Real Sex for Grown Ups. Holy Night.

Last night I found myself drifting on the living room sofa, stealthily mesmerised by the Christmas trees lights. Quieted at last.  In the window the dark night was illuminated by a slice of light from the quarter moon, the life in the house dimmed, banked down behind me.  It came to me that I had not stopped to draw a breath since August. Not. Until here I am corralled in the moment, fallen into a little pocket of eternity. The boy's anguished electric guitar sounds break through from time to time and I do believe the boss is singing somewhere in the house. The beautiful one sleeps, my husband is in bed with the Headache, and I am here in my house in this moment..

Sex is all in the mind.
A Headache though! My fault. It was my newly formulated Timetable for Marital Lovemaking that did it. "How often times a week do you think?"  I asked him. "What's average? healthy?, advisable?  Tuesdays, thursdays, sundays, I thought?.. Maybe bonus days!... which can be um awarded. After all dear man, what with chauffeuring, cooking, shopping, cleaning, arguing, laying down the law, cobbling together complex compromises with adolescents and that sort of thing,  not to mention earning a crust, its a tricky thing giving sex the good clear focus it requires, carving out the essential sexual space as it were.. Its like a...a.. sort of rebooting thing Angel,  no need for panic now. The Timetable is like a re-setting, to like grown up, middle aged rumpy pumpy, conjugal coupling and... well...basically... sex."

                              ....actually in your head
Ok,  Ok, I know it was naughty, but on the other hand, his recent complaint made me thoughtful. There is a question begging an answer here. Like how do you do sex with your partner/husband/loverman, when you are grown up? Its not the sweaty anxious obsessive stuff you filled your universe with as a raw young person. That swoon of passion filling a largely empty, available  universe, otherwise flirting with half hearted schooling, alleged educating. But all to soon your careless skitishness is intruded on by a job, a bank loan, troubled broodings on where's its all going?, what's it all mean, and God how it's all empty, actually tedious? I don't say you want to think this, its that pesky universe again.

                                                            ..... your probably quite crazy head.
To illustrate, I once came on a dear friend shivering on a park bench some little distance from our shared house, my accomplice in working hard and living fast back then, one chilly Sunday morning. "What? Why?. Qu'est-ce que c'est" I asked her . She told me with an air of  tragedy that she could not go home until the man brought back by her in triumph the night before had left the house "so I am watching the bus stop I directed him to" she went on," but he doesn't come! I mean it all seemed so lovely last night, but now, oh now he wants us to have breakfast in town. And I can't actually recall his name, and I mean it's all so alien, and all I want to do is go home and curl up in my divinely solitary bed. Oh do you think he'll ever leave!!!! " It seemed she had bounced out of the bed of passion, flung on some clothes and told him she'd be off, early Sunday morning shift in the Chocolate Factory doncha know. Oh and the bus stop's just across the road. hmmm

                                                                                         ..... only in your head
And then there is the rest of your adult life till middle age. Sex mostly sidelined by the fruit of your loins. You might work up the effort when you can face having another one but basically you are too busy, too exhausted, too too distracted.

                                                                                                                  .... sex is in your
But, not for ever. .You're not done yet.! Oh no! You get the last kid upright, physically and mentally. And psychically the pure light gathers force and shines, unnoticed by you,  and here it is again, and its wide and deep, and basically better than you ever knew it could be. Practice, familiarity, passion resurging, makes you wonder if sex was not for making babies after all, but for this, intimacy, union, transformative surrender to the universe of good hot coupling.
                                                                                                                                             head.

Anyway, there's still the cooking, the shopping, the cleaning yada yada  yada, and so the Timetable. And as I hope you can see it was not produced entirely in a spirit of mischief and revenge. I pad upstairs in my bare feet and in to the dim bedroom, hearing the dogs baking in the fields behind the house, the occasional truck swish swishing on the rainy motorway, and slide into the marital bed. My husband's gentle snoring shifts,  stops. "Yeah. Well.  The hell with spontaneity then. Tuesdays, thursdays, sundays, whatever" he mutters.  "And also bonus days my darling" I reply.

