Anchor Baby – the audio

Each night, at bedtime, Atlas comes to find me – Brandin does the bath and tooth-brushing, in an arrangement that we somehow came to unconsciously and now it’s become a routine – and plaintively asks, “mama cuddle?”

It’s a contrived cuteness, and we both know it. He’s five; he can speak in full sentences. But somehow, “mama cuddle?” has become the cue which, upon hearing, indicates that it’s time to go into his room, snuggle up under the covers and cuddle “for one hundred minutes” before he’ll go to sleep.

Sometimes, we cuddle in silence. When the one hundred minutes have passed – sometimes 10, sometimes 20, depending on how sleepy I become, lying there all warm, our bodies pressed up against one another – I kiss him on the cheek and I say “goodnight honey, I’ll see you in the morning”. Depending on how sleepy he’s become, he’ll say “goodnight mama” or, “no, stay” (and I do).

Last night, we snuggled up as usual beneath the covers – him, in his Hanna Andersson x Jon Klassen pyjamas (too cute, and now sold out), the wearing of which necessitates the reading of the book before bed, me in my clothes – and he started to tell me about which dinosaurs are friends, and which are enemies. Which dinosaurs eat one another and which are “herbivores”; which lived one million years ago, and which didn’t live at all, “only in the movie” (case in point: his beloved, and terrifying, D-rex).

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After about 10 minutes of this, and several “okay, well, it’s time to go to sleep”s from me, I kissed him on the cheek and said goodnight. It’s one thing to snuggle in bed together, it’s another to be forced to endure endless dinosaur facts in the dark.

“No mama,” he said, “stay. Pwease stay.”

Helpless in the face of a cutesy voice – and he knows it, the cad – I acceded, snuggled further down under the covers and then, with a jolt:

“Atlas,” I asked, “Did you toot?”

“No!” he said, too quickly, and then, laughing, “Yes!” ha, ha, ha

“Hmph,” I said, laughing too, because all toots are funny.

A few minutes later, though, things got less funny.

“Come on,” I said, feeling slightly nauseous, “stop tooting!”

“I can’t!” he said. “Boys just do that.”

It was the first time he’d ever said anything like this: boys do X, or girls do Y. I’d been waiting for it – obviously, because I am nothing if not a feminist killjoy – and wondering what I’d say to him in response. But I’d never thought that gender stereotypes would first rear their ugly heads with him in relation to farts (of all things).

I was momentarily struck dumb.

“You know,” I said to him, “I’m not a boy and I toot all the time!” Both of these things are true. I used to think I had IBS, and maybe I do, but really how it manifests is that, if I eat too much, or too much of something I know is not an ideal thing to eat too much of (any and all deep fried foods, Costco’s dark chocolate salted caramels, tomato-based sauces), my stomach reacts in a dramatic, flatulent way.

“Yeah,” he said, “but boys can’t stop!”

I laughed, then, because I wasn’t quite sure what else to do. And this felt harmless. A harmless, fart-related observation.

But I thought about it a lot last night, as I lay awake with my two-year-old next to me in the bed, a two-year-old who has a cold and is very dramatic about it (they start with the man flu b******t early, let me tell you, and don’t get me started on the manspreading).

My five-year-old may well feel as though he, personally, can’t stop farting – and honestly, that might be to do with the fact that his digestive system is fucked, thanks to his entirely terrible diet of mostly cheese – but is it possible that he’s also absorbed the notion that boys (and, by extension, men) are not responsible for their own impulses and that, some way, somehow, they have less control over how they behave than girls (and, by extension, women) do?

If we think about it on a more general scale, this is, of course, true: that men have less impulse control, less of a sense of “oh no, I can’t do this here / in front of this person / again”, than women do.

But it’s not down to some biological factor, or to some innate impulse that has to do with testosterone or a lack of oestrogen or some combination of the two. It’s to do with the permission that we, as a society, give men, and the forgiveness we extend to them when they somehow act outside of the social norm, behave in some way that is objectively objectionable, break the social contract whether consciously or unconsciously.

