Hooliganism

Today, by way of light — and you will be relieved to know, brief — relief, I offer you an anecdote of family history, which goes a long way to explaining the unusually sprightly and mischievous nature of my children, of which you will be hearing much on these pages.

It is said in Ireland — and in Ireland, many many things are said, only some of which are to be believed — that the word “hooligan” derives from the name Halligan. In Victorian London, as the engineering marvel that is the Underground was being built, and the Irish poor — which is to say most of that country — fled the aftermath of the potato famine in desperate droves, many an Irishman hopped on a boat to Blighty to seek his fortune, or at least a few scraps on which to survive.

Many of them worked as navvies when they arrived, hired hands down at the docks or on the construction crews that toiled to build the world’s first (and many would argue best) underground railway system. At the end of the day, these hardworking lads, missing home and ready for a bit of craic, would head off for a pint or six on their way back to boarding houses that were surely profoundly depressing and grim. Who can blame them for wanting to spend time with their compatriots to ease their lonely hearts, for it is true that — more than for most other cultures — you can take the boy out of Ireland, but you can’t take Ireland out of the boy. And if you’ve ever been there and seen its thousand shades of green, and seen the green tumble wildly down impossible hills towards water of indigo and jade, and heard the musical lilt and cant of the most infectious and welcoming accent you’re ever likely to encounter, then you will know too that you’re unlikely ever to wrest Ireland from your own heart.

So of course sometimes — probably especially on the days they received their meager wages, after setting aside some to send home to their mams— they overindulged. And that would lead to high jinx: singing, of course, a bit of dancing, maybe some fighting. The fun was probably mostly harmless, and only occasionally problematic. I rarely have even a single bad thing to say about the English, but I shall say this: there is a persistently anti-Irish racism that pervades many an English mindset, even today. It is probably rooted in a strange mix of attempted justification for oppressing their closest and oldest colonial outpost — they’re unruly, and like small children and dogs they must be managed, so that they are seen and not heard — and a deep-seated envy that the Irish, despite aforementioned oppression, were then and are now one of the most creative, articulate, and engaging groups of people you will have ever have the privilege to meet. And so many English people (though certainly not all) developed a resentment of and disdain for these fun-loving lads who, it must be admitted, sometimes let their high spirits get the better of them.

Many of these young men, or so the story goes, were from the green hills of Tara, north of Dublin. My own young(ish) man hails from those same green hills, and a common name there and elsewhere in Ireland was O’Holigon. In the anglicizing forces that shaped and tamped down so much of what was uniquely Irish, the O was dropped, and the name became Halligan; this much we know is true.

What may (or may not, as is often the way in Irish lore) also be true is that a disproportionately high number of these O’Holigons found their way to work as navvies in Londontown, and when the reputation of this especially unruly family was solidified, they became known as “hooligans”, along with the rest of their high-kicking, full-voiced, rabble-rousing countrymen.

And so it is that I find myself the very proud, and often exhausted (unsurprisingly, given their heritage) mother of two little Halligan hooligans.

More Really Is More

My first word — after “mama” of course — was “more”. Continuing in the fine family tradition, it was also one of the first five words each of my daughters said. This is highly unlikely to be unique to us, as hundreds of generations of genes have programmed us to seek satiety as a means of survival: humans are hungry, always, for more.

I taught my baby daughters the sign language for “more”; we used the American sign, where they tapped the tips of their tiny pursed fingers together, as it seemed simpler than the British sign of tapping one flat hand on top of an open fist. (And I wonder if Americans are just naturally better at doing more? Bigger houses, more clothes, louder noises, larger servings. Just... more. This is not, by the way, complimentary to my own country.) The memory of them signing for more is one of my happiest of their late babyhoods and early toddlerhoods, another version of their little rosebud mouths opening into perfect Os for the next spoon-fed bite, so tiny, trusting and earnest. My older daughter, living in England, said “muh”, and my younger one, in North Carolina, pronounced it like her mother did before her, with a little Southern twang, as “mo”. Of course they always got more, at least of what was good for them, because babies are designed to be cute in order to get all the more that they need and want.

Moreishness applies to all areas of my life, though the fluctuating dimensions of my waistline attest to the fact that much of it has had to do with food. Indeed, I am a lifelong maximalist. When we moved from the UK to the US, our moving men (or removals men, as they were called in England) commented that they had never done a removal with so little furniture and so much stuff. But with all my years of moving around the globe, my stuff became my peripatetic home.

