But, I knew I wasn’t supposed to. Since childhood I’ve had a vague sense of guilt when I do things I enjoy.

I’ve become a bit obsessed with this account, MILF etiquette. Fowler teaches women ‘how to be a milf so you don’t hate your life’. She argues that milf is an energy, it’s about creating a life that makes you want to fuck yourself. I love it. I’m hoping she writes a book.

The milf phenomenon is distinctly American. Mrs Robinson, Stacey’s mom. I remember watching American Pie with my parents and cringing at Stifler’s mom. These caricatures whose existence was purely to be objects of desire for young men. They were sexy because they were mothers. Taboo.

My own mother was in her thirties when I was in my teens, and the boys in my year delighted in telling me what they thought of how she looked. It used to annoy me that she wore makeup, had long bleached hair, dressed in an unmammylike way. Why couldn’t she be like the other mams? It seemed like she was the only mother who received unwanted attention. Most mothers I knew had their hair cropped, wore oversized clothes, made stew.

See, as an Irish woman, milf isn’t a thing. I wrote in Milk that while the US has milfs, Ireland has mammies.

I grew up in the Ireland of the Irish mammy. 1990s Catholic Ireland. Though I count myself lucky my family was secular, I did go to a Catholic school, and in a country that was steeped in shame. For most of the twentieth century, women who were seen as sexual were at risk of being institutionalized in a Magdalene laundry or Mother and Baby home.

Irish girls learn from a young age that wanting is wrong. But still, we were to be desirable. We live under a patriarchy. We’re to be desirable but not desire.

In my twenties I thought I’d shaken off a lot of that shame. I wore lowcut dresses, had casual sex, drank a lot. The battle was internal, but at least my public facing self was shameless. The thing was, I wasn’t behaving how I wanted any more than if I’d been in a convent. I was following impulses, chasing highs, and trying to appear shameless.

Motherhood brought it home to me that the role of shame for Irish women is still extremely present. Becoming a mother, my needs were not important, I had to sacrifice who I was on the altar of motherhood, like all the other mothers before me. I wasn’t just a mother. I was an Irish mammy.

To be full of desire, vitality, lust as an Irish woman, you’re already getting a whole heap of who does yourwan think she is. But if you’re a MAMMY?!

Mammies don’t WANT things. Mammies sacrifice. Irish mammies are supposed to be making fry ups and worrying too much and telling you which one of the neighbors is dead. Not having a life of their own!

How many Irish mammies does it take to change a lightbulb?

Oh it’s grand I’ll just sit here in the dark

The Irish mammy is somewhat of an institution in Irish culture. We can’t escape the loaded mother in Ireland. Mary. To embrace the milf would be tantamount to wondering what’s going on beneath those blue robes.

The young men of Ireland are famous for being Mammy’s boys. Raised on pints of milk, clips round the ear, and an awareness no woman will ever be good enough for them. The division of the female of the species into either Madonna or whore starts early.

Saying that, The Irish mammy is no Madonna. A formidable matriarch, she rules with an iron fist and wooden spoon. She’s not affectionate, you don’t go to an Irish mammy for a cuddle, but shows her love through devotion to domestic duties and streams of wisdom with a warning. She’s both ruler and martyr, her kitchen is her queendom, and her subjects inevitably emigrate and return for Christmas to heavy doses of mash and guilt.

She may not be Madonna, but she’s certainly not sexy. Ironic, seeing as she’s procreated at least once, though often up to fifteen times, which certainly implies there’s been some fucking going on. Marital Catholic fucking wasn’t about pleasure, but obligation. Why would a mother want to feel sexy in a contraception free world where every grope could potentially lead to yet another mouth to feed?

I was born in the nineties, became a mother in the teenies (I’m not sure if that’s what you call the 2010s but I like it). Contraception was certainly available. Neither my mother nor I were married when we got pregnant (my mother still isn’t, and I’m divorced). We both had one child. I never once ate cabbage and bacon for dinner as a child and neither has my son. All of those stereotypes of the mammy I’ve ignored without blinking. Why do I suspect this image of the mammy still influences my motherhood experience, and worse, my mothering itself?

This is not to shit all over the concept of the Irish mammy. She has many admirable qualities. Some of my fondest childhood memories are because of mammies. My grandmothers, of course. Both my mother’s mother, who stayed home with her children because of the marriage bar, and my father’s mother, who worked in factories from when she was 14 until she retired. Both makers of cosy homes that always had our favourite foods and drinks, crisp soft beds, and the tv remote swiped from reluctant grandfathers so the children could watch what they liked.

Our neighbour, who despite having eight kids of her own, always told me I was welcome, offered me dinner every day I came over to play (even though I’d eat at home, she never once forgot to offer over the near decade I visited that house on an almost daily basis). She was always full of praise and encouragement, sweeping brush in hand, the sweets locked in the boot of her car to keep them from the schemes of children. She was fierce and kind in equal measure.

There were countless women like this. Strong, funny, compassionate. When I think of them, I think of their roles as mammies. I don’t know what their interests were, their passions, their hobbies, their dreams. There was no space in society for a mammy to have a life of her own. This is what I feared when I saw myself as an Irish mammy. Not just for myself, but for my child.

The Irish mammy is both a figure of comfort and comedy. But there’s also a sinister quality to the expectation of life as an Irish mammy. The suffocating love of a mammy whose children are her whole world. Who did not hug her children, but also told them no woman would ever love them like she did. This more sinister expression of maternal love is what I believe is rooted in shame. When a woman’s whole life was built around not being sexual, but then becoming a mother. To see her own children go out into the world, surrounded by sin, tempted by sin, and to leave her home without her children to keep her busy.

