I HAVE always been a bit of an anxious Áine, but since becoming a parent, it is less a case of baseless fears and more a rational response to a world rife with hazards and imminent disaster.
While my natural default is to overthink, my husband would say that his natural default is to underthink, and I hope that our son’s disposition is to be found somewhere in the middle. Always a panicker, I have married a man so chilled out he once uttered the immortal line: ‘Julie, relax, it’s only a grill fire. There’s time there.’ What makes this more concerning is that Fred used to work as a lifeguard, but he constantly reminds me that even in emergencies, he never once dropped his coffee.
My anxieties are compounded by the fact I am pregnant and spend most of my day Googling potential crises. My latest searches include: Are Irish eggs pasteurised? Why are eggs pasteurised? What is pasteurisation? I am pregnant and just accidentally ate salami. What do I do? What is salami? Is pregnancy flatulence normal? How do I remove ingrown hairs? Hailey Bieber/Justin Bieber/Selena Gomez latest updates.
It’s fair to surmise that my brain is abuzz with finding problems where they don’t necessarily exist.
In the wee hours of a recent Saturday, the following happened...
I wake Fred up to ask if he is scared of tornadoes. He offers a muffled grunt in response but attempts to slumber on.
I lie on my back staring at the ceiling, thinking at speed when suddenly I let out a gasp. “I never broke up the eggboxes for the compost bin! I’m just nipping down now while I think of it.”
“Julie, it’s 3am,” Fred groans because he’s a divil for a clock.
“No time like the present,” I jolly along.
Under the duvet a voice pipes up: “Bottle?” (Yes, Ted is still in the bed with us, but that’s a whole other column).
Taking his empty bottle with me, I go downstairs and find the offending eggbox, vaguely recalling that the clocks are going forwards, backwards, sideways or something.
“Fred, what time is it actually, minus the clock thing?” I ask him upon my return.
“Julie, this is torture,” says Fred, his head buried under a pillow.
I hand the refilled bottle into a cluster of teddies, a tiny hand emerging to grab it and receding just as quickly.
“You know what, I’m up now, so I may as well start the admin,” I announce, opening up the laptop screen like a woman hellbent on fracturing her marriage beyond repair.
Looking up red latex catsuits that will fit my burgeoning pregnancy bump for my upcoming tour, I happen upon a story where a mountain lion attacked a Colorado man in a hot tub, and immediately Google whether or not mountain lions have ever been spotted in West Kerry (spoiler alert, not yet, but you can never be too careful).
Next, I read a problem page where a best friend’s fiancee told the bridesmaid that he was in love with her just days before the wedding in 2021, and the friend is still wrestling with whether or not to tell the wife. I scour the letter for anything pointing to the culprit being Fred but decide we’re safe enough when the fiancee is described as ‘having a well-paid job’.
Before shutting the laptop off, I fall foul of a clickbait article about kids vaping. After doing a five-minute deep dive on the issue, I become convinced that Ted is just a couple of years away from vaping his way to Montessori on an e-scooter. Lying awake, my brain is on overdrive.
“Fred,” I whisper.
“Yes, Julie,” Fred responds in a tone that begs for mercy.
“‘What if Ted ends up like me, worrying about everything and being too sensitive for stuff?”
“Julie, you worry too much,” Fred says.
“Sure, isn’t that what I’m saying,” I fire back.
There’s a pause, and then Fred speaks. “I hope Ted is like his Mammy because his Mammy has the biggest heart.”
I am just about to gush when Fred continues: “Such a big heart that she’s going to let Daddy sleep in in the morning”, ending on a cheeky “hee-hee’”.
I mentally pack stories about mountain lions and best friends’ fiancees away in the attic of my brain and start counting sheep in a bid to drift off. I soon begin to fret about the sheep and whether they get cold without wool. Somewhere between Selena Gomez and eggboxes, sleep comes. I conjure up visions of red latex suits and Justin Bieber waking me up for a bottle. If my subconscious tells us anything, it is that I am, if nothing else, a psychotherapist’s dream.