Just like a snail carrying its house on its back, I grew attached — perhaps overly so — to things: clothes, books (oh so many books), framed photographs, tchotchkes I picked up in places we’d traveled and, in latter years, furniture because upon returning to the US I was able to receive into my house many beautiful pieces of it, family antiques my mother had set aside in hopes I might one day come home to stay. I have what my grandmother called her “pride and joy”, a beautiful cherrywood Chippendale-style chest of drawers that she bought as a young bride; it was repro then but now that it’s nearly eighty years old it’s approaching quasi-antique status in its own right, and it’s my pride and joy too. I have my great great Granny Griffith’s dining table, burnished and beautiful through years — almost two hundred of them — of happy use. I have many more antique tables and rugs and lamps and chairs and all sorts of other pieces that I am trying to blend with modern things, aiming for a home that feels light and airy and calm, but that is also anchored by history.

This means my home is, despite so much effort to the contrary, bursting at the seams. We moved in 2013 from an oh-so-cosy 1,100-square-foot early Edwardian terraced house in London, to a sprawling 4,000-square-foot faux farmhouse (1980s, parts of which were as cringeworthy as you might imagine but others of which were surprisingly lovely) in North Carolina. For weeks after we moved in, we got lost in it, making wrong turns and forgetting how to get back where we’d started. Even with all the stuff that had so flabbergasted our movers (and that, I hasten to add, was a fraction of what I’d previously packed into our tiny house, literally to the rafters, before making countless trips to our local Oxfam shop in London to say farewell to a good third of our possessions before that move), we rattled around in that vast space. With built-in bookcases and closets galore, the house was so huge to our European sensibilities that we would simply walk from room to room and marvel at the space. Our belongings filled just a few small corners. Our tiny children had three different playrooms: on the main level, a sunroom off the kitchen which rose above the basement garage, looking out into our vast, lush garden so that it felt like we were up in a treehouse; in the finished basement a family room at one end, twice the size of our UK living room, plus a large tiled area at the far end where the girls rode their tricycles and made forts when it was either too hot or too snowy to play outside; and on the second floor an unusually wide back hallway, which had been papered by a previous owner with a frieze of flowers and bunnies, so it felt like they were playing in a fairy garden.

Then, after a brief stint back in the UK — where we had to furnish a second small home and reacquaint ourselves with compact and cosy — we moved to California. Because my husband’s relocation package covered only the cost of our internal US move, as we sold our house in North Carolina, we had to bring everything back from England in suitcases, because they did pay for excess baggage. And oh, what an excess it was! While we were there, my husband was working back in the US, rattling around more than ever on his own in our big house. Every time he came to see us, he brought a large suitcase filled with the girls’ toys and hand-me-down clothes for our little one. They were always overjoyed when he arrived: best of all there was their Daddy, whom they missed terribly, but also it was like Christmas, as they were reunited with beloved toys they’d had to leave behind. So although we arrived back in England in January 2016 with a hefty-but-reasonable six suitcases (which nonetheless weighed our car down to the axels and necessitated a complex negotiation to leave a few things at Heathrow and make a return trip to collect them later), that Beverly Hillbillies arrival was nothing compared to our Kardashian-like departure eighteen months later. Six suitcases had grown to sixteen, and the spectacle was such that our cab (well, large van) driver asked if he could take a picture of them all, because otherwise no one would believe him.

This presaged things to come: when the moving men unloaded the contents of our North Carolina house into our California house (less than half the space, more than twice the price), they had to pack our garage to the rafters, because there was no room for it all inside. Nearly three years and over thirty trips to various local charities later, we can now park both a car and a motorcycle in our garage. It’s fairly tidy and mostly organized, which is occasionally also true of most of the interior of the house, but only on a rolling basis: I can get one room tidy and sorted at once, and by the time I’ve gone through the whole house, chaos reigns once more in the rooms where I began.

This is partly because of our younger daughter who, like her mother, embraces maximalism, but who also, unlike her mother, believes it’s better to have everything on display at all times, preferably on the floor, for constant and easy access. The only thing which currently motivates her to clean up her belongings is the promise of a puppy who cannot materialize until she gets a grip on her exceedingly casual relationship with tidying. Otherwise, I tell her, we would either lose the puppy in the mess or accidentally step on it because it would be camouflaged in the trail of disaster she continually leaves in her wake.

