how I set my uniform out the night before, set my own alarm, got up and got my own breakfast, packed my lunch, and headed off to catch the 7.30 bus. Because if I missed that the next ones along were all full. All my mother had to do was sign my homework notebook, without checking if the work was done because she knew it would be. There’s a communal deafness in the car. Rightly so. But I feel better for having said it. If they’re going to morph into me then I’ll have to get out of their way and let them. If I do less for them they’ll be more than capable of doing it for themselves. I resolve to do less. From this moment on they are on their own I say to myself, pulling up the handbrake which seems to seal the deal.

We flash on up to the school and I turn around, hot tail it back to the car, and screech up to the dentist. It’s 9.05. They’ll probably turn a blind eye. And they do. All’s well as it happens. The emergency milk tooth can be pulled if it continues to be troublesome but it looks close to falling out so we opt for the natural way.

Back in the car marque 2 remembers that he hasn’t finished his Irish homework. No worries, I tell him, all relaxed now, sure I’ll get you a hot chocolate (don’t tell the dentist) and you can finish it before I pop you in. Only we end up chatting. He asks me some lovely questions about my time spent with my grandparents in England as a child and we are laughing and sipping and forgetting about the clock. Eventually he pulls out the Irish sheet. It’s one of those where you have to fill in the gaps. Not that there are words supplied for you. No. You’re supposed to know them or look them up in the dictionary. So at ten o’clock he’s writing speedily while I google, like a fool, crutches and stretchers and bandages. Some stupid Dad has, it seems, broken his leg playing soccer. Crutches. We definitely didn’t learn that when I was in school.

I write a note about being late because of a trip to the dentist. He goes in happy and smiling and warm from the hot chocolate. I start the journey home to clear up the mess from the morning. Somebody needs to teach me a few new tricks.

They love weather. The changeable sort that we are used to. So the trip to school on the morning after the storm is accompanied by fever pitch excitement. Autumn, it seems, has finally arrived. Strewn debris greets us on our walk. There are whoops at the sight of a parked car – it’s tyres submerged in flood water. They run and skid on the blanket of fresh foliage that has been cast for their delight. There’s a nip in the air. At last. Yes a definite nip.
‘Smell it’ marque 2 says, standing still, breathing deeply in. ‘Just smell the freshness after the storm’.

And so we believe that the summer which has gone on, bewilderingly, for half the year is now over. Time to put the sandals away and whip out the boots. Time to hot-tail it up to T.K. Maxx for a coat. We are ready to welcome the next season. Late is better than not at all. Up in T.K. Maxx everyone else seems to have the same idea. The isles are thronged with merry post-storm knitwear and coat buyers. It’s a dizzying affair and I’m no good at it. Row upon row of quilted coats with fake fur hoods. Where to begin? I stand watching the skilled buyers making their way methodically through, going from left to right, making sure not to miss a hidden bargain. I’m in the way, hovering, wondering if I could borrow one of them for a minute to dig me out. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the coat hangers go all around me, mockingly, to the deft hands of the discerning clever purchasers. I scowl around the myriad colours and styles and sizes all mixed up. Can somebody just help me please?

I know I can’t leave without something. You don’t make a trip up here and leave empty handed. I check the time. Getting close to the first pick up. A quick call to see if he is in the area and if there’s any way he could do the collection. Yes, sure, and this should make me feel better, having that extra half hour. But I’m starting to feel that my knees are going to cave. I’m going to keel over, right here in the centre of the store. And then I’ll probably be trampled on.

So I retreat from being a nuisance in the narrow isles to a corner where there’s a free standing display of fresh arrivals. Room to swing things. Mirrors. Air. I can do this. The first coat I pluck from the stand fits perfectly. It’s by a designer I’ve never heard of but hey, that’s probably good. Then there’s another woman who comes over and smiles at me, says she loves the coat and nabs one for herself. We are side by side taking turns in the mirror, looking very much the competent calm T.K. Maxx purchasers. She twinkles at me and thanks me for alerting her to these. This has made her day. Maybe she was sent to help me I think, in some other worldly way. Or maybe the CCTV cameras picked up the exasperated immobile mess in the centre isle and sent an undercover staff member to cheer me along. Pretend the coat was lovely, get one for herself, and hoosh me right out of the store.