It’s a permission we don’t extend to women, at least not in the same way; men are allowed to be angry (“passionate”) and abrupt (“in a rush”) and crass (“funny”) and, yes, sometimes even to fart in public (“slapstick”) when the same behaviours in women would be considered, respectively, hysterical, rude, unladylike, disgusting.

I’m not sure what I can do, as one woman in a five-man household, to counteract these assumptions. I mean, my husband, to be fair to him, will also challenge the types of gender stereotypes kids come out with, about how girls run, or throw a baseball; whether or not girls like a certain type of music; who, exactly, can wear nail polish, and who can’t (when we first met, his nails were painted a kind of lurid blue; he’d gone for a manicure with a friend of his for her birthday).

But children are visual learners. Sometimes aural learners. I wonder if, for Atlas, the best thing I could possibly do is – bear with me here – fart more. Louder. With less restraint.

It feels like the least I could do.

Pity Party 🎉

I got an email from a literary agent last week, saying how much they’d loved my book; did I have representation? Would I be interested in talking to them about my next book? What was I working on?

Quite aside from the fact that I’m not working on anything right now, at least not where writing is concerned – I do have a kernel of an idea that’s been knocking around inside my brain for what feels like years, kind of yearning to get out, but I simply can’t find the time or space to let it – there was something about it that made me suspicious.

It’s very rare, for one thing, for literary agents to reach out to you, the writer. It’s more a case of you reaching out to them, over and over and over again, in the hopes that they’ll (a) read your email, (b) take the time to read your pitch and (c) and this is the real wild card, like what they read.

I spoke to a writer friend about this earlier this week; she’s been applying for fellowships, grants, awards, all of the things that I know I should be applying for. My fear of rejection is less of a fear and more of a great, towering monster; it paralyses me with terror, mostly, I think, that someone will respond to me and identify exactly what I’m most afraid of: that I’ve spent all of this time, since I was a small child, labouring under the misapprehension that I’m a good writer.

More than that: that this has, in some way, been my fate all along (the fact that I don’t believe in fate as a concept is irrelevant; in this instance I do believe in it, very much, for me and me alone); that I’m meant to be a writer, like the narrator in that Abba song, who was a dancer before she could walk. In the tale I tell about myself, I was a storyteller before I could talk; a communicator before I could make a sound.

I wrote to a literary agent in the winter of 2019 – not perhaps entirely coincidentally, I realise now, right after my relationship of five years had fallen apart, mere months before I decided to take a leap and leave Ireland, to “spend a year or two” in America, a place I’d never before wanted to go – to ask if she would read some of my work.

I sent two pieces: one, a selection of essays; the other, the beginning of a novel I’d been working on for a while, inspired, in a way, by the disappearance of Philip Cairns and the ens…

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I’m carrying too many things, and I know I am. This is not a euphemism; this is not a story about how women carry too much, and take on all of the emotional labour, and shoulder everyone’s burdens as well as their own (but it could be, because that’s a story that would be easy to write). This is a story about me, carrying too many things.

I know before I even pick up the last thing – a pile of clothes I’ve selected for my four-year-old to wear to school, clothes he won’t have to be cajoled into today (for change), because I’ve promised him that, once he’s dressed, we’ll go to the pond down the road from our house – that I’m carrying too much, and yet I pile it all on.

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I’m carrying my son, who’s four, because every morning he reaches his arms up to me and he says, in his most babyish of baby voices, “mama ca-wwy?” and I think to myself, he knows what he’s doing with that baby voice. But my cynicism doesn’t take me any further than that.

I’m haunted by those social media posts where women write about their children growing up. You won’t know it when it happens, they write, but one day you’ll pick up your baby and it’ll be the last time they ever ask to be picked up.