Screwed not Dancing.

The boss on this her fourteenth birthday takes herself and girlfriends to see The Hunger Games,  and likes it very much. "A bit darkish, maybe?" I probe, "a bit edgier than the first film?".  "Darkish, yeah. It was.  Dark.  Better.  It was great!"  Right. Better because darker then. Afterwards they eat in Eddie Rockets. That too she says was great and also better, " 'cos we like went on our own, and I mean I paid, and after we got the cab home you sent  together on our own.  And thank you.  It was you know independent,  grown up. So yeah, thank you. It was, we all felt, great."

"I mean it's an unlikely and precious thing to be given thanks, to be permitted to warm oneself a little in a rare fine glow of appreciation. Without one's own prompting! It's actually quite disconcerting!" I puzzle to my husband. "So, right, do you think  I've cracked it this time? Do you think in fact that this time maybe this one will dance with me through the adolescent quagmire. Step light with me over the bruising terrain. On this my fourth and final try?  Do you think?".  "Nope!" he said "Screwed!" he said. Just face it, baby, chances are, not dancing you're screwed".

He tells me how she'll dance me dizzy, dizzy, how she'll  twirl me round in circles till I know that everything I thought I knew about her was a story,  just a shadow of her shimmering, her solipsistic   truth. Says he wants it on the record when I find that she is leading, deftly spinning me and others that he warned me, he's Cassandra, yeah he warned me that I'd better watch my glide"!   "Yes... but... no but.. NOT this time, angel,  this time, I think dancing".  "Maybe baby BUT and for the record I think you will find, actually screwed".

Oh. Well we'll see. And he undertakes to pick up the pieces. Should the need arise.

Leaving home (some day). More Sex.

The beautiful (and adamant) girl is completing her College Application choices for next year.  "Perhaps you could maybe put down eh Business Studies? or uh... Law!,  or.... or Languages... combined with eh Business Studies or like Law. As I mean a third option, a..um... fallback position, so to speak, darling."   "Pardon!?  Why would I do THAT when I am taking English and Drama, or I am taking  English and Film, or possibly I am taking Film and Drama. I'm not actually like DOING anything else. Or don't you think I can get the points? Didn't you see my pre mock results? I mean hello?!". I have seen 'em. She has a point.  She needs more points for the chosen option than for any of my ridiculous suggestions. And she's on track. My vision of the beautiful girl as self supporting, comfortably established, launched!, sooner rather than later is fading fast. "Well, I mean maybe the chosen option will actually yield a living wage" I harrow to my husband. "Yeah. Maybe baby, maybe. Or,  she will be exhausting the arts department on your ticket for the decade. Either or."

"Well  I'M thinking of goin' local, the IT, Institute of Technology you know.  You'll save a fortune..my mate's getting wheels you know... SO I have a lift.  Until you've sorted me with a car. Nothing to worry yourself about here! "  My husband asks the hopeful boy what he would be proposing to study. "Don't know yet.  Havn't decided.  I mean I could do anything. The way I see it.  Pure History maybe,  I'm like good at that. Do they do that there?  Or Archeology! Architecture! Agricultural Science! or, I know,  Vetinarian!  I'm really like good with animals. As you know. Like how many years would THAT take me?". "More than you'd think", I mutter brokenly.. "Maybe you could ASSIST the vet" the boss says kindly   "And, you know,  it will be weird for me when they have both gone AWAY to College. Kinda lonely",  a thoughtful and not unhappy light in her eye.

