Diary Of My Week As A Mildly Panicking Person Who Needs To Say The Serenity Prayer

Life has been lifeing HARD

So as you may know, from time to time, I do a diary of my week here at Death Is Coming. This is because at some point in the distant past, someone told me they liked them so, in the grand tradition of say… THE IRISH GOVERNMENT… why change? Like EVER? More on this anon.

Monday:

Mondays are podcast day in my week. Over the course of one chaotic twelve-hour period (usually roughly 10am to 10pm), I record four episodes of the two podcasts I co-host. I also edit two of them and schedule the shows for the week. The beauty of the Giant Podcasting Day is a) getting the shows locked off so that the other four days of the week can be writing-focused and b) easing myself out of the weekend with a very fun day of work that really doesn’t feel like work. On this particular Monday morning, I needed to pack the car because I was going away straight after recording that night to do a few days of writing solitary confinement to finish the first draft of my new novel which is on deadline. I dropped the kids to school, came back, did my workout and then loaded my car with thermals and jumpers (my writing solitary confinement place is very, very cold).

I drove out to my friend Jen’s house, eating a sausage roll and a banana on the way because I am always late. We got down to recording then I hung out in hers after to do the editing and scheduling. Then I left and had two hours until we were due at Cassie’s house to record the Creep Dive. Mondays always remind me of my years working in hospitality because they’re like a split shift. Except instead of passing the two-hour break sitting out the back alley of a restaurant smoking, I now like to have a massage.

This is intolerably bougie behaviour I know but my god, I just love to pay strangers to vigorously touch me. The massage place I go to is cheap and therefore somewhat lacking in luxuries such as heating but that is, I feel, fair punishment for being so disgustingly middle class and going for regular massages.

The Creep Dive recording goes well except I fucked up my deliveroo order. We’ve started getting food from this gorgeous place Yeeros – they do amazing kebab-type things but on this occasion my sauce selection went awry and my gorgeous shish was defiled by WAY TOO MUCH mayonnaisey chilli sauce. I could write a whole newsletter on sauce ratios and the tragedy of the Irish devotion to mixing every delicious flavour into cumy mayonnaise concoctions (siracha has been a particular victim of this).

I left Dublin 8 at 9pm and began the arduous (I am an exceptionally bad driver and shouldn’t be allowed out) two-hour drive to Wexford, stopping en route to pick up rashers, bagels, cream cheese and cherry tomatoes for my breakfast. Once I got to the house, I did my exhaustive check-there’s-no-serial-killers search, made up the bed and shivered myself to sleep, full of deluded optimism that in these four magical days I would get the draft in hand and all would be well.

Tuesday:

A stunning morning by the coast on Ireland’s sunny South-East. I have my first pot of coffee then went for my run (more of a sweaty shuffle). Then I made breakfast (basically cook the rashers and cherry tomatoes in the pan, toast the bagel, spread with cream cheese then squash the tomatoes on top and add the bacon with black pepper and fresh basil if you have it).

Then I sat down at my desk and CHARGED out 5k words. I never do that, I am a bird-by-bird writer (Anne Lamott reference there, her book on writing is brilliant).

I put my drafts together a thousand or two thousand words at a time. Whenever I am panicking about work my husband always asks: ‘How do you eat the elephant?’

And I reply, usually pretty sullenly: ‘One bite at a time’.

But anyway on this day, I nailed two big chapters and went to bed that night high on the fact that I was going to SORT. THIS. BOOK. OUT.

Wednesday:

Everything went to shit.

Not in any kind of cataclysmic way, don’t worry. More in a everything’s-actually-going-to-be-okay-but-it’s-all-going-to-be-super-hard-and-annoying-for-a-while way.

Early that morning, my husband had gone into hospital and now I was driving back to Dublin panicking on two fronts. The obvious front being: Oh shit this guy that I routinely complain about is going in to have surgery on his SPINE and it turns out that I may actually like him after all. And then the less obvious, more selfish front: Oh fuck, I am on deadline. How am I going to do all the things I have to do with three children climbing all over me?

I got back to Dublin in time for school pick up and then updated all the people who needed to be updated that Seb was in hospital. My house was upside down and inside out because at 6am that morning my mum (angel that she is) had come over to take over with the kids when Seb left for the hospital. Now the thing about my mother is that visually she looks like the most put-together woman of all time. The blow-dry is always immac, she has fabulous taste in clothes and she wears white a lot which is the most put-together adult thing you can do ever.

If you wear white, you are signalling to everyone around you that your shit is so together it is basically fused and the pressure is so great that the carbon will eventually break down and crystallise into a diamond.

And yet. My mother’s put-togetherness doesn’t extend beyond her person and so when she comes into my home, it takes just minutes for her to fuck the place up. It’s kind of an endearing trait really because otherwise she’d be scarily perfect. She loves teabags in the sink, clothes everywhere, she does a particularly cute thing with kitchen roll where she’ll wipe her hands on the first few sheets but instead of tearing them off and putting them in the bin, she leaves them dangling there. Did I mention she was doing us a HUGE MASSIVE FAVOUR getting out of bed in the freezing November dawn to jump into action and feed and dress three small boys and bring them to school? So yeah there’s that.

When I first got back into the sea of chaos, I said, right first things first: quick panic.

When I got done with panicking, I tried to reacquaint myself with parenting. It was hard because I hadn’t had to shout at anyone in 30 hours. My screaming callous had depleted in that time but I was soon back in the saddle, especially after the four-year-old stood on the eight-year-old’s bed and took a very defiant piss.