I’m not someone, in general, who laments the reality of her children growing up. While I accept the objective truth that newborns are cute and contact naps are cute and first teeth are cute and crawling is cute, I think I would happily skip the 0-to-2-year period. Sure, there are things I’d be sad to miss out on, but it’s very hard to spend a full 24 months doing everything for somebody else, getting no appreciation, and all the while worrying that they’re going to cause themselves grievous bodily harm by sticking a finger in a plug socket, or reaching a soft, chubby hand out to touch something that’s just come out of the oven.

But there are aspects of this time – baby time, toddler time – that I treasure, and the moments where he holds on to me like a baby koala are very high on that list.

And so, I carry him. I carry him, and his clothes for the day, and that’s not all; I carry a bottle of water (not a Stanley, but close enough, and better, in fact, I think, because it’s less likely to spill and the one I have comes in a great colourway) and a pair of runners and, gripped between my ring and little fingers, my phone, because heaven forbid I should be parted from it for long.

My mum would call this the lazy man’s load. I’ve just realised this is not a phrase she coined; I also thought she’d come up with the acronym NNTR, until my sister and I discussed it on our podcast, and hundreds of people told me that their parents use it, too.

But one thing you should know about me is that I hate to make unnecessary journeys, especially up or down the stairs. If I’m down, I’m down; if I’m up, I’m up. Heaven forbid I should go upstairs for the night, and realise I’ve forgotten my phone, or need to go back downstairs to find the painkillers.

Were I ever to build my dream home, I’d put in a dumbwaiter, not for clean or dirty plates, or even for washing, but for the bits I forgot to bring upstairs, or down. I’d happily stand and wait for 10 minutes, if it meant I wouldn’t have to take 30 seconds to go down the stairs myself.

Did you know that carrying too many things is actually a female superpower, according to the New York Times?

“A popular theory around the origins of the claw grip,” writes NYT reporter Alisha Haridasani Gupta, who covers style and pop culture for the newspaper, “is that it is a reaction to Big Fashion’s refusal to provide women with the functional pockets that are standard in men’s clothing.”

Anyway, today I’m carrying too many things. And before I begin to ascend the stairs, I have this very clear thought: I should probably put some of these things down. But I ignore it, because there are some thoughts I feel able to ignore, and others, like, wouldn’t it be a great idea to get takeaway for dinner, that I am entirely powerless against. What can I say? I don’t make the rules.

We’re almost at the bottom of the stairs – one step away, in fact – when I see my sister-in-law, Stasia, in the living room and I say, “morning!” in a sing-song voice and it’s right as I finish the word, on the “ng” of the “ing”, that I miss the very last step. My foot, which should have landed on that very step, instead, meets the air beneath it, and then lands on the floor below.

In that split second, in the shock of those missing seven-odd inches, my foot twists, my ankle rolls, and I land, instead of on the sole of my foot, on the outside edge of my ankle.

I hear myself scream, and I’m embarrassed. That was an embarrassing scream, I think, and wish I could somehow take it back. It doesn’t occur to me, in my instinctual wishing, to instead wish I could take the fall itself back. Only the scream. Priorities.

I sit on the ground for a few minutes and try to take deep breaths. My heart rate starts to spike. I’m weirdly aware of my heart rate lately, ever since going on medication for ADHD. If I get the timing of my meds wrong, my heart rate becomes very noticeable; one day last week, I take my morning dosage and drink two americanos within about 10 minutes, then begin to worry I’m having a heart attack before realising it’s just the potent combination of caffeine and amphetamines.

My Apple Watch has an ECG function, and more than once I’ve switched it on, and watched as it tells me what I already know; my heart rate is spiking. 114BPM, it tells me on the two-americanos-plus-amphetamines day. “Elevated heart rate.” Unsure what to do with this information, I leave the last few sips of coffee in the cup, try to do my box breathing, and take a mouthful of water.

It passes.

Today, I sit on the floor and notice my heart rate and try to do my box breathing (try and fail), and while the shock passes, and my heart rate eventually goes back to normal (I think), the pain stays pretty constant.