In an attempt to manage my own trail of mess, I have tried to do the Marie Kondo thing, but with rather limited success. Apparently almost everything I own sparks joy. Lucky me! I am clearly a very joyful person. Anyone who has ever sat on one of my sofas can attest to the fact that throw pillows make me especially joyful. As do books and lamps and art... oh and shoes. Shoes most of all. But I did manage to clear out masses of things and felt lighter and cleaner and, briefly, better. You wouldn’t know this if you suddenly dropped in for a visit (not that you could these days, which for those of us who keep a messy house is frankly a massive relief) because every surface is covered with detritus, including much of the floor. My closet is downright dangerous, despite much clearing and admirably little restocking; my daughter — bless her mismatched socks — comes by her propensity for mass chaos completely naturally.

Slowly, lately, as I spend so much time truly inhabiting my home while we shelter in place, I see that although I am undoubtedly less burdened by belongings I also feel slightly less like ME after I say goodbye to excess things. I do envy my friends — and it seems like most of them have achieved this — their clean, elegant, minimalist homes. And I do feel inordinately happy when I manage to clear a surface or organize a closet or simply just tidy a room. But despite all my truly excellent intentions, it never, ever lasts. So I have finally begun to make peace with this, and stop striving towards a neatly kept house, because our mess is a joyful one, and our home a very happy one.

I realize, too, that more is a bit of a creed for me: more stuff, more books, more food, more drink, more travel, more fun, more laughter, more life, more love… just MORE, please! My husband, who is always my first reader and best editor, pointed out that these long, wordy posts are really a collection of essays rather than the short, snappy, soundbite of your average blog. But I called it “More Is More” for good reason: it’s just who I am.

It’s ironic for someone who spent her career honing texts that averaged around 500 words (the minimum was 3, the maximum nearly 40,000, but most were mere dozens), but it’s ever so much easier to whittle down other people’s work. I wrote many of the very shortest books I edited and that was easy, too: rhyme has its own self-limiting virtues, and there was only so much space on the page. In those cases, less really was more. This is different, though, and in these strange times when so many of the moreish pleasures are off the menu — no meals out, no shopping, no travel — words are one of the few things I have. More of them, these days, is keeping me going. I hope that, in some small way, reading my moreishness helps keeps you going too.

Love In The Time Of Corona

In a former life (though isn’t everything a former life right now?), I was a publisher. This means that I would normally check that no one else had ever used this title. I would possibly have to clear rights for a punning title based on a bestselling classic, because I wouldn’t want to get sued for passing off. I would look up comparable sales of similar titles. Discussions would ensue about how close to the wind we might sail with our own similar idea. But now.... now! Ha! I can just do whatever I want. This is a blog. I didn’t check to see who had already done this. I just did it. Blogs are brilliant! Ha!

(But I do in fact sincerely apologise if in not performing due diligence —or indeed any diligence— on every single post title I accidentally step on anyone’s literary toes. I’m not talking about Gabriel García Marquez; his toes are way up there in the stratosphere of literary greats and are untreadable-upon. I am talking about whomever else has also resorted to borrowing his brilliant title and besmirching it by using it for an article or review or an online dating ad. Or a humble little blogpost.)

Creative synchronicity is a beastly problem: you have this fabulous idea and then you pitch it to your agent who pitches it to a publisher…. and then —piff (that’s the pitiful sound of a fabulous idea dying)— it’s dead and gone and swept into the dustbin of oblivion where It Will Never Happen because someone else got there first with a similar (but probably less excellent) idea. Piff! I have heard that sound more than once. No less than two novels that I started died before they even got as far as an agent; and more than one picture book text has gone the same way. Piff, piff, piff. Such a sad, forlorn little sound.

But I digress. This is not about books. It’s about love. Rather specifically the insane, overwhelming, all-consuming adoration that occurs when you have a baby and fall truly, madly, deeply in love with it. A dear friend just had her first baby mere weeks before her 46th birthday. If I was dubbed a “geriatric mother” when I had my first at 35, I can only wonder what they call women who are primigravida at our advanced age — or what my younger child recently referred to as my “middle ages”. Would she be superannuated? Ancient? Decrepit? She is none of those things, but rather young-at-heart, fit, healthy, vital and clearly capable of delivery a perfectly healthy and beautiful baby girl. Which she just did. Hurrah!

But what a time to bring a baby into this world. Thankfully her baby girl arrived, via caesarean, just a week or so before hospitals became impossible places for anyone without COVID-19 and even worse for those with it. So they are all safely holed up together, a tiny universe of three, while she and baby get to grips with breastfeeding, her hubby makes marmalade from their overladen trees, and they all get to fall in love with one another with no outside distractions or the only semi-wanted invasions of well-meaning relatives and friends. If it wasn’t for the danger or the awfulness that abounds in the outside world these days, it would be rather wonderful.