I’ve been overly conscious of avoiding these qualities. I am loving in action, but also physically affectionate with my child. I want it to be normal to hug in our family. We keep shame out of our house as much as we can, always talking about the making mistakes, apologising when you do wrong, and encouraging our child not to see us as infallible. As my child gets older, I’m afraid of him growing up, there’s a grief to watching your baby become a child, knowing your child will become an adult, and possibly leave. But that fear is normal, mild, not crippling. I have my own life outside motherhood, and if I do a good job, my son won’t leave my life. Sure, he’ll move out, go to college. But I’m 33 and see my parents most days. The only mother who needs to cling onto her growing children is the one who has given them a good reason to not come back. This is the mammy that I was afraid of becoming.

Having my own life is good for my child as well as myself. But even when I know I shouldn’t feel guilty for having my own life, I do. Shame does this. It lies deep in us, overruling what we know by making us feel wrong.

I’ve realised that letting shame win isn’t just bad for me, it makes me a worse mother. Children learn by example. They do as we do, not as we say. If my son sees his mother shrink herself to a life of servitude, becoming resentful and irritable in the process, I’m teaching him that this is the role of a woman. He’ll expect to be served by women. He’ll think pleasure is something to feel bad about. In short, I’ll be perpetuating the intergenerational shame that I give out about so much.

It’s not enough for me to know shame is bad.

I have to live it.

I’m starting to suspect this is the permission I’ve been looking for all my life.

Why I love Milf Etiquette so much isn’t because I want to be a porn category. It’s because Fowler is talking about reclaiming the identity of mother, living as you want to, mothering as you want to, being a person you love being. She’s talking about living without shame.

Shame has no constructive role in our lives. Negative emotions do play important roles. I’m not pretending we should always be dancing about with a face full of chocolate and champagne.

Guilt helps us know when we’ve done wrong, and try to change our ways.

Fear can keep us safe from dangerous situations.

Embarrassment helps us decide when to modify our behaviour to exist in society.

Shame, this ingrained belief that we’re fundamentally wrong, does nothing except keep us malleable, and miserable.

If you’ve been following my online wanderings the last few months, you’ll know I’ve been figuring out my work/life after a period of serious burnout, getting an ADHD diagnosis, and navigating secondary infertility. Instagram played a big part in this. Using it to streamline my creative practice led me to the realisation that shame was holding me back in many areas of my life. It has all fallen together in several moments of clarity. I needed to streamline my work, both paid and creative, to have more time and money to sort out my health. I didn’t expect that it would streamline itself so naturally.

It has become, like my most beloved projects, an obsession. (Thankfully this obsession won’t take me on any boats.)

Shame, this thing that has ruled my life, needs to go. This country has put away thousands of people because of shame. Even more have lived in hesitation, sure they are wrong. So many lives not lived, stories not told, because of shame.

Shame is something I talk about all the time as a creative writing teacher. Mainly, working through it, giving ourselves permission to write. The majority of my students are Irish women, more often than not, mothers. The book I’m writing, Failure to Thrive, is about shame and Irish maternity care.

To write it, to teach it, to model it to my son, I have to live it.

I have to be shame-free. But it’s not just that I want to be shame-free, it’s that I want to do this as a mother. To fight the learned urge to sacrifice every part of myself to a version of motherhood my child never asked for. To be a person that I enjoy, and let my child know that person too.

There are parts of the Irish mammy that I hope to embody. I want my son to be able to tell me anything, to know I’ll always be on his side. I’m fierce when it comes to my family. Our home is a place of comfort and sustenance, a safe port. I will always treat any child in my house, whether my own, a friend of my son’s, cousins, neighbours, etc, equally. Any child here will be offered food and comfort and a place to feel at home.

But to take these aspects without the negative, I have to do away with the shame that’s so tightly woven to the concept of mother, of mammy.

We did not become mothers to become a stereotype.

The Irish mammy, this martyr over the stove, did she ever exist?

Did she want to live life the way she did?

Did anyone ever ask?

Sitting here typing in my wooly jumper, ignoring the laundry, I suspect this is what Peter Parker felt like when sewing the web across his new lycra suit. I’m still Alice, but from now on I am also a

Shame-free Mammy.

And I think you should be too.

It’s been a while since I wrote a book. A year since I was actively obsessively working on one. My work-in-progress, Failure to Thrive, sort of snuck up on me. I thought it was a poem, then an essay, then an exhibition. All I knew was that it was something. But I was struggling to find the time (and money!) to develop it.

I was looking for a breakthrough, which never actually results in a breakthrough. Mainly, I was just surviving.

Here are two posts in one. One that’s been in drafts since May, and one written today. There’s a bit of rambling, it’s a sprawling this, much like the project. I share them because I think it’s useful to see the growth and change behind a book, the doubts and failures, and what happens when things don’t go to plan.

May 2026

Writing a book is a private and secret act. Well, that’s what I thought. For all of my books to date, they have started quietly, alone, and with the exception of one (Wake of the Whale) no one but me knew they existed until there was a full draft.

Failure to Thrive, my current work-in-progress, has been a different experience. For a while now, I’ve been challenging my own preconceptions on form and what I’m making. Does it always have to be a book? Well, I’m a writer, surely a book is the primary goal. But there’s a looooong way between an idea and a book. And sometimes there’s more urgency, more flexibility, to a subject.