My ankle has swollen up like a large apple. I’m both amazed and disgusted at the sight of it.

“Look at my ankle!” I tell Stasia, breathlessly. (Breathe in, count one, two, three, four, hold one, two…)

“Yeah…” she says, sounding less excited than me. “You’re gonna need to…”

“I know,” I tell her. I do know. I’m gonna need to. Go to the walk-in clinic, or the ER, have an X-ray taken, find out if it’s broken. I can put weight on it, and I can wiggle my toes, and flex my ankle, which all makes me think it’s not, but I am famously not a doctor, and there’s also the matter of the swelling, which is not getting any less impressive.

Stasia calls Brandin. “Your wife took a tumble,” she tells him, and I’m brought right back to the last time someone called to tell him this very same thing – four years ago, in my sister’s kitchen, when I rolled my ankle walking across her back patio and ended up with an avulsion fracture, caused by the ligament pulling a fragment off the bone.

I haven’t cried yet, although the pain is, I would say, at about a seven or eight out of 10. Every few seconds, it will intensify to the point that I feel I might pass out, and I’ll remember to focus on my breathing again.

In my sister’s kitchen that time, I lay on the floor and wept while I waited for Brandin to come and get me. Today, a fracture and a sprain and a second C-section later, I think I might just be better able to cope with pain.

Plus, what’s the point in crying? What will that do, except upset Atlas – who’s just got over the fright of the whole thing, and is eating his Pop Tarts while watching A (Real) Bug’s Life, one of his favourite nature documentaries – and make me look like s**t, and probably give me a headache, to go along with the sheer agony of the ankle. No, thank you.

Of course, by the end of the morning – we’re home by 10.30am, in all it’s a quick in ’n‘ out – I’ve cried quite a few times, mostly bec…

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When I get back to my car after our first session with our new couples’ therapist, I have a parking ticket.

I have parked on the street, in downtown Fort Wayne, where there are actually quite a lot of car parks. There is not, however, a lot of clarity as to who has the right to park in said car parks, so I almost always opt to park on the street.

This is not, I should add, my first parking ticket.

When I lived in Dublin, I would run – nay, sprint – to my car to avoid going over on my paid parking. I’d fallen afoul of the clampers more than once, and paid the (literal) price; by the time I moved to the US, I had a healthy phobia of overstaying my parking.

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But in downtown Fort Wayne, where parking never costs more than $2, a parking ticket is $10. If I overstay my parking, I just think… oh well. I’d be paying that for 10 minutes in the Trinity Street Car Park in Dublin city centre. What’s a tenner for the convenience of parking right around the corner from where I’m going, and not having to go back to my car to feed the meter? (This, I know, is an incredibly privileged position to take, and possibly also a very stupid one, coming from someone who’s in an astonishing amount of debt. BUT LET’S NOT DWELL ON THAT.)

The thing is, on this balmy, loud – you don’t know loud until you’ve walked around Fort Wayne in cicada season – August evening, I know I paid my parking, feeding the meter until it told me I’d reached the limit, not of payment but of paid-parking-time. That is to say, after 5pm in Fort Wayne, on-street parking is free. I should not have been fined; I did everything I was supposed to do!

To add insult to injury, my parking fine is $20, not $10; I appear to have broken some kind of rule I don’t understand, at least judging by the ticket, which says “OPPOSITE SIDE VIOLATION”. What does this mean, I wonder, looking around to see if there are any signs on the opposite side of the road that tell me I shouldn’t be parking here.

This “looking around” is a learned behaviour, not an innate one; on a previous occasion, I received a parking ticket (an affordable $10 that time) for parking opposite a work site, where there were, to be fair, multiple signs telling people that, while the work was going on, they couldn’t park on this street.

Sometimes I feel as though I walk aound with blinkers on, seeing only the things I want to see (attractive men and my phone screen, mostly), ignoring everything that doesn’t suit or would inconvenience me, in even the most minor of ways. It is, let me tell you, quite a nice way to live.

