Blessings and Felicitations.

The boy sits on beds edge ferociously  strumming his  guitar, his eyes channelling something feral and intent  when I tap his shoulder.  But he is content.  All he wants for Christmas, sorted. A good  camera for shooting wild life , in the bag.  Subscription   to  an  X box site, not.  But he is working  on it. .  A copy of the Beano Annual, yeah,  granny Oonagh never fails him. .  Presents for family, done.  CDs all round from the  bargain basement and first burnt onto his own  I pod.  So,  OK,  made to contribute some of his cash  for the camera, and some serious lectures from the boss about the CDS, but, you know, Duck's Back. Water and  God 's in his heaven.

                          The gorgeous girl whirls through the house on her way to choral performance, girl shopping, hanging in the Vault listening to music, eating talking dancing with her friends,  dressed in dark teeshirt, black jeans encasing giraffe limbs and a mere  hint of jacket  against the winter, because everything is shiny and speeded up as the great day approaches and there is no time  to waste on  chill  or rest..

                                              My husband and I watch the Boss in a row of hopeful soulful teens, as they bounce and thrill through all the Christmas carols at her school concert.  Her eyes shine,  her beautiful  face  serene. She has wrapped and tagged every Christmas present in the house for us, written and posted  all the Christmas cards, given and received cards from a multitude of girl friends.  In the wardrobe her fine  new outfit hangs for her (first) teenage dance tomorrow night, white lace, brief black skirt,  silver pumps (and stout seventy denier  black tights at my insistence.)

                                                        I wrap  a  frozen limb  around   my  good  husband's sturdy Cavan legs    afterward, as we chat under the duvet about missing  addresses  for cards recipients , vegetables still to be got for Christmas dinner, whether we might get Port as well as Sherry for the great day,  when oh when he can decently remove the flashing garish Santa clause the boy has proudly placed in our front window, and he tells me  that he is this year  truly happy,  and will be so on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day.

Doctors prosper/ Patients die.

"DO YOU KNOW I have,  (A) , a MORTGAGE  to pay, (B),  THREE  children to support,  (C),  a household to keep afloat, and this is.... this is... is......"  words fail  me.  Earlier  I stared  stupidly at a  snotty faced minion  in the blood testing department when  she  advised me that I had better hand over €110 euro, or no blood test for me. I have a medical condition which, while it can be treated,   can' be neglected.  Having in fact neglected it for some time, due to the expense, I had submitted my self to scanning and consultant, a few weeks past,  paid €500  for this,  and he, the consultant,  decided on a cunning plan to put me on a regime involving fortnightly visits  to  a nurse to titrate medications upwards, following on a blood test.  I learned, after the first visit that the NURSE  cost €50. On this the second visit,  I learned that the preliminary  blood  test was €55, and that they forgotten  to tell me last time.

A total then of €155 this time, and €105 hereafter, with a further €50 for medications, EVERY TIME.  The figures danced about in  my brain as I scrambled over to the nurse, who harangued me for tardiness. (I had rushed to the hospital during my lunch hour)  leading to the above outburst ( spluttering, as you see  to an exhausted and disgusted halt)

The thing is that I have no choice. I have medical insurance,  rapidly becoming unaffordable, which offers no contribution to this. My salary is  average, I am not eligible for medical cards or any  other sort of contribution.  These people simply milk you for cash for necessary treatments. Doctors fees were always high and they have reduced not one whit in this recession. There is no attempt to look at a financial plan for the unfortunate sick person. . Payments for doctor visits, tests, are applied without discussion or estimate. The stark  fact of the matter is that medical doctors accept a far smaller fee for patients with medical cards, place these at the end of the list when it comes to necessary hospital  treatments, and hold the rest of us to ransom, with medical care that is unaffordable.. Or at least I would like to know how it can be afforded, and who can afford it?

There is no attempt by our quite quite hopeless government to rein them in, to control prices, and working folks skimp on necessary medical care, because it is over priced. This information  is perfectly clear and available to they medical establishment when they apply these prices.   A case of indifference then  or good old fashioned opportunism. .

Anyway, I dismissed the nurse, I intend to thrash something out with my GP  re prescription and surgery blood tests in the future, and will return to the consultant when I can afford it. I am saving up.

And as to value, the nurse was patronising, adopted a one size fits all approach.  In fact you might have been eight or eighty and a little slow to boot, for all the distinction she made. And repetitive, with  largely redundant advice. To justify the cash extraction?  I left each time feeling diminished, worried, broke and extremely irritated. The consultant will charge the same sum every three months if we adhere to the cunning plan. It is hard indeed not to feel frisked, turned over, mugged almost, and that, my friends is so not therapeutic.

Barbarians. Love/Hate.

Sometimes its hard to be a teenage boy.