When I was researching this lecture on form I interviewed several writers about form. One such writer, William Keohane, talked about how performance can cater well to subjects which are more urgent, need to be communicated NOW. This really stuck with me. Performance isn’t my own go-to form, but I’ve enjoyed doing it at times. With the internet, there are so many other ways to perform work than on a stage.

I’m interested in the voices of others. In what people have to say about their experiences and what I can learn from them. One of the reasons I loved Miranda July’s All Fours so much was her use of ‘open sourcing’ (i.e. the narrator interviews friends and acquaintances on things like monogamy & menopause and shares these conversations). Isn’t this what women do? But for so long, especially where birth and motherhood are concerned, these conversations have happened in hushed tones over cups of tea, careful not to scare the next generation or be thought of as ungrateful.

Failure to Thrive isn’t a book, at least not yet. It may never be a book, because I’m not sure that’s the right form for it. What it is, for me, is an experiment.

It grew from a poem commission, which had a clear deadline. When I realised the subject I was examining was going to pull me much further than one poem, I had to figure out how to still fulfill my obligation on the commission. I could write a poem, send it off, and just quietly keep going with my own research. Or I could be honest and explain that what I was presenting was a work in progress, and hope that was acceptable. (Lucky for me, it was). A selection of the work was shared at the Institutions and Infant Care conference in May 2025 (You can see an early draft of the poem here https://www.institutionsandinfantcare.org/services-2-3-1)

More will be shared in October 2026.

But I can’t see Failure to Thrive ending there, or being finished as neatly as a book would be.

Instead of keeping my work quiet until the last minute and then TADA, big reveal! I want to share it as I go. Not to drip feed completed sections, but to let the sharing shape the work.

Already, this has changed what the project looks like.

I put a call out in November for personal stories and received hundreds of responses. Before this, the focus had been primarily historical, with my own voice and that of a handful of friends representing the modern day voices, but now, it’s clear that the voices of living women will shape the project more than anything else. Having a cutoff point for women to submit stories felt unfair, arbitrary, when it was clear there was appetite for a space to voice their experiences. So I started In Her Own Words.

The initial response was huge, but the replies petered out. People just weren’t seeing it. There were clearly hundreds of women who wanted to be involved, but I wasn’t providing a clear enough shape.

Things took another change when I started posting every day on Instagram. I set myself a challenge to do it for thirty days to see if I could grow my account a bit. Marketing as a writer is hard, the industry is… many things, and without putting myself out there I can’t really complain if no one reads my books.

So I set off posting away and feeling stupid. Then something started to shift. These posts, these tiny stories, the thematic threads, it all felt familiar.

I’ve published memoir, poetry, hybrid books, I’ve done shows, and now I have an exhibition coming up. I LOVE experimenting with form. I started wondering, could Instagram be a form? Could I try a little experiment?

I’m writing this in May 2026. I won’t publish it now. I think I’ll save it until closer to the end. I wonder if there’ll be results when I open this.

Never before would I have dreamed of publishing something so uncertain, so dependent on participation, something that could so easily fail. This is a new step for me as a writer. A leap of faith, that this project will find its feet while on full show, and be all the stronger for it.

August 2026

Well, that didn’t go to plan. Which, I suppose, was the plan?

I didn’t imagine that throwing myself into being visible online would result in the sort of revelations I’d usually spend a therapist hundreds of euros to reach.

I set out posting every day, talking about the project and my intentions. I even published an article about it in The Irish Times (which I really didn’t expect to do).

Sounds good, so, how did it not go to plan?

Failure to Thrive was due to be exhibited in October 2026. Through circumstances beyond everyone’s control, that deadline was moved until 2027. I was quite relieved. Writing this summer, and sharing on Instagram as I went, was certainly interesting, but it did not result in a finished project. It did, however, help me understand the project, my work, and myself.

Firstly, it is a book. While there are visual elements, and an installation that’s all but ready to go, I’m a writer. Words are the core. Form will be experimental, definitely, but it will be a book.

Secondly, Instagram is not the place to publish a book. While sharing segments and writing thematically linked posts is useful, I don’t want to condense the work itself to fit on a carousel.

Thirdly, it can’t be done in a summer. At least, not to the level I’d like. When I started the experiment in May, I thought I knew the extent of the personal and historical aspects of the work. I figured Instagram would just be looking at the community voices that will be included in the work. But my own reluctance, discomfort even, when it came to posting, to being seen, made me tackle my own relationship with shame.

Fourthly, shame, I realised, was the core of this book. Shame, in fact, has been a major feature in my life.

Before starting this experiment, I’d been quite burned out and overwhelmed trying to manage paid work, creative work, and life. My health was all over the place (PMOS, ADHD, fertility stuff). I needed to streamline, and had been slowly cancelling things that weren’t essential for a few months. But it was sharing on Instagram (I know, I know) that gave me the clarity to make the moves I needed. I quit my regular teaching work, said no to lots of opportunities, and launched my own workshops, all thematically linked to the project.

If I can make a living from these workshops, I can continue to write the book. It’s as simple as that. That’s a thought that had terrified me for too long, and stopped me from even trying. Despite working as a creative writing teacher for twelve years, going out on my own was too overwhelming.

I was sure I’d fail.

and failure wasn’t an option, because it wouldn’t be the failure of a project, it would be the failure of myself.

Shame. This belief that there was something wrong with me. I thought I’d overcome it. Facing being visible online, really trying to do what I want to do, made me address this.

I thought about shame, about the memoir aspect of this story, and why I was reluctant to look at it. It was about maternity care, and I’d already written a maternity book… If I wrote again, I’d have to address my fertility issues, and I didn’t know if I wanted to do that. But, why not? When it’s relevant, and not talked about enough? Did a part of me blame myself for my infertility?