"It WILL work itself out in the end, angel. It will, you know, unfold as it unfolds, follow its own strange trajectory,  take its own mysterious course. So. We must just go with it, like roll with it,  have faith in the universe. And like also the teenagers" I finish magnificently to my husband, he having by that time cooked the dinner, fed the dog, driven the beautiful girl to drama, gathered in the boss and boy from the darkening night and the suck of a teenage swarm on the road.  "Yeah" , he says, "yeah. Or maybe we should get down on our knees and pray. And afterwards  call one of those helplines, tell them where to get me, tell them there's two of us here, tell them how I'm worn to the bone, pinned to the mast,  may not actually be getting ENOUGH SEX". "Pardon!!!!!!????"  "S'ok," he hastens to add, "I mean I've grown accustomed,  I 'd actually miss 'em if they ever did. Leave I mean. They can stay. Bless them. Also their babies, lovers, hordes of little friends. And you, you can let me know when you have a window, no pressure, I'm basically always at home. Though off to fetch the beautiful one, first."

Save the Children Stupid!!

 Home ( before I take off my coat)

"Yes, I know. It was bad. Very bad. Grounded? Right. OK, And anyway I have things to do. So that's good" "Eh?" "Yes, I'm making you know like designer christmas cards? for the like Hand Made  Christmas Card Market.? And you won't like have to give me too much money this Christmas, becuase I  will like sell them?. Do you think many people would buy Hand Made Christmas Cards?? Well there is always the family. We could like go visiting THEM when I'm done"

Oh she's very good, my boss. And the christmas cards will be very good too. It all started on an indignant high for my part. You know, the kid is missing when you get home, not seen for hours, no phone on her,  finally turns up at 7pm hot on your heels. "Where?" I asked my husband. "I mean its dark, cold,  alien, out there. AND no phone, no credit, no coat". But like I said, she's good, tipped the wind nicely out of my sails. Easy peasy I guess. "I'm thinking Boyfriend!" my husband  offers. !?!?

And on upstairs,( first floor).

"It was HIM" the beautiful girl tells me, "It IS tobacco smoke, BUT it was him". She doesn't actually stop playing something classical and fluent on the piano, as she assures me that she herself may have taken a drag but it was the Boy's cigarette, and anyway she hardly ever....I mean how could she?...can't afford them, her friends get cash from their parents for like a few drinks  on nights out and other like  needs,  "but not me. Ho no, not me". "I'm thinking  nicotine plus what?" my husband calls.!?!?

"Nope. It was HER," and anyway he doesn't smoke, not  hardly ever,  maybe like  a drag to keep her company, and  anyway he can't afford....and so on and so forth and... "I WILL NOT HAVE IT IN THE HOUSE" I say, and also "You may do what you choose when you go out in the world. Make your own choices then, pick your poison, undermine and pick apart the good health I have tended in you all, but not yet. And...and then it won't be on my watch...and.. and.." I come to a stuttering stop, catching a distinctly wry and long suffering  twinkle in the boy's nordic blue eyes. That wind has deserted the parental sales again. Oh well. "I'm thinking you gotta laugh" my husband mutters. !?!?

And upwards to the marital bedroom

In the blessed peace of there  I listen to  the beautiful one's trilling fluent scales on her piano,  the masterful slam of the front door and unmistakeable stride of the boy gone towards the gate, all six foot one of him undiminished by the cigarettes he does not smoke. Beneath me on her bed sits the boss fashioning the finest of hand made cards, calmly planning the purchase of presents, mascara, chocolate. But not cigarettes. No.  An idiotic habit she thinks. Her siblings idiots she thinks also.

"Stop thinking!" "Am not!" "Yes! you are! I hear you thinking, thinking". My husband  comes to fetch me for dinner where I sit lost in knotty twisty dilemma. I order him to take himself out of my mental processes, where yeah,  I am....mulling, twisting, wrestling with work related turmoil and imponderables, the slipperiness of teenagers. He asks me how I think I  have advanced  things with my fruitless broodings, and if I realized the unflattering displacement all this is causing  to my facial features. Hmm. There is no point, I think much later on from the deep deep peace of the marital, there is no point in trying to control anything, ever, at all. And when the whirwind gathers you up, the only think to usefully do is hang on. And wait, hopefully, for deliverance. In due course. Stop thinking.

Musings in the Wee Small Hours.