Ours is under siege these days. On a daily basis almost,  his sisters shop him to management. The boss: "Three hours of doing homework! huh! he was on the INTERNET". The elder "help him with his maths? NO ONE could help him with his maths, he is rude and unwilling!".  A sisterly duet: "Chocolates, whole packets of biscuits vanished,  devoured,! milk mess in the kitchen!, electronic stuff damaged! it was him, it was him,  IT WAS HIM."

The boy keeps a limped eyed persona in reserve for when taken to task, and he has an interesting line in excuses/rationalisations. My husband particularly enjoys these, and he tells me on Tuesday, smirking, that the boy now appears to have discovered on line porn. "Whaa, but we must, I mean, I must.." "You must WHAT, exactly?"  "Dunno, um establish what kind of eh porn he is looking at and..and.."  "To see if its tasteful you mean?" sniggers my life's partner. So anyway, we should be concerned with quantity rather than quality he assures me, and the web has joined the X Box on the  restricted list. And the boy is fast assuming an injured, harried air.

Sometimes its hard to be a second husband.

Mine took raging refuse in the bedroom on Sunday evening, after being  torn from the living room where he was watching  a programme on Barbarians  in the Middle Ages, to mend,  for the umpteenth time a TV cable for the recreation room TV yanked loose by careless young people. The fearsome threesome descended, as he laboured, to watch X factor raucously and interactively in the living room on full volume. He loathes X Factor with vim and bile along with boy bands, trash TV, the twilight movies and yes, blithe teenage insouciance when it comes to Good Manners, Doing your Chores and Waste. It's been a baptism of fire for the poor man, who begins to see that he is a captive audience.

I lure him downstairs later on with tea and apple tart to watch Love/Hate. (Barbarians dispatched to their quarters). Something in the car crash  events  unfolding around the hapless and mostly witless characters is irresistible. It is a comedy of  horrors. It is punctuated by some quite devastatingly unglamorous  and authentic looking scenes of ie, a rape, a man's brutal slaying, a woman's experience of being slammed, poked and pushed into by punters over a day in  brothel.  Its brow moping, shattering, insane, and hysterically funny TV. And it is NOT the sum of its parts. But it IS  guaranteed to put pesky teens in the halfpenny place.://www.hotvsnot.com/">web directory!</a> for free Find sites like this in the <a

Rage and incredulity, The Halappanavar tradgedy.

I have been veering between states or rage and incredulity for the past week or so regarding the death of Savita Halappanavar  in the Galway hospital. The radio and newspaper coverage  gathers a head of steam as the days go on. There is so much to be enraged about;  the refusal to terminate for at least two days as the unfortunate young  woman waited in pain and fear for the baby's heart beat to stop,  the failure  of hospital staff to note her and her husband's repeated requests  for a termination, and the endless reams of fudge  being trotted out by the government as to why there has been no legislation obliging the hospital to do its job and carry out the procedure from the outset.  Including the recommendations of the  working party that an appeal  board  be set up consisting of two doctors, if a woman has been refused a termination!

When exactly should one appeal after finding oneself  in the throes of a miscarriage? A very good time indeed to be dispatched off to jump through a series of legal hoops. We have the Supreme Court decision in the X Case, and the European court issuing warnings to legislate, and still we allow ourselves to be paralysed by a minority of zealots and dinosaurs. And so we wait and wait, as in this case until its too late. An Irish  answer to an Irish question , no more no less.

"This is a catholic country" Mr Halappanavar   was told,  a remark that was not recorded in the hospital records,  edited out along with the couple's many  requests for a termination. I prefer Mr Halappanavar's    account in this regard. So why not come out and own up to  this kind of thinking? Is it because people are too concerned about negative repercussions for themselves, as opposed to having any view on this? And who or what are they afraid of?  Is there anyone other than a thimbleful of crazies, who would object to a prompt  termination where a woman's life and or  her health is at risk due to a  pregnancy or a miscarriage?  As to enquiries,   it would be  good  to think that a stone would be lifted to expose this kind of dangerous murky thinking at play, but it won't happen unless there is a public enquiry, I think.

And pity poor Mr Halappanavar, who, not given the vital  medical procedure he asked for his wife,  was at last  given tea, biscuits and a blanket, (recorded) to keep vigil as her life slipped away, unstoppable now.  

Murderous Vissicitudes.

Thursday is black. Murderous vissicitudes with husband and children lead to a sleepless night and today I have a ominous  ache zinging spitefully  up and back from belly to heart.

The day brings the usual round.. The boy tells me passionately that "you expect me to sacrifice my health to your stubbornness ", when I refuse to stock up on some junk cereal he desires ( the semi nutritious one I supply doesn't agree with him. Seemingly). "Yeah and Fruit and Veg!,  thats two entire food groups you have already sacrificed to your HEALTH" his knowing sister sniggers .Energetic insults are traded .Someone asks me for money I don't have on me, for something essential, urgent.  At work a large swathe of the  public  have decided that all the bad stuff in their lives can be traced back to some small inadvertence of mine, some failure of attention on my part.