As I exit with the autumn-winter purchase I am blinded by the sun. It’s sweltering again. For feck’s sake, all the newly found competence draining out of me as I think about hurling the boots to the back of the cupboard, retrieving the sandals and waiting for this Indian summer to finally cough itself to sleep.

At night, with all the homework almost done, I announce that we are going for a walk. They look at me quizzically as I pull the purchase from the bag. Mutterings of ‘great new coat mum’ resound and I smile.
‘Just something I nabbed for the cold weather’.
‘It looks so, so posh’ marque 4 says giggling. Posh – the unintended consequence of a panic buy.
‘I don’t think we need to bring our coats, do we? It was ROASTING today’.
As you please, dear children, as you please.

Mercifully a soft drizzle descends and I whip up my hood, feeling decidedly less ridiculous now. They run ahead, coat-less arms outstretched, welcoming the change, while imbibing the smell of seaweed that has been thrown onto the path in last night’s storm. A harvest moon sparkles and winks at us on the sea. Embrace the changes as they present themselves, much like the kids do, he seems to be saying. Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s what he means.

Marque 4 whips a book from the shelves to lean on for doing his homework in the sunshine out in the garden. I smile when I see it. Parenting is Child’s Play. Not that I got around to reading it. Not enough time. It’s not working out. This whole leaning on the book on his knee thing. His writing isn’t too hot at the best of times. He’ll get into trouble if he hands this lot in. I provide him with a chair to lean on instead.
‘Maybe we should toss this book over the wall into the neighbour’s garden’ he suggests. It has been as useless for him as it was for me. And they have young kids too. Perhaps they’d have better luck with it. Thoughtful.
‘Well I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, so better not. Do you want to know what it’s called?’
‘Yes’.
‘Parenting is Child’s Play’ and he laughs.
‘That’s so funny. It IS child’s play. Let’s tell the others. Hey guys, parenting is child’s play’ and he cackles on. Better not tell him about the Raising Happy Children for DUMMIES that’s knocking around collecting dust here somewhere too.

We are thankfully out of the stage of looking to the shelves of book-shops for answers to our parenting quandaries. In fairness, he was never in that stage. Use your instincts and best efforts and it’ll be grand is how he sees it. Mother guilt and niggles of doubt not featuring at all in that mind-set. I’d try to imitate him at times, mooching around in a guilt-free zone, trying to care not a jot about the small things. Best efforts and all that. And then I’d hot tail it off to buy a book. He used to laugh, along with my own mother, when I’d purchase a book and spout the latest while breast feeding in a corner.
‘What are you buying those books for?’ my mother repeatedly asked, chortling away. She had Dr Spock or nothing. I think she chose nothing.
‘You should be writing them not buying them’ she’d say, which was vaguely reassuring, even if I’d no intention of ever doing so. You don’t feel quite so gung-ho when you’ve five kids aged 8 and under. Or was it when we had the four kids aged 5 and under. I forget.

Most of the books I’d lurch for in crisis had ‘positive’ or ‘confident’ or ‘happy’ somewhere in the title. Sometimes just purchasing a book had the desired effect. The crisis having slipped on by without the need to turn a page. The book relegated to the bottom of my monstrous bag of reading material to be delved into in snatched moments of quiet time. Given that there’s really no such thing, the bag just got heavier with desired tomes – parenting, philosophy, short stories, creative writing, novels. If a moment did present itself, I’d often spend it wondering which area I should plumb for. Then it would be gone before I’d made up my mind.