Because when a baby is born, the rest of the world falls away. Nothing else matters at all, and in that little, perfect universe, the parental planets revolve around their very own sun (not to be confused with a son, though of course it might be one; our suns are daughters) in a state of exhausted bliss, and the baby’s sustaining, life-giving glow is utterly mesmerising and essential and all-consuming. It is the most extraordinary and terrifying and impossible-to-describe time in a parent’s life — or at least it was thus for us.

But imagine if the baby had arrived now? When mothers must deliver alone, their husbands or wives or mothers or doulas cheering them via FaceTime, desperately wishing for their other half to be by their side as they are immersed in the primal and strangely solitary-but-completely-dependent state that is labour and childbirth. When the other partners-to-be are watching, helpless, from afar, utterly disconnected and excluded from that miraculous moment when the baby emerges. When — far worse — a baby is admitted to the NICU, and the mother must leave the hospital, not knowing when she will see her baby again.

The other night as I read about the separation of NICU babies from their mothers during the isolating awfulness of these virus-driven times, I began to cry. My heart broke for them. Because I have been there. When our oldest daughter was born, about 12 hours after her arrival I noticed her colouring had gone from rather red to a deep, bright crimson. Worried something was wrong, I asked a nurse for help and she suspected jaundice and immediately called a paediatrician. He in turn suspected something far more serious, and whisked us up to the NICU. There he confirmed his suspicions: our tiny, precious, as-yet-unnamed baby had polycythaemia, which meant that her body was overproducing red blood cells to oxygenate her blood (possibly because our placenta had begun to fail as she was 10 days overdue and therefore did not have enough oxygen in her blood), but paradoxically this meant that her blood was becoming too viscous to circulate, which would soon lead to major organ failure. They would need to dilute her blood with saline, via a drip. Not yet fully appreciating the severity of this condition, we took deep breaths and asked about the benefits and risks, but he cut us short, explaining that there was no alternative: they had to do this in order to save her life.

I fed her once more, we named her, we handed her into their care. My husband, exhausted from having been awake for 36 hours straight and without the benefit of the amazing hormones that were sustaining me, went home to sleep, trusting that all would be well. Driven by those same hormones to hover as close as possible to my child, I was unable to rest, unable to do anything but long to be with her. Three hours later, after an agonising wait in my bed on the ward below, our baby looked like a pincushion because they were struggling to get a line into her tiny veins and was in an incubator; I couldn’t hold her but simply stroked her little body through the two holes in the incubator with my scrubbed hands and sang to her through the glass.

Three hours after that I learned she was in respiratory distress because the saline drip wasn’t enough: they would have to put in a central line to perform an exchange transfusion (blood out, saline in) to save her life. Of course I couldn’t be there so I returned to the floor below to wait, again, during what would be the most frantically lonely hours of my life. When I next went upstairs, desperate for news, I finally was allowed to hold her in my arms: she had survived her ordeal, clinging fiercely to her brand-new life and showing at just a few hours old the incredible tenacity that would become one of her trademarks. The next morning she was transferred to the special care baby unit where I was able to hold and feed her and visit (almost) as long as I liked. After two days, we took her home and I rarely put her down again. Our dark night ended, and the sun at the centre of our little universe was shining once more.

As traumatic as that experience was, the holding her held me together. The times I was apart from her, especially while they were performing the life-saving exchange transfusion, were the darkest moments of my life — and that was because of the separation as much as the terror of her perilous situation. I know all too well the agony of not being able to be present, even if only a floor away; just that one flight of steps felt like miles to me that night. I know all too well the pain of not being able to touch or hold or feed your new baby.

Even so, I can only begin to imagine the heartbreak that these new parents are living through during their separation. I hope with all my heart that they are sustained by the photos the NICU nurses send, and that their babies come home soon to them, well and whole and unscathed, so that they can hold them and feed them and drink in the perfection of this little creature that is finally, completely theirs. So that they can all begin to heal together, however long it takes the world around them to heal.

For months after my daughter’s birth I struggled with post-traumatic stress, and remembering that time makes me wonder now: what will we all be like after this trauma? After the loss and the grief and the strange solitude of the world which we all now inhabit? Who will we be when we emerge from our COVID-induced chrysalis? Will a little bit of our collective soul shrivel and die inside? Or will we be butterflies, stronger and lighter and more beautiful? Solitude and separation are not what birth should be about, nor are they what life should be about either.

So I send you love, in this time of corona.