I told you, I saved hundreds in therapy bills with this experiment.

Building a project in public involves lots of small failures. It’s been rather liberating.

Ireland’s history with shame is long and bloody. As is my own. I talk about shame with students often. It’s something that prevents us from writing, from sharing our stories, from living fully.

Instagram is still playing a role in the writing of this book. I’m using it to reach people, to spread shamelessness, and in particular to grow In Her Own Words.

In Her Own Words has become the part of the project that’s demanding the most of my attention. Because as much work as I have to do on the historical and the personal, it is the voices of women living today that are most important for me now.

I want to talk a little bit more about that aspect of the project.

My own maternity care experience made me feel crazy. Was I unreasonable? Why had I found it so difficult? Why did my notes not feel like they reflected my memories?

Only talking to other new mothers did I realize I wasn’t weak or wrong, I was one of many. I wrote a book about my own experience and I thought I was done with the topic. But every time I dealt with the HSE it came back. The constant struggle to be heard, the kind exhausted staff who would widen their eyes in understanding but ultimately had their hands tied, the feeling that if I wasn’t confident to the point of being bullish I’d be ignored.

As a writer, I do a lot of work in archives and history. There are always voices missing. Researching institutions, it’s the patients’ voices missing. Even when there are quotes, they come via a doctor’s notes, a doctor who decided what to record and what to omit. These are all 100+ year old records (you can’t access any more recent as a researcher) and yet it felt very familiar.

Because records, archives, how they are made and kept, is as relevant now as it was a hundred years ago.

That’s what I want to do with In Her Own Words. To create a living archive of mother’s voices. I’ve received hundreds of emails and DMs. Women who are in shock, angry, grieving, determined, excited, heartbroken, scared, hopeful. More than once women told me they’d been trying for years to write it down but hadn’t quite felt able. This helped me realised that not everyone who’d like to share has had the opportunities I have had.

So rather than just being a platform for these stories, I want to create a space for women to write and share. To do what the project is about, not just write it.

I’ve held two free workshops so far, they’ve been wonderful.

I’ll do more of the free workshops, and come September, I’m going to host a monthly co-writing hour for mothers.

While these words and this part of the project won’t be a part of the book exactly, it feels right to do this work alongside the writing of it. Because the book is about voices not heard and shame. I can write about that all I like, but is it not more effective to create a space to directly tackle shame?

Driving along yesterday, rain pouring in a way that tells me summer is over, I finally had the breakthrough I’d stopped looking for.

The one that made me know Failure to Thrive is a book.

Maybe I should have known it was a book for a long time. I think I was afraid to admit it. If I wrote another book, it would be a book that could fail. It would be hours of unpaid work and obsession. It would be something else that could go wrong.

Growing it online, all the conversations that have come from it, the zoom sessions and emails… I know it’s an important project. A book may not happen, but I’ll only find out by writing it.

I won’t be writing it in 3 months, nor will I share it as I write it online like I’d planned. But I’ll keep building the project online, especially In Her Own Words, and I’ll write it in those co-writing hours with other mothers, because surrounded by women who are carving out time to tend to their own creativity I know I won’t forget why I’m doing it.

p.s.

if you’d like to join any of the In Her Own Words workshops you can join the mailing list here

Today, I’ve removed paid subscriptions from my substack completely. I won’t be bringing them back.

When I paused them last year it was because I found the pressure to write and publish regularly too much. I thought it was because I’m a slow writer, but I’m not really, when I put my mind to it I can easily turn over a book a year. It’s the regularity of it that I can’t hack. I write cyclically, in generative bursts, constructive streaks, and slow revisions. I take fallow periods to rebuild my creative foundation. Churning out monthly finished pieces was not working for me. Removing the pressure helped enormously. I was able to publish an essay a month without agonising over it. So why did I unpause them at all?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my career this year. Substack looked like it could be another string to my professional bow. It worked for many peers, who built communities and paid their bills here.

For years now I’ve been cobbling together a living from writing, teaching, commissions, and grants. My own creative work took a backseat to admin, and more concerningly, so did my family life.

When you grow up without money, you’re always aware of it. I’ve always known that I needed to make my own way in the world financially. There’d be no inheritance or connections. I’m perfectly happy with that, what my family lacked in cash they more than made up for in being present, supportive, and now as an adult in childcare! I’m incredibly fortunate.

What I have only begun to figure out is how to bet on myself professionally. My base assumption has always been ‘you won’t make any money’. Some sort of in built preparation to fail to protect myself from pain. Ah, introspection is a wonderful thing. Even now, twelve years into teaching, earning my own money, having been published by a big five publisher, I’m still shocked every time an invoice is paid. This mindset was keeping me on the breadline. I’d say yes to all work that came my way. Worked for a much lower rate than I should have for my experience and skillset. Ran myself into the ground to keep afloat. I’d never hosted my own workshops, always going through a provider who handled the booking and money, sending an invoice at the end and waiting patiently.

I’m not sure what changed this year exactly. Probably a few things. Getting an ADHD diagnosis, finalising my divorce, and reaching a stage in my mothering that I feel confident and comfortable with has made me rethink how I want my career to look. I’ve been streamlining, and doing what I’ve never felt able to do before, turning down work.

I’ve quit my regular teaching gig, as it was in the evenings, and have thrown everything into building my own courses that I can teach online.