I have a keen memory of the ridiculousness of the parenting purchases from one episode. I was in a chair in the corner breast-feeding, two toddler-ish kids playing in the garden and the eldest knocking around (aged 5 ish). Time for a read. What pleasurable experience did I select from my book bag – a happy confident children tome.
‘Mu-um can we da-di-da-di-da…??’ I was so immersed in the book that I was ignoring the child whose happiness and confidence I was concerned about. He was speaking to me. Repeatedly. Some question or other. If I kept reading maybe the questioning would die down a little, go away, and I could continue to absorb these clearly needed parenting tips. And then it struck me. What I was doing. Sidelining the actual child while busy learning how to increase his self-esteem.
I looked up from the book with a smile so wide that it frightened him a little. I think he even took a step back. I snapped the book closed. You have my full attention.
‘Yes, sweetheart?’
‘Can we make some lemonade mummy?’
Building up self-esteem, I had been informed, included looking like you want to spend time with your children and pretending to enjoy making a mess even when you have a hundred other things to be doing. With the baby (2 months) or the toddlers (1 and 3), with the house, or the washing, or the dinner.
‘Yes we can’ I said dumping the book, winding the baby over my shoulder, and heading for the kitchen.
‘We can? Now mummy? Really?’ and his thrilled excitement coupled with a smidgeon of suspicion made me laugh. A little hysterically perhaps. Thinking of all the times I must’ve said ‘No, not now, I’m feeding here and then I have to do this and then I have to do that. Some other time sweetheart’, to a crest fallen face. So we cracked on with the lemonade, me beaming away, scaring him with positivity, and I carry that image with me. Mother absorbed in book telling her how to be with child while blanking the child with all her might. Instincts and best efforts. There’s a lot to be said for it.

We’ve reached a new realm, whether we like it or not. I’ve known this only since last week for certain. Killing the hour between pick ups sees the two of us – marque 5 and myself – meandering around with an occasional trip to a cafe. This is rare individual time which I savour as it will all too soon be gone. One day we were chatting away, diving into hot chocolate and cappuccino, in our own world, dimly aware of the table beside us.

Until marque 5 and the other little boy said hello to one another. The woman with the other boy was there but elsewhere, checking her phone, and so quiet with the boy that I thought she must be a child-minder with very little English. I was wrong. As the two little ones hit it off we sort of had to chat too and she was the mother, who doesn’t usually do the pick up. She said she was ‘trying to give him some one to one time’. It was when she started to quiz me that I knew. She was looking for answers. I looked like someone who might have a few. I was one of those. I never would’ve thought it.
‘But you look so, so, god, calm? How does that work? I thought I was bad with two, five, god – how? What do you do with them, say at the weekend? I suppose, being boys, you just have them doing a load of sport…’ She looked tired and as if she was on the verge of purchasing one of those books for the answers. ‘How?’ It’s tricky now that I seem to have morphed into one of those. The mothers I used to see as well, looking as if they had it all sussed, and I’d wonder. How do they look so focused on the one child, as if they’re actually enjoying themselves, when they have all the others to fret about. How? How are they not just one big ball of stress? How the hell? Now I know the secret. It’s as simple as having older children too and knowing, really knowing, how fast it actually goes. So enjoying it comes easily. But you can’t say that, not to someone who can’t see it yet. They’d secretly wish to throttle you. The trickiness is in treading carefully, engaging while not providing intangible answers, looking like you have no answers yourself. Which you don’t, not really. We’re all just muddling through to the next realm after all. So I didn’t tell her that they’re not sport crazy, even though they are boys, so we don’t have them doing that all weekend. That we let them find out what they’re into and follow their lead. Which has worked well until recently, with art, swimming, guitar, animation, Coderdojo and a smattering of basketball along with out on the road play. It’s come back to bite us now though. This following their lead idea. Marque 1 (13) is showing a frightening interest in motor sport which we have no clue about – except that it’s expensive, potentially dangerous, and there’s travel involved. Maybe we should’ve pushed the traditional sport thing after all. Fools… Perhaps it’s time to run out and buy the sequel: Parenting is Child’s Play -The Teenage Years. And some far off day, fingers well crossed, we’ll be laughing and thinking about throwing that one over the garden wall too.

There’s a recurrent dream I have about not being able to get to them. That they are waiting for me but I do not arrive. I am badly stuck somewhere and will not make it. And there isn’t a thing I can do about it. It’s one of those dreams that wakes you, such is the terror, and you’re in a great mood for the rest of the day. Because it didn’t really happen.

Until it did. Three years ago I was at home with the two youngest. Marque 4 was sick and I was wondering how I was going to collect the others from after school activities with a vomiting child. I was getting a bowl for the car when he arrived home saying he’d collect them, no bother, as he needed the car after for a meeting anyway. Phew. I sat back to relax. Feeding or reading or both. Probably both.