I wonder if the enthusiastic policemen who snatched  the two Roma children from the bosom of their anxious families, the ones also who made herculean attempts to transmogrify a twenty four year old Australian woman into a lost girl ripe for the rescue feel as I do about the pointlessness of one's efforts to control the bad stuff,  one's enthusiastic blunderings to get a handle on the world?

And then there was Sweetie, virtual girl bait, the lifting of a stone to reveal the predatory feasting horror of men on children via the internet. Tip of the iceberg. Devouring of the innocents. And the free for all of the Beast on children orphaned by Tyhoon Haiyan. Can we do nothing?  Are we helpless in fact?  Forever barking up the wrong tree, forever backing off from the one true fight we have to fight and win ruthlessly, unflinching, whatever it takes. My husband awakes, sighs histrionically, pokes me in the ribs. "Stop. Thinking."

Hearing voices, Valerian overdose, Reaping the whirlwind.

 Last week I spent a day in the Family Law District court with six hundred or so other souls, waiting, waiting, for our cases to be reached. There being upwards of two hundred cases in the list to be dealt with on that same day . We waited, pushed on top of one another in a smallish Foyer, having standing room only with very little in the way of  of seating, as the hours ticked gruellingly by. Marriage breakdown, questions of custody and access to children, domestic violence, all matters bringing  us to that place.We were tormented in not  knowing when our cases would be reached, and straining to hear a court clerk who stood on a chair and called out cases in batches periodically over the heads of  the anxious crowd. In the evening my kind husband presented me with a cup of Calming Herbal Tea, with, as I told him, enough valerian in it to fell a horse. I wasn't looking to healthy he said. I told him to go easy on his spoonfuls of herbals. It's the voices, I told him echoing, insisting, whistling insanely  in my poor frazzled head, clamouring to be heard.

 .                                                    .......(fairly) desperate lawyers
                                                                                                                                                              "OH NO! You can't LEAVE! Yeah I KNOW You've been here since 9.00am.  I KNOW we're 189th in the list, I KNOW there's no where to sit, you need a cigarette, the bathroom, to feed the meter,  get some coffee, phone your sitter. I KNOW. But you can't actually leave.

"Get through that list? Oh yeah he'll get through that list,  keep going untill he does. He doesn't adjourn. Not for any reason. Ever. I mean adjournments right,  why do you think there's two hundred cases in the list? AND adjourned  where??   Onto another list, that's where.. He's like... like the Lone Ranger here, he's gonna like deal with every thing. How? like a knife through butter. In his own sweet way. Like short, bewildering but definitely, when you leave, OVER.. He'll be the last man standing when darkness falls".

"Evidence? He doesn't do evidence. He  hasn't got  time for evidence. He does decisions. And when your case is called start talking from the door on your way in, get in first, before like the other guy, make sure it's your voice he hears. Hey,  it's a small window, you don't want to overload the guy, its a  finely balanced edifice in there"?.

"All wrong? Yeah it's all wrong. but hey, at least you get a decision! And if you don't like it, well hey  go out there and.... AGREE, concur, parlay with your ex husband, lover, partner, one night stand.  Forget the war, forget the battering he gave you, the way she made your babies hate you, the bedsit she won't let you bring them to, the way he left you broke with young children he lavishes useless stuff on come Sunday just because he can. Get back out there and sort it out yourself."

                                            ..........(like) cattle driven off a cliff

"But.. this is important. Sensitive. Delicate stuff. Is't it? It needs time. Patience. Careful consideration. Doesn't it? This is just not going to end well.  Is it?

"Don't know. . Here for five hours now and just managed to grab a seat. Still, I think my ex is gone, he's like,  you know, claustrophobic. Standing like cattle in a pen for six hours solid's not his thing. Hah!.