(This skill of mine will come back to haunt us shortly.)

I wonder about why I got this parking ticket for approximately 7 seconds, then I tuck it away in my handbag, file it under “things to worry about later” (suddenly wondering if I should create a Note on my phone of “things to worry about later”, because filing them away in my mental filing cabinet is… less useful than you’d think), and drive home.

In my defense, I have a lot to think about. I went into our first couples therapy appointment feeling cautiously optimistic about what we could achieve if we gained some better communication skills, but I’ve emerged feeling stressed and anxious, as though the divide between our modes of engaging with the world, and one another, is perhaps more of a chasm than a crack, and might never be bridged.

So it’s fair to say that the parking ticket is, truly, the least of my worries.

I tell Brandin about it when I get home. He – a man who has, to my knowledge, never got a parking ticket in his life – rolls his eyes, asks, “how does this keep happening you?” I tell him, honestly, that I have no idea. “I paid my parking up to 5pm!” I protest. I show him the ticket; he reads through it.

“Did you park opposite a work site?” he asks – proof that I’m not the only one who had this question. “Not to my knowledge?!” I say, genuinely baffled. We move on to other things: dinner, bathtime, bedtime. The usual routine. The parking ticket is back in my handbag. I do not, in fact, worry about it later. I forget it exists.

Until, of course, the following week, when I drive downtown for our therapy appointment and drive on to the same street I parked on last week (a creature of habit).

I decide to turn on to another street this time, not trusting the space I occupied last week. It’s free, again, but who’s to say I wouldn’t get another ticket this week?! I still don’t know why I got last week’s ticket!

As I exit my car and lock the door (with the key, because the fob ran out of battery about a year ago and – ADHD things, apparently – I haven’t got around to replacing it), I spot a police officer a few feet from me, in the direction I’m walking (so I have to stroll past him), and I decide to get over my general fear of the police and ask him, as he will surely know, why I incurred this extortionate parking fine.

As I approach, I notice that he’s using some kind of brush to clean up his utility-slash-gun-belt thing. This action is comforting to me somehow. Look at him there, polishing up his little uniform. This does not seem like an intimidating man. (Is it misogynistic to feel comforted by the sight of a man doing a little in-public tidying up?!)

“Excuse me?” I say. I can’t bring myself to say “sir” or “officer”; I’m too Irish for that.

“Yes, ma’am?” he replies. (NOT Irish.)

“Could you help me figure out why I got a parking ticket, please?” I ask him.

“Absolutely!” he says. He is very enthusiastic about this project.

I tell him about my situation. I parked over here – I point – last week. I paid up to 5pm. When I got back to my car (I do not tell him about couples therapy, although I feel like it, because maybe he’d feel sorry for me if I did), I had a parking ticket. I can’t figure out why!

He looks confused. That is a valid parking space. It has a meter (I fed the meter).

“Do you have the parking ticket on you?” he asks.

I start to dig around in my ludicrously capacious handbag. “Maybe?” I tell him. He smiles indulgently at me, a silly woman with a too-big bag. I emerge, mere moments later, triumphant, with the ticket in hand.

I feel like Grandpa Joe when he finds the golden ticket. Only short of doing a wee jig.

“Let me see this,” he says, and begins to read through the ticket slowly, painstakingly, taking each line in turn. I bet he’s the kind of man who walks up and down every aisle in the supermarket, I think (but do not say).

“Ah,” he says. (By jove, I think he’s got it!) “See here?” He points at the line – OPPOSITE SIDE VIOLATION – and nods. There. You see? I don’t see.

I must look as flummoxed as I feel, because he then does me the courtesy of explaining it. “You parked facing the wrong way, on the opposite side of the road,” he says. The flummoxation does not clear from my visage, obviously, as he tries again. “You have to park facing the same direction as the traffic on that side of the road.”

