Am I Odd?

Am I odd?

Don’t answer that just to be clever.  I know we are all a bit odd, a bit eccentric in our own right, it’s what marks us out as individuals but sometimes I wonder am I just plain outright odd?   

When people say to me that they enjoy the noise their kids make, I think they’re cracked.  When I’m told that it all goes past in the blink of an eye, I mentally rejoice and urge myself to blink faster goddammit!  When they intone that one day I will look back and miss the noise, the craziness, the mayhem, I think they’re the ones who need their heads examined.

I know there are people out there who openly admit to keeping their smallest a baby regardless of that child’s age, because they are the youngest in the family.

Am I odd because I cannot wait for my baby, who will be two years old next week, to finally get the hang of feeding himself without pouring milk and sauce down his face and all over the floor?  For him to be finally out of nappies.  For him to be again, that little bit older so I can just let him run wild with his older brothers and not have to keep checking on him all the time.

Am I odd because for the last 18 months I have been all over a “this time next year” mind-set?  Practically wishing their little lives away.

And my own. I tend to forget that. 

As much as I am looking forward to them being teenagers, it also means I am going to be 5 or 10 years older too. 

I might be looking forward to them becoming teenager but I am not looking forward to the teenage years.  I am dreading it.  Dreading the testosterone riddled house I am going to find myself in.  I used to joke when people pointed this out to me and I reassured them all it will be ok because I will be drinking again by then.

Reaffirming the Irish stereotype that alcohol solves every little ailment.

I’ve said it out loud, twice I think, this year already that youth is wasted on the young.  Mother Nature got that one so wrong.  Maybe she was having a little laugh at parent’s expense. 

There are so many things I want to do.  I discovered running 15 months ago and for the first time in over twenty years I am writing consistently and regularly. 

I love both. The trouble is I want to do them all the time.

All. The. Time.

Well, not running because that would be exhausting.  But I would dearly love to be able to get up and within an hour of waking, go for a run. At least four times a week.  And not when I can fit it in. 

I do know fitting it in is better than not being able to do it at all which is the case for me in winter. 

As for writing.  That’s a different kettle of fish altogether. With writing, I could sit at the table from early morning and still be there late that same evening. 

And I want to. 

But in the words of Scooby-Doo, “those pesky kids” kind of get in the way. With their tummies that need feeding, their minds needing education, bums and noses wanting wiping every Nano second. 

It’s a hard knock life for me 

Sometimes, usually on the really, really shitty cabin fever days, a little ghost from my past, the teenage me puts in an appearance. She gets in real close and pipes up in my ear, “I told you so.  I told you this is exactly what it would be like.  But you wouldn’t listen.  So suck it up!!!”

(You can almost hear the unsaid bitch at the end of that sentence, cantcha?) 

So for the foreseeable future it looks like I will just have to do exactly what my teenage me ghost says.

P.S. I actually had a lovely day when I wrote this piece.  Tuesday 2^nd April 2013.  The kids were/are still on Easter holidays and we had been to Lovely Group that morning.  I ran a 5k in the Phoenix Park with Ray D’Arcy of Today FM fame on Friday and had a wonderful night out in the pub on Saturday night.  I was practically glowing from all the fun I had.  

School holidays are great.  There isn’t a parent in the world who would be without their child, regardless of how they came to have them but by god, nothing sucks up your time like school runs, lunches, uniforms, homework and clock watching.  Kids are little time suckers in their own right too. 

So I am in good form lately and I’m great craic at parties but sometimes, just sometimes all I want to do is write.  And write.  And write.