Me and my Da

My Dad died this week after a long and courageous battle against cancer.
Although we were expecting his journey to end soon I still feel lost. My Dad was such an anchor in my life that I feel totally set adrift in the wake of his passing.
He and I were very much alike, from the same soul. I inherited my fighting spirit from him, that and the deranged notion that I’m constantly and consistently right.
Of course I learnt a lot about parenting from my Dad. He instilled a strong sense of self-belief in us from a very young age, something I try and do for my own children. He told us that we were capable of doing anything we put our mind to. I have the feeling that had I told him many years ago I had aspirations to be an astronaut he would have sought out courses, took me to the NASA open day and bought me the fancy space suit. Had I mentioned I fancied a career as a fisherman, he would have got me a second-hand boat, painted it up all nice and waved me off with a smile from the pier.
He was the head of our house and was the person my brothers, sister and I went to when times got tough. He always made it better – when I was five years old and fell off my bike to when I was 25 years old and having some serious journalistic-related troubles – our house was always a beacon in the dark, he was a guiding light bringing us home.
My dad was a great man. A man who championed equal rights as a young man – he was a leading light in the Civil Rights movement. He was a great teacher who left a lifelong imprint on the lives of thousands of pupils. He taught us, his children, great values – values I have passed onto my own children and I hope they will pass on to their own.
He was a man who firmly believed in doing stuff himself – some people call it multi-tasking, others control freakery – a trait I have also inherited. Although he was a teacher for 33 years, our next door neighbour thought he was a motor mechanic, as he was constantly fixing our beat out 1976 Nissan. After school he installed central heating systems, built conservatories, renovated houses. He was man who very much grabbed life by the scruff of the neck and shook every fibre out of it.
To us he’s not really gone, he’ll live on in all of us. We’ll continue on our path in life with him walking beside us, in spirit now, rather than in person. He’ll still provide the words of wisdom, only now he’ll whisper them in our ear. He’ll still be the strong suit of armour when we face our greatest fears.
Although I am heartbroken I’m so grateful, blessed and proud that he was my dad, I was his daughter.

Terminator Baby

The KGB loved it, the Japanese favoured it in the PoW camps of World War Two and here, in a quiet corner of Derry, my one year old is using the age old sleep deprivation technique to torture us. We call it 'Torture by Baby'.
The child, that's him pictured above, is not unlike the Terminator. He hasn’t slept a full night for over two months, and still he keeps on trucking, relentless, leaving us to steer this beat out, sleep deprived juggernaut along the road of parenthood bleary eyed and disorientated.
The child wakes us at 1am every night and no amount of work or cajoling will get him back to sleep before 4.30am. We have tried, quite literally, everything – tough love, controlled crying, begging, praying, offering money – nothing works. He wakes the entire house religiously every night.
Getting through a day while only having clocked up three hours shut eye is no joke. And as this form of torture leaves no physical marks on people, the perpetrator, I mean child, comes away looking cute while we carry around bags the size of bin liners under our eyes.
We weren’t all that with it before, but lack of sleep has left us totally unable to act and think coherently. Take for example last night – a night when the madness that blights the O’Neill household was on full and proud display.
At midnight the dog barked maniacally in the kitchen. The husband woke up (for this was during one of the short 30 minute bursts of actually sleep we did get to relish) and shouted at the top of his voice to no one in particular: “Who’s that barking?”
To which I, quite sensibly, replied, “It’s the dog.” At which point he came back with a “are you sure?” Yes, I’m sure. Unless our older children have been driven so mad with sleep deprivation they have taken to impersonating household pets to express their displeasure at the situation, I’d say that was definitely the dog.
Thirty minutes later the oldest child woke up shouting for me in his usual alarmist manner. I stumbled across the toy strewn obstacle course that is our landing and made inquiries as to what the matter was and told him that unless he was informing me an axe-wielding lunatic was in the house I would rather prefer if the matter could possibly wait till a more reasonable hour.
“You know that blind man who we talked to at Sainsbury’s today?” he asked.
“Yip,” said I.
“His dog, the guide dog. He brings the blind man home, takes him across the road, sees for him?
“Yip,” said I.
“What if the dog goes blind too?” he asked.
“Well Dan, that would indeed be an unfortunate turn of events,” said I. “I suppose the guide dog would have to get a guide dog himself. Good night.”
And off to bed I went for a grand total of 45 minutes until the alarm went off.
We will not be broken by these methods of torture, we will not give in. We may be half the people we were when we first started off on this road to parenthood, our children may have rendered us half-wits but we will survive. We will overcome.