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It’s as though the scene before us – cars, lots of them, parked up and down in rows – has gone from black and white to technicolour. I look around. I see that each and every car – bar one (ahem) – is parked in the exact same direction as the traffic would be going on that side of the road. How have I never noticed this before?! Is this… is this a trick? An early (or late) April Fool’s? Is this for real?!

He hands me back the ticket. He’s done with me now. Mystery solved. I hesitate.

“So are you telling me…” I start, slowly, then turn to point at my car, “that, if that was my car, parked right there” (the only car, you can imagine, facing the opposite direction to the traffic on the same side as it is parked) “I should probably flip it around?”

He laughs again, then. “Yes,” he says. “You probably should.”

When I get b…

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In honour of Hayden Panettiere, I’ve donated $100 to the Whaleman Foundation; and in honour of Hayden Panettiere, Britney Spears, Lindsay Clancy, and all of the many, many women who are failed by society and the system when it comes to maternal mental health, I’ve donated $100 to the Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance.

Anchor Baby is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I woke up to pee at 4.11am last night – since having kids, I can’t sleep through the night without waking to pee, so honestly they’d better not end up being Republicans or none of this will have been worth it – and brought my phone to the bathroom, which is one of my top three worst habits.

I like to check Instagram, to see if anyone’s sent me any mean messages; then I look at my emails, God knows why because all I ever get are solicitations to spend money (I mean… I KNOW WHY, because I’m always dying to spend some money); then I play Royal Match for a few minutes, just in case my brain isn’t wide awake yet – I need to make it as difficult as possible to fall back to sleep when I finally wipe and stand and wash and get back under the covers, manoeuvring my body in around the cat.

This morning, I didn’t get past Instagram, where I saw this post from the New York Times (deeply problematic coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza aside, one of the very few mainstream US news publications I feel is in any way reliable).

I’m not really one for waxing poetic about celebrity deaths. That feels like an odd sentence to write, but there are people out there who are ones for waxing poetic about celebrity deaths. Whenever a famous person shuffles off this mortal coil, I know where to go for wordy recitations about what, exactly, they contributed to the world, and how their contribution will echo through the ages. You know yourself.

It’s just not my “thing”. (What is my thing? I couldn’t help but wonder. Rambling diary-style entries about my life in consumerism, with the odd piece of misandrist bigotry thrown in for good measure?)

This morning – maybe it was the hour, the time that exists in that kind of liminal space between sleeping and waking – I felt, honestly, a type of grief I’ve never imagined feeling for someone I’ve never met, someone I knew relatively little about.

Hayden Panettiere was 36 years old when, on a hot afternoon in Greenville, South Carolina, a friend called 911 to report having found her unresponsive and in cardiac arrest. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

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I was a big fan of the TV show, Heroes, in which Panettiere starred as cheerleader Claire Bennet, who discovers she’s impervious to harm. Her survival becomes a central tenet of the show, as Masi Oka’s time travelling Hiro Nakamura imparts the crucial message to Milo Ventimiglia’s Peter Petrelli: “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”

I can’t stop thinking about that phrase, in terms of Panettiere’s untimely death (36! way too young). A child star who got her “big break” in the soap opera One Life to Live at the age of four, Panettiere is yet another woman who was chewed up and, rather than spat out, swallowed whole, by Hollywood.

She would go on to star both in Heroes and in Nashville (also worth a watch, even if – and I know this is blasphemy – Connie Britton’s Rayna James becomes painfully earnest and worthy about halfway through season one, and never recovers), and to struggle, publicly, with severe postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter, Kaya, in 2014, with then-fiancé, former professional boxer Wladimir Klitschko (50; they met in 2009, when Panettiere was 19 and Klitschko was 33).

Following her daughter’s traumatic birth – she suffered a postpartum hemorrhage and, according to news sources, required seven blood transfusions and a life-saving operation to save her life – Panettiere suffered from severe PPD, which then led to her becoming addicted to alcohol and opioids.