I hosted my first one last month, and it went better than I expected. Not only did I get paid double my previous fee (even though participants were paying less than they would be when I do IRL workshops), the quality of the workshop was higher than I’ve pulled off before. These people were trusting me with their time and money. I was determined to do my absolute best. I made a PDF of notes to go with the workshop. We covered heaps in two hours. It was a small group, and people had the chance to ask questions and share their work. This is what one of the participants had to say afterwards:

“Alice’s workshops are a breath of fresh air. She is warm, welcoming and reassuring. She guides you to find subject matter to write about and within a series of prompts you’ll have a plethora of beginnings to go back to and expand. An excellent workshop to do if you’re feeling a bit stuck, it will stretch the writing muscles and set you up to continue with confidence.”

ANYWAY. What has this got to do with Substack?
Instagram, strangely, was also integral to this change. I did this post every day challenge and had some huge revelations around my relationship with shame. Shame and fear have held me back, both creatively and professionally (let’s not even start on personally). When I kept the paid tier for my substack, it was to keep my writing private. WHY!?

Yes, I think writers should be paid for their work. I’m putting a lot of work into building a more predictable career with less faffing and scrabbling. When I picture what that might look like, a substack subscription is not a part of it. I want my writing to be accessible, including my intimate writing that I was afraid to share. If someone wants to support my work financially, there are lots of ways to do that. Mainly, buying my books, or taking my workshops. ( You can checkout what I currently have on offer here or signup to my mailing list here for future offers). You can also post me cash in an envelope, the Irish postal system is great so just send it to Alice Kinsella Writer Mayo and I guarantee it’ll get here. Kidding, well don’t post me cash but the postal system would 100% deliver something to that address.

wrote an incredible article recently about turning off her paid subscriptions. Substack is yet another tech bro platform happy to champion arseholes. In an ideal world, none of us would need social media, but that’s not the world we live in right now. Working within the system, not giving them a cut of your income is a small act of rebellion. Hell to the yes.

I’m not saying I’ll never revisit the subscription or membership model, but for now I’m focusing on high quality workshops, developing a group programme (doing the pilot this autumn which is very exciting and scary), and using substack to explore ideas, meet new people, and read!

Watching it in my thirties is a different experience. It’s still fun, but I’m seeing it slightly differently now. Well, no, I’m not seeing it differently, but I’m not feeling it in the same way because the cognitive dissonance of that period in my life is gone.

For those not familiar with the show, it centres around the disappearance of a 15 year old mean girl and the aftermath, when her four friends are harassed by an anonymous stalker. Typical murder mystery, right? Not quite. There’s loads to love about the show, the characters are great, the plot isn’t predictable (though there are some serious plot holes as the show goes on), and there are some intense romantic storylines that keep you hooked.

One of these romances is between a 16 year old and her English teacher. Surely, this would be a story of abuse? Nope! It’s the love story that had fans rooting for them, complete couple goals. I was one of the obsessed fans.

By day, I was studying English Literature. Just your average feminist psychoanalysis loving, opinion having, student. By night, I sucked up every bit of the drama of this show and loved it. Sure, I knew in real life a teacher fucking his 16 year old student was criminal, but it wasn’t like that. It was so romantic.

In the show, the main (murdered) character Alison is shown to have a dark history of affairs and secrets. At 14/15, she used the pseudonym Vivienne Darkbloom, reads Lolita, and has multiple flings with older men. Throughout the show, the girls have relationships with men in their twenties, some shown as shocking (aforementioned teacher) but more often it’s a doctor, police officer, some other random professional who thinks nothing of dating a 16 year old.

None of them were all that shocking at the time. I suspect this is in part because the actresses in the show were in their twenties. They didn’t speak or act like teenagers. They had their own schedules, firmly developed characters, and hair and fashion senses of professional women. Would the story have been any less compelling if these women were in college? I don’t see how, except the lack of the shock factor and ‘interfering’ parents. But would the appeal be the same?

Pretty Little Liars was made on the foundation of a culture that fetishised young girls. Bodies of women, the agency of a child. So beautiful. So powerless. The fact that the majority of teenage girls don’t have the bodies of women was lightly skipped over by hiring adults to play teenagers. If we saw enough 25 year olds protraying 16 year olds, we’d just start thinking that’s what 16 year olds really looked like.

I developed early. I know, that sentence makes my skin crawl. By 11 the moms of school friends were remarking on my chest. I was known as the girl with the tits until I became known as the girl with the anger issues. While physically below the neck I could pass as an adult at 16, I had a moony baby face and, most importantly, the brain, of an adolescent.

00s culture has been well documented as damaging the people who grew up in it. Size zero, Britney in a school uniform, tabloid culture, Bridget Jones being ‘fat’ at a size 10. I don’t know any millennial women it didn’t effect. By university, I was learning about feminism and all the ‘woke nonsense’ that I’d come to built my life’s work on. I was realising how being perceived as an object had shaped how I saw myself. I knew that I shaved my legs and my pubic hair because I thought that’s what men wanted. I knew I had an unhealthy relationship with my body. I knew that women were judged for things that men didn’t even think of. And I still watched shows like Pretty Little Liars.

I’ve always been fascinated with cognitive dissonance. Knowing something’s bad but doing it anyway. It’s a fundamentally human quality. We all do things we know are wrong. Because we’re more than our surface consciousness, we’re informed by our bodies, our instincts, beliefs we don’t realise we hold.