The merry banter could be heard in the driveway. Laughing and joking as I opened the door and he fled off in the car for his meeting. Marque 1 and 2 were standing there, as relaxed as I’d been two minutes ago, lost in whatever the joke was.
‘Where’s marque 3?’
‘Who?’
‘Your brother, you know the one. Blond. He does the musical theatre while you’re doing guitar. Where IS HE?’
‘Maybe he’s behind the bush waving to Daddy’.
‘Is he? Was he IN THE CAR AT ALL?’
‘I think so, wait was he, I don’t know’. Poor marque 2, fielding all my questions, the eyes welling up now.
‘He wasn’t’ marque 1 clarifies. And there it was. My nightmare a reality staring me in the face. Or perhaps it was even worse than my nightmare. They had been there and driven off without him. With all the practise of the dreams to date one might think I’d have a plan. Something to drum up just in case. Nope. I froze. Then I cast my gaze around to see who might be blameworthy. But marque 2 had already run with that baton.
‘I can’t believe I left him there, that I didn’t remember him. Maybe he was running after the car…’ Jesus. Time to summon the adult amongst us. I dialled his mobile, but low and behold it went straight to voice-mail. And then I saw that the school was ringing me.
‘We have your son from first class here. He wasn’t collected after his activity and the school closes in ten minutes’.

Ok, ok, think brain, think. Nothing. Not a solution in sight. All I knew was that we live nowhere near the school and we’ve only one car. Which is elsewhere.
‘Could you put him in a taxi and we’ll pay for it when he gets here’ I said, the brain mercifully beginning to engage.
‘No, we can’t release a six year old to a taxi without an adult’ she said, merrily. Far too merrily. I think she was laughing. Jesus.
‘Do you know anyone who lives nearby who might be able to bring him home for you?’ People. Ah yes, people. Lovely charitable people.
‘No’ I said, think brain think, ‘wait a second. He has a grandfather who is not too far off. I’ll see if he is able to. I’ll ring back in a second’.
My father-in-law has helped us out of many mini-scrapes in the past. When cars have broken down and we’re stuck in some godforsaken place and he arrives to save us. Or he gently steers us away from purchasing the house with the gaping flaw that everyone else can see but we’re blind to, so keen are we to get started. Or rescues me from the church after marque 1’s first holy communion – I’m close to keeling over with a pain issue, just out of hospital as I was after the birth of marque 5. Refuge he is. He says he can do it, no bother at all.

I’m standing in the hall wondering what the little face will be like. Will he be ok, or terribly upset, or humiliated, or in need of therapy. Then I notice something. Something with even more terrifying possibilities. The front door has been wide open during all of this palaver.
‘Where’s the baby?’ I say, quietly. Marque 2’s eyes widen and he runs out onto the road, hollering ‘baby, baby, come back, BABY’ much as I should be doing, but this quietness has taken over. I feel that it is time to surrender. To walk out onto the road, get down on my knees, thrust my arms up into the air and beg to be taken away. I’m clearly not cut out for this mother of five lark. One kid abandoned at the school. The baby probably up at the main road by now. Just do it. Take me away.

Marque 1, more action than waste of time reaction, had taken to searching the house. And then came the sweetest words from upstairs. ‘Found him’. Marque 5 had decided, on that very day, at that very moment, to play, for the very first time, hide and bloody go seek. He was thrilled with himself, sitting there in my cupboard, beaming at me. ‘I win, I win’ he said. He’d probably been there for half an hour before we noticed. Feeling less like surrendering myself to the authorities now, I went out to rescue marque 2 from walking around in circles wondering how this day had gone so horribly wrong, and blaming himself for it all.
‘It’s not your fault sweetheart, it’s the parents who should be head counting and knowing where everyone is, not you’ and he’s nodding but not buying it. He knows the truth. The parents are in need of some seriously vigilant back up and somewhere along the way he seems to have been nominated.

Marque 3 clambers out of his grandfather’s car looking chirpy and unscathed, unlike the rest of us.
‘Are you ok, I’m so sorry we left you at the school…’
‘I’m fine Mum. In fact it was fun. They got to meet my grandfather and I got to go in his car, which was nice.’
‘Are you sure? Did you see our car with the guys driving off?’ That image of him watching the car zoom off without him, maybe even running after it, refused to leave me alone.
‘No Mum, we were out late, that’s why Dad didn’t see me.’
Phew, phew, phew. It seems it’ll just be myself and marque 2 heading off for the therapy so.

