Edel Coffey: Hangovers from life before children and a reminder life doesn’t have a reverse gear

"Of course, my lifestyle habits have changed dramatically... but I hadn’t really noticed the slow ebb of those expensive frivolities from my life"

Picture: Bríd O'Donovan

Sometimes life changes so gradually that you don’t even notice it. I was thinking of this last Monday morning as I pushed my shopping trolley around the supermarket. I bumped into a neighbour, the same age as me, with children the same age as mine. We chatted about our respective weekends and what we had done.

‘I went to a gala,’ she said and for a minute I thought, oh, how glamorous! I think images of the New York Met Gala were still floating around my brain like sunspots on my vision, but I quickly realised that she wasn’t talking about that kind of gala at all. Rather the other sort of gala, the one that Irish mams regularly attend with children.