Pretty Little Liars is one of so many films and shows and books that centre the experience of teenage girls that don’t really seem like teenage girls. What Pretty Little Liars does differently is acknowledging it. By referencing Lolita and including storylines of sexual relationships with older men the show itself has a kind of cognitive dissonance to it. There’s a recurring motif of dolls, the girls themselves being doll like. There are toys and sleepovers, emphasising that the girls are children. But it stops short of criticising the culture on which it is founded. Because it also presents these girls as women. Throw as many dolls on set as you like, they still have the speech, mannerisms, social lives, and bodies of women.

It’s not unlike porn. People watch all sorts of things in porn. Incest, assault, teenagers fucking their teachers. Normal people watch these knowing that the people are actors, they’re not really brother and sister, not really teenagers, it’s a fantasy made to fulfill a desire. We also know that the porn industry is riddled with exploitation, but tuck that away because…well, we want to watch porn.

Watching the show at 21, thinking was my full time job. I could see the flaws, but what I wanted overwhelmed my reason. I enjoyed the references to To Kill a Mockingbird and Lolita. It made me feel clever. I could relate to it. These clever girls who wanted so much. I knew they weren’t really like teenagers, but I’d always thought I wasn’t like the average teenager because I was more mature than average (spoiler: show me a teenage girl who doesn’t feel more mature than average). Even while being somewhat aware of the innate sexism of the representation of these girls, I ate up the show, because I wanted to be as beautiful and together as them, I wanted to have intense romantic relationships that broke the rules of society, I wanted to be what society told me I should be.

As with porn, we want what we’re told to want. We know that watching porn changes your sexual preferences over time. Our desires are influenced by what we’re surrounded with growing up. So many women talk about only discovering their sexual preferences and desires in their thirties and forties because they grew up learning to only think of how to be attractive not to question what they’re attracted to.

How many of us now, women in our thirties and forties, are still hanging on to beliefs that were layered on us as young people? Know about pay gaps and healthcare gaps, about how women are treated differently for the same behaviour, are expected to visually present differently, and yet still play by those rules because it makes our life easier and because there’s a part of us that automatically blame ourselves for, well, everything.

I’m enjoying this show more on the rewatch. The silly plot. The twists. The jokes. Because I’m not watching it and longing to be different, to be better, to be more. I no longer want to be a size 8 and have a dramatic affair with a bad boy with a heart of gold. I don’t see myself in the show, but I’m still enjoying it. That makes me suspect I haven’t completely shed the cognitive dissonance of the culturally aware but overly sexualised millennial woman. Maybe I’ll never be free of it. Change happens slowly. If Gen Z watch the show and are appalled, at least change is happening in the right direction. At least, I hope so.

Oh, just in case there’s any doubt that the show is a big clever challenge to your beliefs, in the end the English teacher marries his former student.

You gotta make the thing.

You gotta get the thing out there.

Make the Thing. Writing takes time. And writing is more than just writing. Exploring ideas, experimenting, this stuff takes TIME and time is money.

I love my work, but I wouldn’t call hybrid poetry nonfiction particularly profitable.

I got a decent advance for Milk. I mean, I’m not going to do the math because I’m pretty sure it would work out at like .50 cent an hour work wise, but by industry standards it was very decent. I also have had success with arts grants and the rest comes down to budgeting and grit.

If you’re lucky enough to get financial support or find write in the margins of paid work, you Make the Thing.

But then, you gotta GET THE THING OUT THERE.

What’s not mentioned is the producing work most artists do for free.

Events, marketing, tours, grant applications.

Let me tell you, grants are NOT sustainable. They’re gratefully received, but can’t be depended on. It’s gambling, because you can do everything right and still be rejected with the explanation ‘we didn’t have enough money’ which is exactly what killed the best thing I’ve ever worked on.

Wake of the Whale, a hybrid book of poetry and nonfiction about whaling, was conceived of with a live event in mind. We published the book first, then started the process of making the live show. If I’d thought releasing a book involved a lot of unpaid work, live events are a whole other kettle of fish.

Grants, social media, producing work, a million tiny tasks all unpaid. But for this project I was willing to do it. Because it wasn’t just my story, Wake of the Whale looked at a rural community, brought voices from the past & now together, & asked what we might learn going forward.

Look, I’m FULL of self doubt, but when I tell you…we had an amazing story, state of the art tech, and one of the best musicians in the country.

I’ve never had a project so well received fail to get funding so many times. We got shortlisted again and again and again. I threw so much time at it.

Eventually we got the perfect application together, this took months, and we ended up being disqualified over a technicality. (I’m not exaggerating, it was one missing figure in a massive document but… another time…)

I was so disappointed because of all the people I’d let down.

The community who’d given their stories, photos, and time for this story. The artists who’d worked for very little. The advice and time. This story wasn’t just mine & that made the obstacle so much harder to take.

So we were sitting there 3 years after starting, still not having done a full show.

I was thinking why did I have to go so obscure & niche, I should have stayed in my lane, gone the proper route. But I was just used to blaming myself. I HAD done that, jumped the hoops, hat out for funding, and when I needed it to most, it hadn’t worked.

Everyone I knew in the arts was having the same crisis.

I thought there must be another way of doing this.

This was about a year ago. I was severely burned out. I was doing promo for my poetry collection, scheduling events, and trying to figure out if this rejection meant the end of the project. It was the hardest I’d taken one of these things. I felt like I’d let so many people down. I was vowing not to do any more shot in the dark projects.

The thing was, while I was burning out over unpaid producing work, I’d been commissioned to write this poem about Infant care in twentieth century institutions. Amazing! Write a poem, get paid, done! That’s how it should be. Oh, Alice, you fool. It’s never like that.