‘What about the lion’s manes?’ marque 4 enquires as I throw the togs into a bag on a scorcher of a Sunday. We’ve been sweltering away in the garden until we can no longer take it.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve googled it. They’re gone’ I say assuredly. ‘Now get in the car’. There’s been no swimming since we came home from the West despite the tantalisingly good weather. Today is the day. Google throws up a newspaper article stating that our poisonous friends have scarpered – no sightings for on the beaches or in the sea for 5 days. The notices banning swimming have been removed.

Given the scorcher that it is we debate the relative merits of the beaches and plumb for Five Mile Point in Wicklow to escape the certainty of crowds along the Dublin Coast. And then I remember the car situation. On Friday our drive home from school was accompanied by an almighty knocking.
‘What the hell is that?’ I asked the children, figuring theirs would be as good a guess as mine.
‘Maybe there’s a cat stuck under the bonnet’ marque 4 offered. And they all laughed. Marque 2 started to calmly investigate.
‘It’s not there when you accelerate’.
‘Isn’t it?’ I said, accelerating. He was right.
‘What else do you notice?’ I asked wondering if between us we could somehow solve it. Make it go away.
‘People are staring at us’ marque 3 chimed in and true enough it was a stop and stare noise. Some people even turned around to look. Cheek of them. I expected at any moment to hear a thud and to see the engine on the road behind us in the rear view mirror. We clanged and rattled our way into a local mechanic who investigated and diagnosed a completely rotten exhaust section, all the way up to the axel. He recommended we go swiftly to any of the exhaust fitter places. And he didn’t charge a cent for his time. Decency. The exhaust fitter let us know that as our car is a Japanese import with a long wheel base we’d have to order it specifically. It might take some time. Then he said that the whole thing was about to fall off, and asked permission to remove it so it’s not dragging along the road behind us. Sure you can we said. We’ve caused enough of a stir already.

He told us we can drive around without it. But we figure a long drive would be foolish. So on this scorcher we cross our fingers and head to Killiney beach.
‘We’ll never get parking on a day like today’ I say as we sail past the car park at the train station and notice a load of empty spaces. We go around to our favourite small car park – down a tunnel which isn’t much fun if you meet a car on the way out – and he says he’ll leave us off if it’s full and go back to the other one. But there are a handful of spaces which is very unusual – even when the weather isn’t good.

We get down to the beach and it takes a minute for it to register. There are so few people here. Where are all the crowds? The place should be mobbed. What is everyone doing on such a glorious day? It’s late afternoon. Maybe they all got here earlier and couldn’t take the heat. We’re delighted. Free rein fun. They clamber quickly into their togs, the two youngest being first, and they run down to the sea. I follow them down. Marque 4 is running straight in – like he has done all summer in the West – when I see it. Directly in front of him, a few feet from the shore, is an enormous burnt orange mass. He’s making a bee-line for it. I holler for him to stop. He comes back to me and I point it out to him. He agrees that it is indeed one of them. But the size – surely they don’t get that big?

A man is swimming close to where we are standing. By my calculation he is heading horizontally for it and it for him. With the 10 metre long stinging tentacles in mind, I sprint over to him and motion him out of the water.
‘I think I’ve just see a lion’s mane’ I tell him, not wanting to sound too alarmist. I don’t think, I know, and it’s ginormous. Turns out he’s a regular swimmer and has a few tips. He tells me how they stay far out, they don’t come close in to the shore so if the kids stay within their depth they’ll be grand. As he speaks it’s dawning on me that he hasn’t taken my spotting seriously at all. I’m looking like an over protective mother who has seen a clump of seaweed and won’t let her poor children have any fun in the water. I leave him re-iterating what I saw, and how it seemed to be heading in his direction.

