Mother Ireland

Men are funny creatures at times. I know I have a house full of them – big, small, human and canine.
Through my own scant neurobiological studies I have found men and women’s brains are wired differently. Men let only one thing occupy their minds at one time. Women have a million different thoughts, plans, lists, requests and demands all vying for attention in there.
When the male and female brains collide, strange things can happen.
Us mums are the ultimate multi-taskers. In any 24 hours we must be all things to our kids – taxi driver, nanny, nurse, entertainer, bank manager, cook, cleaner, teacher, counsellor and referee. Men’s brains actually short circuit and melt if over tasked. I’ve seen it with my own eyes – there are still bits of brain on my garage floor.
Our tumble dryer broke at the weekend. If you, like me, live in the part of the world where it has been official monsoon season since Christmas you’ll know how much a catastrophic event that is.
So I phoned a random repair man and he said he’d be out before the day closed. In the meantime my mother arrived around and proceeded to try and fix the thing herself. By fixing I mean using a screwdriver to remove the front panel, frowning at the inner workings and shaking her head. Of course the woman couldn’t get the front panel back on again.
So the repair man arrived and squeezed into the tiny enclosed space the dryer is kept in the garage – think train toilet – while my mother and I looked on throwing electrical appliance related questions at him without stopping for breath.
“Who took this off?” he shouts over our questions, pointing at the front panel.
“Me,” says my mother all coy.
“I could go to jail for even looking at that,” says he.
Now I’d be pretty well up on the legal system, being a journalist and all, and I doubt gazing upon broken washing machines is a jailing offence. I looked it up on the PSNI website – Murder, yes, and also stealing cars, pillaging, plundering and general scalwaggery. No mention of washing machine panels.
And so we continued with the questions. Yes, our husbands are adequate DIYers but it’s not very often we get a real live white appliance expert in our grasp and we weren’t for letting him go until we gauged his opinion on why the fridge was making a funny humming noise, the toaster timer was out or why the dishwasher leaked on Wednesdays only.
So he gets the spare part he brought out of his tool bag and stands there with it.
“You told me it only needed this,” he growls. “You never said nothing about the front panel being off. And stop asking me questions. And you shouldn’t have taken that off. AND I COULD GO TO JAIL!”
Maybe it was the relentless questions, the lack of tea, or us laughing at this poor flustered man that made him blow up. Or it might have been me telling him that it was my tumble dryer and if I so wished I would take off that front panel, decorate it with fruit and dried flowers and dance around the garden.
But blow up he did and began shouting obscenities in that tiny space at the back of our garage, scattering birds from the trees and scaring kids.
He shouted at my mother that she must buy the effing machine part off him there and then for £100 and fix it her effing self. He called us mad effers and I told him to get out.
And so my mother is still in the garage, still frowning and still shaking her head at the tumble dryer. And despite all this hard work, the thing is still not working.