"Legal aid?, you're kidding. I paid  €600 to mine. For this. Still she looks pretty green around the gills too. Keeps telling me to let her do the talking, she does. Because we won't have much time, she says.  Be ready, cos we won't know when it will be called, she told me. Be prepared, we won't get much of a hearing, she thinks. But, also, not to worry she say, we can appeal.  It's the luck of the draw, also, we can appeal. Could come out right, who know's,  we can appeal.  But anyway but  yeah she says  we can appeal".

"Divorce? Forget divorce. We were going to sell the house, go our ways, agree time spent with  the kids. Now he lives it in the dining room, house is a war zone, bank won't let us sell, negative equity you know, all that. And we have to get a protection order, safety order, barring order, stop a killing, go on medication, get one of us out,"
                                               
                                                   .........a whirlwind for the reaping.

And so the day wore on, the gathering evening light penetrating the high court house windows at  the Family Law District Court  folks. Where I  gratefully found a wall to lean against by afternoon (standing room only for this party). Grimly humorous. More grim than humorous. I grimly think about how everything has shifted in Ireland in recent years. A quietly building  tsunami of people having a marriage split, a relationship break up, a fruitful one night stand, and this is what we offer in the fallout.

We need a dedicated nine to five, five day a week Court, stoopid. With  mediators, councillors, social workers attached.  And judges who choose the work, are given a chance to judge,and to learn how. .  Expensive? doesn't have to be, it's a question of planning, vision, recruiting the good and interested people.

And if we don't well,  then we stand over a  system that does actual harm.. Does anyone have any idea just how many children have major decisions made about the trajectory of their lives in  this system? Effectively minced  along with their parents at the end of  this bizarre assembly line. We will answer, are answering already  to a generation, in our  failure to meet this need.  Better to have no "family Law" courts at all. 

Australia. No babies. No judgement. .

                                                  TRUTH                                                                                                     "Did they come out of the computer for their holidays? Did they?" So said the infant niece of my first born son's  wife, he, she and the three children having come home once again from Australia to visit.
"D'u think its the vitamin D from the sun that makes them like glow" the boss wonders.   "Hmm, yes, probably"  I muse, taking  pleasure from that glow, from actual presence, and also from the ease of conversations without the three seconds pause of  Skype and Facetime.
"Do you think it will be long before we see them again? Will they ever come home again" asks my watery girl, as they leave.
Truthfully, I think not. Employed, glowing, prosperous,  established in a fine circle of friends, why would they? For what come back? They are planning to buy a house ohmygod. How we all swore never to do that again! Australia and they are a fine fit, thanking you Australia. You won't regret it I think.
"Someday baby. Maybe " I tell a kind untruth.

                                           THE WHOLE TRUTH
"Nope. Don't trouble yourself. Don't actually bother. Don't  basically lie.....DON'T  tell me it doesn't hurt!" "Nnnnno, I'm not saying ....I mean its a very particular kind of pain.....not like.....I mean it sort of builds and builds and then.... gone.....builds and builds and then.... "   "Stop!That sounds like even worse. Like actually awful!"  "Yes, but it's a...it's a... um ..fruitful pain. And...and I mean the most wonderful high, of your life, when it  like you know arrives." "Yeah, yeah and then it howls and wails and slobbers for YEARS. I'm NEVER EVER  DOING THAT"  I wonder why I am in effect trying to sell motherhood to the beautiful girl? We don't want that, after all. Not for years and years and years.

But I want her to understand. I want her to see. To know it's not  a conspiracy of women to soften the edges, to lure free spirits on to the horror the horror. I want her to have an inkling of  the unique and transformative nature of labouring and giving birth. The act of being torn open, the car crash trauma an essential component even . I want to tell her .....  everything. The truth.  The whole truth. I want to tell her. Oh well I guess she will, having asserted how it isn't for her, come to the yearning aching need  for what grows inside her when she gets there, however she gets there, like the rest of us. One day. Maybe. Most likely.