I suppose I could describe Halloween in the O’Neill house as a mixed bag of lethal sugar rush inducing pound shop sweets and those dark chocolates which taste nice but bring on a migraine later.
We spent so long perfecting our costumes that we forgot to buy trick or treat sweets for the kids in the street. We spent an hour hiding behind the sofa when the doorbell went while the husband was despatched on a sweet mercy mission.
We spent the rest of the evening apologising to little kids while handing out cheap, nasty pound shop confectionary that they’d probably be regurgitating on their living room floors later on.
Because we have a dog, opening the front door in our house has to be a carefully synchronised affair. There’s no careless throwing open of the front door and greeting the morning with open arms and a song in our house. You want to open the door, you got to make sure someone’s guarding the kitchen door because there’s a large slobbering beast just waiting to pounce, flatten and gallop without grace off into the horizon. But enough about the husband, I worry the dog could escape too.
So on Halloween night there was a family at the door, two pirate parents and three kids dressed as confused fairies – one was a zombie fairy, one was a pirate fairy and the other was a standard issue run-of-the-mill typical everyday fairy.
So I opened the door and made a fuss over their costumes, and while they were pretending to be impressed by my cheap sweets I heard the familiar sound of claws slipping on the wooden floor, trying to gain momentum. Then there was much screaming and much running as the dog took me off my feet and galloped out into the night after the pirate fairy family.
He’s a big friendly Labrador, he wouldn’t hurt a fly – but he has a beard phobia and chased down said pirates to voice his objection to their fake facial hair. Then his attentions were drawn to three Santas heading off to a house party. When the husband – dressed as a zombie Rastafarian – caught up with him in the car he had Jesus pinned to a wall at the bottom of our street.
As we headed off to see the fireworks Caolan, dressed as a really scary vampire, had consumed a few too many of the lethal pound shop sweets and had a mini-meltdown. As he stood howling in the street, the husband and I found the sight of him screaming open mouthed, vampire teeth in place, full make up and costume quite hilarious. Us laughing made him worse, which made us worse. We missed the first half of the fireworks and the child’s makeup was ruined. Disaster.
We dressed the baby up as a demon. He had his face painted red along with his hair. The face paint said it was safe for young kids, non-toxic and will wash off easily with soapy water. Yeah maybe water with paint stripper mixed in it, applied by a sand blaster. Baby bath is no match for this stuff. A week later the child is still raspberry coloured.

Blasted tooth fairy

I’m in the process of drafting an angry letter in regards the tooth fairy’s failure to show on Halloween night to pick up items owed to her, the cow.
Dan lost one of his front teeth during the Halloween festivities and stuck it under his pillow for retrieval by said fairy. Next morning, to his horror, the tooth was still there, there was no coinage to speak of. The fairy had forgotten him.
We couldn’t imagine what had happened. Had the tooth fairy perhaps had one glass of wine too many and forgotten about us?
The next night the tooth vanished and three quid was left in it’s place along with a note that read:

“Hey Daniel!
This is the tooth fairy, what’s the craix?
Sorry about last night, was shot down by a stray firework over Creggan and spent the night in casualty getting my singed wing fixed up. Nice tooth specimen, by the way.
Thanks!
TF
X

Mummy Fight Clubs

Hands up, I admit it, I couldn’t go the distance, couldn’t hack the pace, I just wasn’t strong enough. I am a mother-and-toddler group drop out, so sue me – actually scrap that last bit, the ATM machine laughs maniacally when I venture within 20ft of it.
I went to two different mother-and-toddler groups when my eldest child was younger and thought I had been magically transported through time to the playground of my primary school circa 1980. There was cat fighting, dirty looks, back stabbing and much judging of parental techniques and physical appearances.
My first experience was none too great. I may as well have stood up and admitted I was a card-carrying member of a Satanic cult when I mentioned I was a working mother.
The second group I went to was a gathering of level seven yummy mummys. I could hardly breathe the air was so thick with Channel No5 and my retinas where frequently burned when the sun happened to hit overly large diamond rings or the go-faster stripes on their designer prams.
One of the mothers was a fully-fledged member of the breastfeeding mafia. When I informed her that I had bottlefed my oldest son, after having great trouble feeding him myself, I know she felt an urge to take me out to the hall and beat me around the head with her umbrella. Fair play to her she fought the violent urge but informed me gently that I had poisoned my child and that he would grow up to be tres stupid.
The idea that these mothers' groups are meant to be a place where sleep-deprived, vomit-smeared mums can swap advice on how to get your baby to sleep is, in my opinion, laughable.
If you're worried that your daughter is 14 months old and still crawling instead of walking? A better mother than you will boost your anxiety by bragging that her son was walking at eight months.
Your son's vocabulary is a bit limited and you think he might have a hearing problem? The best mum in the world will tell you her 11-month-old uttered his first full sentence yesterday.
And now, my theory has become proper fact. An Australian study has found mother-and-toddler groups can make mothers feel even more guilty than usual by allowing mothers to compare themselves, and their children, to others and find faults.
The study, a proper one by a fancy psychologist, showed that playgroups reinforced the ‘good mother syndrome’, which is how society expects an ideal mother to be.
From my own personal experience I’ve always thought that mother-and-toddlers groups should be renamed fight clubs and are places where women can go to beat each other up over parenting techniques, make each other feel guilty, judge one another on appearances, laugh at other mums who can’t shift the baby weight, backstab, bitch and ridicule. That and let their kids play together.