Three years later, Klitschko and Panettiere would break up, followed that same year by the pair’s highly publicised decision to give sole custody to Klitschko, who would eventually move back to his native Ukraine with their daughter. (Today, they live in Kyiv, where Klitschko enlisted in Ukraine’s territorial reserve army in February of 2022, when Russia declared its “special military operation" in the country, a war that remains ongoing.)

It’s easy, sometimes, to ascribe meaning to people’s deaths – and lives – in ways that are dramatic, exaggerated or borderline ridiculous.

But somehow, Panettiere’s death – the absolute failure of the system and structures around her to help, protect, and shelter her – could be read as a damning indictment of the world at large. We could, at any stage, have saved the cheerleader. We didn’t.

Hers is a descent that feels, instead inexorable. She was a child star who became incredibly successful as a teenager; then, a young mother, suffering from postpartum depression; later, losing both her fiancé and her child, and subsequently sliding into substance abuse. She would later meet Brian Hickerson, a man who would go on to be arrested (and convicted) for assaulting her.

“I am prepared to do my part to make sure this man never hurts anyone again,” she told People in 2020, following Hickerson’s arrest, but the pair were on and off again up to the day before her death, when they flew to South Carolina from LA.

That she died in the middle of another highly publicised case involving the failure of a system – and society at large – to support another mother whose postpartum period was marred by mental illness and what appear to be exhaustive efforts to get help for said illness feels somehow significant. (Lindsay Clancy, the Boston-area mother charged with murdering her three young children in 2023, suffered from postpartum psychosis, a very different illness to that documented by Panettiere, but it’s fair to say that the system failed them both.)

In Panettiere’s case, it’s clear that her public profile had a major impact on her perceived ability to get help. She spoke about not wanting to call 911 when she was abused by Hickerson, because of the publicity that would surround her; is it fair to assume that decisions made around her addiction, and treatment (or lack thereof) for said addiction, were made with the same considerations in mind?

It’s difficult, too, not to think of Britney Spears, whose very public breakdown, in February of 2007, occurred when her second child was just five months old (her first was 17 months old).

In Spears’ own memoir, The Woman in Me, released in 2023, she wrote about being beside herself with grief following the death of her aunt that January, and suffering from postpartum depression following the births of her sons. Her marriage had broken down that November, two months after she gave birth, and resulted in an increase in the already-intense media scrutiny which saw her being stalked by paparazzi 24/7; who doesn’t remember footage of the 25-year-old Spears sitting in a cafe, pregnant, crying, holding her then-eight-month-old?

There are so many moments at which we, as a society, failed these women – and so many women, worldwide, who suffer from postpartum depression or psychosis or both, whose stories haven’t ever been, and perhaps won’t ever be, told – that it’s almost impossible to pinpoint the moment.

But it does feel as though there should have been one: a moment when the paparazzi, hounding Britney Spears as she drove around LA in her wedges, could have chosen to give her a break; a moment when someone could have (should have?) told Panettiere to take a year, or two, after the birth of her daughter (she was in the midst of the third season of Nashville when her daughter was born, a gruelling production schedule that filmed for nine months of each year); several moments when Lindsay Clancy could have been given t…

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Let me tell you some things I am sick of.

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.)

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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 b***h 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 s**t about the impact on my career of calling out powrful men who are also creepy, pedophilic pieces of s**t, 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.”

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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.

Thanks for reading Anchor…

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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.

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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 t…

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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 footnote.

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.

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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 f*****g 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.

Thanks for reading Anchor Baby! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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…

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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.

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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 f*****g 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…

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Yes, I’m still on my budget. In theory. Somehow, I’ve still managed to – and you’ll know this if you read my money diaries – spend a zillion dollars a week. Which really makes me feel like… why bother?! If the money gets spent either way, shouldn’t I just be buying all the things I want to buy?!?! (The answer is no.)

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

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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.

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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?!)

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5-star discoveries from my travels

* 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

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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 s**t, 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.

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 embar…

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