We go back up to the others.
‘Google let mummy down’ marque 4 says laughing, thankfully. Not annoyed as he could we have been. He was dying for a swim.
‘Google lied to mummy’, he continues. ‘There’s an enormous lion’s mane right there.’ Marque 2 and 3 along with their Dad go down to spot it too. He ends up chatting to the man with the tips. Suddenly they both have their hands cupped above their eyes looking out, pointing. They can see it too. Apparently the man’s face paled when he saw it, the size of it, so close to where he’d been swimming. He was very keen to thank us. Repeatedly.
‘That could’ve been a very different evening for me if you hadn’t pointed it out, thanks again’. Then comes the choice. Do we head up the beach warning others too. Or do people just want to be left alone to take their own risks? Is there an onus on us to warn? We believe that there is. If it was us we’d want to be told. So he heads off and I watch as he points, and people scan. It’s like a scene from Jaws, all the cupped hands over eyes, the pointing and the swimmers retreating hurriedly from the water in that moment of recognition – that there is indeed a monster amongst us. But then again most of the county seemed to know that already – the sparseness of the crowd a huge clue as to what lay beneath. Maybe it was only the vigilant few googling whether it was safe who turned up today. Fools. I’ll follow the crowd next time. The man with the tips and his companion pack up to leave, waving to us as they pass, and she mouths ‘thanks’. Ah, the sweet rewards of a good day’s work – I wonder if Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council might employ me as chief jelly fish spotter for the rest of the month.

Given the otherwise damp squib of the excursion so far somebody deemed it appropriate to nod her assent to a trip to the all the rage new ice-cream parlour – Scrumdiddly’s.

Part of the hype of the place, it seems, is the street queueing. The longer you queue, the more delicious it gets. Capitalism at its very best. Having been in the former Soviet Union and Cuba – back in my youth – and witnessed real queueing for bare necessities this is a little disquieting. But I don’t let on. Marque 3 throws his hand up in assembly on Monday morning to tell the tale of the near miss with the lion’s mane and the 45 minute queue for ice-cream. Every minute of the wait, he swears, was worth it.

‘If you’re going to spend half an hour chatting to every mum on the way to the car, we’ll never get home’ astute marque 2 remarks as we wend our way through the merry throngs at the end of the second day. There’s something different about the return this year. The collective parental sigh that usually accompanies it is curiously absent. There’s a consensus that it all came to an end too soon. An unpreparedness for the assault of the manic mornings, the lunch boxes, the lost uniform ties, the impending homework gloom. Where I used to feel alone in not wanting the school year to begin, everywhere I turn now there are allies.

My research head tells me to search for the variable. What’s causing this difference? Everyone I talk to reports they had a great summer. Not a ‘grand’ or ‘fine’ one which other years has been case:
‘How was your summer?’
‘Ah grand, grand. I was ready for them to go back though!’ accompanied by a conspiratorial collective laugh of relief. I find none of that this time.
‘How was your summer?’
‘It was great, great’ accompanied by smiles and the addendum that ‘it was over too soon’. They seem to really mean it. The weather. Cha-ching. We have just experienced a real summer, not a typical Irish one. Plenty of sunshine, sporadic mini-heat waves that didn’t keep us waiting until September for their arrival. Yes, there were the weather warnings and torrential rain and flooding. The tail end of a hurricane. Blips in the overall picture. The truth is that we, in Ireland, have just had a super summer weather-wise. Vitamin D levels are soaring at a comfortable high. Nobody wants the party to end. Even the jelly fish agree, graced as we are by the presence of the exotic deadly lion’s mane, which wouldn’t usually bother with our cold summer waters. Marque 4 spotted one lurking in a rock pool along the shore at Seapoint.

He shrieked to warn people. While the no-bathing sign was being heeded, a family with little kids was playing nearby. Buckets and spades and wellie boots, but their little investigative hands could’ve been in for a shock. And then a funny thing happened. Men, women and kids gathered around us to look at the poisonous intruder. Excited banter was exchanged. A mixture of horror and pride. Tales of other spottings and risk takers ignoring the notices and swimming anyway. All in a backdrop of pride about the uncharacteristic summer we’ve just had which has invited these creatures along.

I ignore marque 2’s pleas to curtail the conversational merriment on the way to the car. I just have to make it home on time for marque 1’s late afternoon return from secondary. And I don’t let on that this is how it has been since we left them in on the first morning. Non-stop vitamin D induced conviviality. My jaw might be aching and my ears ringing. But hey. Who knows when we’ll see the like again.