                                          NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
And then there is another woman's daughter this week who had the ambivalent victory of proving her father a rapist in a court of law. A full and poisoned chalice. A vindication mired in the loss of her father, in private when she was four years old and first violated and in public this day.  "A good wee girl. I believed her." said her uncle. As did her mother, when the child spoke up at thirteen years of age. But then the years passed and no crime was acknowledged,  no punishment marked. The uncle failed to act, the police were not terribly interested. Other fish to fry. Oh yes.

I  have no truck with Gerry Adams.  And yet, and yet. His revelation to the police finally, of his brother's confession of guilt, was a powerful proof in his niece's case. And I am a little haunted by how he went on to reveal his fathers abuse of some of his ten children, though he himself does not recall it.  He did not say whether he experienced it. The abused becomes the abuser, and all surely in the abuser's family  are expected to sing in that circle., take on the yoke of that which may not be spoken, the bad thing carried by each according to kind.

He is brother, son, and uncle is Adams, and there is no simple truth and nothing but..  Not here. Not for Adams who delivered his brother in to the maws of the justice and penal system. Not for a brave woman who tore open a family circle leaving everyone of them  exposed and isolated in the unsupported light .

Ned Kelly/Lovers/ Villagers bearing torches

We took ourselves  to Cavan for a wedding on the weekend, orphans from the storm of family life. We sped along the motorway with a nice sense of the clandestine, though it was a trip punctuated with  news bites from a story just coming in on the car radio about the two young children lured away  from a children's party in Athlone.  The children, horribly assaulted,  escaped through a window and the alarm was raised." Not some desperate fruitless hunt then for little ones whose fate could only ever be imagined", I said uneasily, as we cut the radio off, " there is that at least.  Is there not? " My husband was silent as we arrived and parked.

"I met her on the internet" the beaming groom, long known in that part of the world as The Hen,  began the wedding speech. " That's how at first, and then..... I went to China, and..." He drew the air deep into his lungs to contain his emotion, to go on, when from the back of the room  the loud squawking of a hen and its human bearers drowned him out. The hen was carried to the bridal table and ceremoniously placed to cheers and guffaws. I watched her edgily where she perched on the wedding table by my elbow. She stared calmly back as though waiting with me for the groom to resume his story.

 He did attempt it, but the hen flew into the air to be snatched as she flew, by one of the guests, and sat tucked into his arm to increased cheers and catcalls. Each time the groom  reached  for the threads of his story he was derailed by the mockers thereafter, until at last he abandoned the attempt.

 " She's the love of my life and my soulmate ANYWAY" he roared above the crowd "and oh I know right well your smart remarks, your chinese takeaways and the like. Don't care, it's what she is" smiling down into the loving anxious face of his chinese bride. And she was. They  were an obvious couple.  Peas in a pod. Each other's only other.

" Why, oh why" I asked the man I  married "wouldn't they let him SPEAK?" But he was in the moment,  hooting at the dexterity of the wedding guest who never even rose from his chair as he reached up an arm to catch the flying hen. Earlier the dear man  had been hauled before a venerable old woman on the Groom's side, who after casting about her in vain for his seed and breed, announced "Oh it's you! Ah yes, you were always like your mother" bringing his beloved mother, lost to an aggressive cancer when he was still in his teens, to the wedding feast. And he was Cavan, native and son again.

On Monday's T.V.news we watched the people massing on on the Garda Station  in Athlone where a man suspected of the frightful assault on the children was held. "What are they waiting for? I mean what do they want exactly?" I asked my husband, both of us blasted and loose after our pretty wild weekend. "Want? they don't know what they want,  they only know what they don't want, angelface"." Huh?"   Don't want to be alone,  be taken unawares,  be prey to the unexpected. There's safety in numbers, ease in the crowd, positive bliss, baby, in laying down the burden of your own adjectival individual tormenting knowing. Yeah"

Maybe baby. But. Smarts, heart and your adjectival  soul's well thrashed in the braying crowd. And I do not forgive that refusal of the Groom's story, though they drank and laughed and  feasted for him all night long.

And you might like to take a look at Peter Carey's True History Of the Kelly Gang if you want to hear the voice of an individual adjectival man..