At lunchtime I decide to go home to my mercifully empty house, take refuge with book, blanket and tea. . And just stop.

Sniggering husbands, Consoling fires, disrespecting Harry Potter.

"Its  only seven weeks till Christmas", the  boy announced on Tuesday.  "Yeah, and  FIRST  there's my birthday"  the boss added,  "and you needn't worry about Christmas"  she continued magnificently, "something small will do cos  like you will be spending  a lot on my birthday  (guitar).....oh and you know  seven weeks,  that's only  actually twenty nine days".     There is a distinct lifting of spirits in the back seats..    Post mid term break,  post autumn,  drop kicked into hard core winter as it were (cold)  we are daunted gloomy and  tired.

Specifically,  on Monday night,  we are tired  on account of Nicky Minaj's concert, after which we were required  to collect the eldest from the bus drop off point,  well after midnight.  The drop off  point could not be clarified, and after at least twenty texts, a kind bus driver dropped her near the house, where I hovered fretfully,  harrowing my husband.   Also,  the boy blues resume, as he rails agains the fact that I have made him  join the school  computer club in return for X Box time.  "I mean I have to get down with  GEEKS"  he cries and I wonder who he sees when he looks in the mirror,  he  being an avid   fan of TV documentaries,  a keen reader of  factual tomes concerning wars, aviation,  true incidents of house hauntings (no, really) extra terestrials and such matters  on a loop (now kindly supplied by his stepfather from his own stash).

By Wednesday  it occurs to all our  young people that the Sky Tv service  is gone, replaced by Free to Air Saorbox.   "Its an economy" I  offer  to a wall of outraged faces.   "But... but I can't be without my programmes,"  utters the eldest tragically.    "What programmes?".  "Well I mean.....um.. um ".   "She means  Britains Next Top Model, and  America's Next Top Model too.... Oh and  Sixteen and Pregnant"  carols the boss.  My husband snorts.  "After all, we must prioritise. What if I were to lose my job. Then, the things that actually matter like piano lessons would have to go  ".   "WHAT!. I couldn't  LIVE  without my music" the tragic one  wailed.  "So..so  are you? Loosing your job I mean? Oh My God Are you or are't you?" . I tell her we must hope for the best, in this present climate,.

Later, I tried to explain to my husband  the difficulty of maintaining a sense of stability and predictability  for teenagers who  hack  a path through  a  hormonal snowstorm, whilst insisting they see the real world  that you, and one day they,  must negotiate.   The deprived one bounced into  the middle of this to ask,  with utter  insouciance,  if she might now  have  previously promised  money for clothes shopping on Friday, " while you still have it".  "And what's with the snorting" I asked my unimpressed spouse  (A cavan thing, perhaps?)

Anway, we are cold and tired.  We light  blazing  fires in the evenings to console ourselves and watch  television by the flickering, warming conflagration  of burning wood.  My husband gets a fire snapping and crakling in jig time, which he says is a fine Cavan attribute.  As is eyeballing people, calling a spade a spade  and some other nutty macho stuff.  (But he may be having me on).   He watches Homeland with me and I Breaking Bad with him.  Next door I hear the boy and his sister giggling rauctiously over the computer where they watch a spoof on Harry Potter  (god help us all).  "You really would not want to enquire too closely into that" I tell my Cavan cave man. But, after all,  basically, God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.  More or less. Yes.

Worms turning. Autumn becoming Winter.

Mid term break.  Boss and boy go west to spend the week with their father.   The older one, having declined to be shifted from bed and board, remains with us.   One true thing about Divorce is this;  

the infant parties affected will one day decline to pack up  teddy bear,  clothes and electronica 

and  present themselves to the party of the second part for his or her equal access, (  intensely fought  

for by same.)   The infant will hit puberty,  and,  having a say, will say this  "Hey, I am staying put, I  

am spending my free time with MY FRIENDS and,  if you want me,  you know where I am".   And             

who among us should blame them?   Soon we vote on a constitutional amendment to underpin   

children's rights.   The day indeed may come, my friends when  THE CHILDREN  get the house;  

the equal access,  the  visitation,  the split lives awarded  to the warring parties.

I take a week myself and spend it liberally,  like a  drunken sailor,  on shared  meals, movies,   

random trips across the country with my husband.   We go northwards where I witness the beautiful 

autumn transmogrify to bleak and arctic winter, as we drive.   Beautiful too in its way, if you have                                                                                                                                                                  the stomach for it.  The change is so abrupt that the  cold assaults your very bones, before you can 

adjust to it.  "Too soon" I tell my heart"s companion "its just too soon' and  wrap him round me 

like a blanket as we walk  a blackly winding Cavan road.