I am not sure if the dog can actually ‘take this in’ – but he seems to be doing a good enough job listening to me and giving me that sorrowful look with his big brown eyes. Which are rimmed a bit with blood-shot red, which by all accounts is a sign of a great storm.
Which is what we apparently are having today with the lashings of rain outside and the fear to go to the shop even for an emergency bar of chocolate. Which I need, right now.
Because my daughter
is singing in her room, and she keeps appearing in front of me saying – “I
literally, cannot, (little jump up) wait!”
I literally, (pretend smile on face), can. It's all too soon.
Aoise who is 12 and
almost 13 any day now, is going to Secondary School tomorrow for the first
time.
I have spent the day
distracting us from the actual thought of it, but as I write this evening, I
have blurted the news out to some unfortuantes who've happened to lend an ear, and who were rather
stuffed with anxiety for me about it all.
The young fella in
the Credit Union was very supportive. “What’s your main subject?” he asked as
if it was the ultimate thing to say. “Home economics,” said the daughter
proudly and rightly so because she is a great cook, and bakes amazing muffins,
pancakes and such likes that I – on the contrary – do not bake – but eat. I
don’t even (hands up here) cook – much, and when the children were little I had
to disguise every meal produced, with foreign and exotic sounding names in the hopes that they
would be fooled into eating them.
Chicken Towers With
Cup Of Rice – Chicken Surprise (said in French accent). I was banned from using the word ‘Pie’ in
reference to any meal, as it made the little son heave. So, Chicken Yum Yum.
I blurted out during the course of the day, a forlorn - “Aoise is starting Secondary School tomorrow.” As if that
would cover every reason why my life today has turned into something, that if
it was a graph on a sheet of paper, would look like a rather spiked mountain,
followed by spikey smaller valleys and rounding up by evening time as enormous
spike off the Richter Scale.
I've tried to iron on
the iron-on name tags, which I did not manage very well and had objections to
them from the word go when I wrote her name in Irish – hoping to give her a bit
of a booster.
I briefly left the
son to his own devices and found him in his room putting stickers on his pens
and totalling up the money in his piggy bank. Another visit from the Tooth
Fairy – left him a €2.76 cent. Oops.
Such is the level of distractedness in here.
I am trying to hold
it all in (crying wise) until she goes to Secondary School tomorrow morning. I know she will be fine. But her father, brother and myself will not. It's a new chapter and metaphorically speaking, it is a new blank page in our family's life.
“I’ll
have nobody to stick up for me!” said the son this morning, standing opposite her in the kitchen. He was kind of half glad. But also kind
of glum. They'd spent the past six years "minding" each other in the school playground and making good friends together. Not that he'd ever had any cause to use the strengths of his sister in a melee. The Richter Scale's needle was quivering. “Yes, you’ll just have to get on with it,” she replied diffusing the stand-off, matter-of-factly. I meanwhile, will just focus
on the positives and keep talking to the dog. He's moved out into the hall now, huddled near the front door. And I don't blame him. More storms may not be too far away.
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