It grew waaaay beyond the commission. I became obsessed. I talked to people about the subject, heard some heartbreaking stories, came across chilling information. I knew how long a project like this would take & how little money it would make.. but I knew there was something important here.

Then that Big Rejection for Wake of the Whale came, and I couldn’t afford to spend time on an unpaid project or the time to apply for funding all over again. I had to accept this just wasn’t going to happen. I tried to forget about it.

But then six months later… I got an email inviting me to exhibit this work at a gallery in October 2026. Was this an opportunity I could walk away from? Or was I going to burn out again trying to do it all to make art?

I didn’t even realise it had been submitted (there was, as always, a benevolent woman behind this). As exhausted and burned out as I was, I’d gotten even more of a community response from this project than I had from Wake of the Whale. I knew it was an important story.

I couldn’t turn it down.

But I needed time to Make the Thing. Which was going to be a LOT of time. And time is money. I applied for a tiny materials grant, but couldn’t face going for bigger ones, I KNEW that the time & energy trying to get this thing funded would take would eat into time I could actually be Making the Thing.

When we got the rejection for Wake of the Whale I’d thought, if we’d just gone the DIY route, done it cheaply ourselves. It wouldn’t have been perfect but we’d have had it on stage & wouldn’t be as burned out.

So when this came up, I figured I’ve thrown out rule books when it comes to the form of my work, to how they’re published. Maybe I could do that again, in a different way this time.

If I was going to DIY this project it could very easily turn into me doing it ALL again.

The only way I’d manage to do this unpaid was by giving all of my very limited free time to it. But spending all the time Making the Thing, I was going to turn around in October having done zero Getting it Out There and only have my partner there to see it.

With This project, part of it involves community voices, so I needed to be Making it and Getting it Out There somewhat simultaneously. An added layer of producing work and time. I was looking at community centers and WhatsApp groups, spending hours in libraries and archives. If I had a team of people it would still be tight. (And I did not have a team).

Then inspiration struck, from the last place I expected. I did a challenge on Instagram, posting every day for 30 days to try to connect with more people. I’m a writer, I want people to read my work. Part of being a writer these days is doing a good chunk of your own marketing, and not utilising this way to reach potential readers was surely stupid.

I started to think about the creativity involved in it, to play around with ideas of form again. I’ve gone down so many different avenues of getting art to audiences before: book, video, stage….and I like experimenting. Maybe social media could be the answer here? Not just as a way to present a finished piece, but to be part of the process.

Could this be an accessible way to tell a good story, platform voices, reach people who’d never hear of a project like this otherwise? A way to Make the Thing AND Get the Thing Out There. Without burning myself to the ground?

So I’m breaking all the rules for being a proper writer. I’m going to make this project on Instagram. It may work. It may burn down my career. But I know that I can’t do it all without sacrificing both the art and myself.

If you want to follow the journey, you can do so here

My writing life has always come in fits and starts. DO IT ALL, fall down, repeat. I’ve only recently begun to understand why.

Our society encourages a mind body disconnect. This is especially true for women. We’ve been taught that physical symptoms have no impact on our mental state, and that’s just not true. I write quite a bit about how motherhood forced me to become more aware of the connection between the mind and body. I have ADHD and PMOS, and these diagnoses have helped me understand just how much I’d been operating in a way that ignores my body.

I had no idea I had ADHD when I wrote any of my books. I suspected I had PMOS, but couldn’t get a diagnosis.

I can’t tell you how long I spent beating myself up for not writing every day, or worse, writing every day only for half of it to be useless and leaving me too empty to write when I should have the energy?

Before I was a mother, I’d just stay up late, work all at once then slob about for three days. Motherhood put a stop to that. I was all over the place, felt like I wasn’t getting anything done, mood up and down.

In my thirties I got my ADHD diagnosis and realised the cyclical nature of burnout and hyperfocus. AND how it’s affected by hormones.

With the PMOS diagnosis I was put on medication which helped regulate my cycle a little and I realized that the periods of low mood or anger or general dysregulation weren’t random at all, they were tied to my hormones. But without a predictable cycle it had seemed random and more likely to be some kind of mood disorder (yay for a medical system based on the male body!)

Once I started paying more attention to energy levels and mood at different times in my cycle things for sure got a bit easier. What I only clocked recently was that my writing needed to be synced to my cycle too. That my writing could not be the same every day.

With my creative writing students I always talk about the different phases of the first draft of a writing project. inspiration, flow, draft and edit. I loosely break them into: foundation, generation, construction, destruction.

Foundation: this is going on all the time, in the books you read, the memories you make, the films you watch, looking after your body, spending time with loved ones. You make your own raw materials here.

Generation: you’ve got the ideas coming, inspiration sparking, you only need to be jotting down notes.

Construction: you have a bit of a clearer idea of what you’re writing, but you’re still writing ONLY, DO NOT TAKE ANYTHING AWAY. This is where you’re going to find the flow state.

Destruction: this is when you’re editing yourself (I still think of this as a first draft but ydy). You’re looking at your work as a reader might, asking does what I’ve written match what I want to say?

These require different parts of your brain AND different energy levels. I’d been working to this model for years, but it was only when medication regulated my menstrual cycle that I realised how they could line up.

If I’d gotten a diagnosis a bit earlier my writing life may look very different. Because I’d been writing to a model that was made for men without domestic and care duties and had male bodies.

I’m a writer, I take this seriously, I work more than forty hours a week once balanced out across the year. Because I’m also a woman and a woman’s body does not run on a 9-5 40 hour work schedule, and fitting my work around my body and not the other way around is vital to producing good work and, more importantly, not slowly breaking down.

