Upfront

BACK FROM THE holidays, and I am feeling like I desperately need another one. A few days before we went on our first foreign excursion with childer, my mother-in-law-in-waiting, Queenie, predicted this would happen. “Och, you’ll need a holiday afterwards, so you will,” she said in a pitying, yet authoritative, tone. “You’ll be so worn out minding them and putting sun cream on them and making sure they don’t jump in the pool or eat sand. You’ll be wrecked.”

Her gloomy predictions were kind of putting a downer on my pre-holiday glow, so I chose to ignore her, taking a big sip from my half-full glass of metaphorical sangria. Needing a holiday after a holiday? Pah! That was for wimpy parents. I had researched several websites. I had written lists. And I had a secret weapon that came from a charity shop in Portadown: a portable DVD player.

All I can say is that the holiday was hard, and if we hadn’t had the DVD player I might have been on the plane home after a few days. By the 93rd application of Factor 50 on the two wrigglers I was thinking terrible things like: “Sure a little melanoma never did anyone any harm.” They had a brilliant time, eating sand and trying to drown themselves, and because they enjoyed it, so did we. Sort of. But yes, Queenie, we are wrecked.

The other thing that the holiday did, apart from make me feel around 90, was to remind me of how my lifelong journey towards a place where I am at peace with myself has not so much stalled as crashed into a brick wall at 90 miles an hour. This revelation came by virtue of being forced to put on swimming togs to bring our two girls swimming. I don’t, as a rule, do swimming togs. So that wasn’t just me swimming to the surface of the pool twice a day – it was all my issues, every one. When I was a teenager I thought that by this age I would have it all sorted. But I don’t, not even close, and I am fed up. I feel like I’ve spent enough money on self-help books and therapy to be able to leave the issues of yore behind me. I mean, how hard can it be to eradicate negative tendencies you’ve been indulging for more than 20 years? Impossible, apparently.

One of my self-improvement books told me that unless you can clearly see the goal then you won’t be able to hit your target, so the other night, accompanied by a tube of Pringles and a bottle of white whine (a Freudian typo there, so I’m leaving it in) and possibly some mini Twirls, I sat and wrote a list called “Issues”. There were 10 of them. They were 10 whoppers. And I didn’t even have to think very hard, they just spilled out on to the page the way a shopping list writes itself when the cupboards are bare.

And whereas before I wanted to fix the issues for me, now I am in a panic that if I don’t sort myself out sharpish they will transfer on to the childer and later I’ll have to watch them struggle with the same issues, while I continue struggling myself, at a loss to help them.

Damn, those parenting websites: “Remember that your toddler is watching your every move and listening to every word. Their little minds are absorbing this information, preparing them to imitate everything you do . . .”. So, no pressure then. I got depressed. I got angry. I made plans. I scrapped the plans and made new ones. I despaired. Eventually I wiped away the tears because we’d been invited to a party in my cousin’s new house where, by some miracle, the Jolly Boys were going to be playing in the garden.

The lads are a mento band and have been around since the 1950s, when they played for the Rat Pack. Errol Flynn was their biggest fan. These days they sing incredible reggae versions of songs from the Stranglers, the Rolling Stones and Amy Winehouse. If they couldn’t cheer me up, then those boys from Jamaica weren’t worthy of the name.

But going to a party with newly walking children is also hard work. Good job then that their father can spot the signs of imminent meltdown in me, so after a few hours he whisked them home to bed, just before the band appeared.

I met the lead singer of the band (he is 70-odd, missing a few teeth, and just incredibly cool) at the buffet. “They tried to make me go to rehab,” I told him over a mound of crab claws. “I said no, no, noooo,” he replied, eyes twinkling, lifting my weary heart.

Maybe it was the champagne, or dancing barefoot with my sisters on the grass, or having a private audience with those extremely Jolly Boys, but right then I decided that my issues are not going to beat me, no, no, noooo. I really hope not, anyway.