Julie Jay: It's hard to hold down a job when 60% of my day is spent kissing Ted’s face

I would be lying if I said I haven’t questioned whether my expressions of love for Ted are a bit over the top, especially of late

This generation of children probably hears the words ‘I love you’ more than any other generation of Irish children who came before. Image: Vector illustration

I once grew a plant for a senior infants’ project. I remember repotting it and showering it with care, drowning it in over enthusiasm as I loved that plant to an early grave. I brought the sad, pathetic stump into school and felt even more despondent when forced to place it beside
its plant peers which were positively flourishing. Even the most annoying classmate at my table, who by his own admittance couldn’t have cared less about the fate of his flowery friend, had nurtured his plant to vegetative perfection.

Where had I gone wrong? “I think you watered it too much,” the teacher had noted. The takeaway made an indelible mark on my soul: I loved things with the kind of love that could only end in tears. Over the last two-and-a-half years, my full-on approach to parenting has elicited a wide range of comments from bystanders. There’s been the comforting “look how much your mammy loves you” to a slightly more loaded: “Surely, it isn’t good for a child to be kissed that much?”.