I’ve made a free PDF guide on this subject, which you can get here

Well, no. Because it might just read as oversharing, but a woman writing about her body can be political. If anything, it’s inherently political. And as an Irish woman, there are very specific reasons for this.

Let’s go back a bit.

District Asylums built in the early 19th century when Ireland was still under British rule. They were set up to cure society of the ‘lunatics wandering at large’ and with an aim of curing people and reintroducing them back into society. People who cared about the mentally ill, especially the vast number of ‘paupers’ who couldn’t afford care, campaigned for these asylums. Noble intentions! It was also handy to try out these things in Ireland before rolling it out in mainland Britain…ANYWAY, initially the asylums were good, progressive even, people needed help. But in 1838 the Dangerous Lunatics Act was brought in and this changed everything.

The Act meant: anyone could be committed by anyone else. No professional qualification needed. No proof. Accusation was enough.

People ended up in institutions for many reasons, genuine mental illness was only one of them.. Asylums became a place to get rid of inconvenient people. Being in one was associated with being a ‘dangerous lunatic’. They were overcrowded dismal places.

By the 1950s Ireland had the highest level of inmates per population in the WORLD. And remember, if we’re just talking about women, mental asylums were only one of the institutions you could end up in. There were also the Magdalene laundries (for fallen women) and the mother and baby homes where an estimated 57000 women and children were kept in the name of decency.

Shame and stigma didn’t come from nowhere. Institutions (and throw in good old Catholicism. Madness a punishment for sin. The ‘Fallen’ woman.)

It was the INDIVIDUAL who was bad rather than seeing their circumstances in context.

We can’t just blame church and state. These institutions were economically beneficial to localities. They created jobs. They were a convenient place to put inconvenient family members. For a long time people didn’t want them closed.

The stigma around the institutions can’t be overstated. Remember for most of the 20th century we were a poor country. We’d only just gotten independence. People couldn’t afford to have their child be marked as unmarriageable, unemployable. You depended on your community, being an outcast wasn’t an option. Who would want their loved one ending up institutionalised?! Who would admit to mental health difficulties if they could avoid it?

Change in Ireland happened very quickly and inconsistently.

The last mother & baby home closed in 1998. The asylums gradually declined in use until the early 21st century, replaced with care in the community and famously lacking services.

We also had law changes around divorce, contraception, abortion & the cultural shifts around sex, religion, mental health. We went from being an underdeveloped nation, rejected by the EEC(now EU) in 1961, to being accepted by the EEC in 1973, and to the Celtic Tiger, the economic boom of 1995-2007. We went from poverty and shame to sun holidays and multiple mortgages in less than a generation, and it was not a smooth or complete transition.

We still have intergenerational attitudes of shame and fear around mental and reproductive health.

Abortion was only legalised in 2019. We’ve had IT’S OK NOT TO BE OK and huge pushes for more honesty around mental health, but we also KNOW there’s eff all support available which hardly encourages being vocal.

Next time you think why does that woman think I care about her period? Wouldn’t she cop on?

Remember that the shame that has been tied to Irish women’s bodies for so long

And we only need to look across the Atlantic to see how quickly progress can be reversed.

So yes, it’s period chat, but it’s always more than period chat. We have to remember the privilege we have now and also use it for good. Yes talking loudly about women’s health and mental health while knowing people may think you’re mad is a radical post-colonial act and until we have fit for purpose healthcare I’m going to keep on shouting about my hormones, my body, my cycles, my moods. Are you?

I’m a freelancer. I write, edit, teach, mentor. Several connected bows that just about make up a livable income. But that’s meant working evenings, sometimes weekends, irregular hours and getting a routine in place is just not feasible. I’ve been working on streamlining paid work, changing things so that I can be more predictably at home. One difficult decision I’ve made is to quit teaching in person in the local arts centre where I’ve taught every Tuesday for the last few years. I love it, but it gets me home after bedtime, and since getting my ADHD diagnosis last year and starting medication, I find that by 6pm the best of my work brain has long clocked out. For the first time in my life I’m trying to build my life around my needs and not the other way around.

I’m moving my work online. Have set up a business that will mean I can offer my services at affordable prices while setting my own hours. I’m good at my job, but I’m not good at business so there’s been a lot of learning. If it works out, I’ll still be working 40+ hours a week, but may actually be able to do it from home, not be constantly pitching and hustling for new opportunities, and be confident that what I’m offering clients and students is my absolute best.

Parallel to the business, I’m using instagram to try to streamline my creative work. To spend the time I have on actually creating work and not hustling for grants and submissions etc etc etc.

I’m trying to see these months of unpaid work as an investment in our family’s future, and desperately hoping it doesn’t all go tits up.

The day to day of this has looked like a lot of reading about tech stacks and website building and Instagram. Writing and planning and a huge amount of thinking. The long weekend was a welcome break from that, but I was eager to get back to the full day I had planned Tuesday. A day to film videos, schedule posts, finally learn how flodesk works.

I got up early, made school lunch, had a shower. Wrapped in a towel, I heard dogs barking. We don’t have dogs. Our neighbour does though. Two lovely if excitable creatures that KEEP BREAKING INTO OUR GARDEN and have nearly killed our cats on more than one occasion.

I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say it involved me in bare feet, holding up a towel of modesty in one hand, and a dog lead in the other, while making the low volume threats any mother who’s seen her babies under threat will be familiar with. Our cats hid under the car, we evicted the muts, and I got dressed for the school run.

When we got to the school and I’d sent my child in, happily oblivious to the morning drama, I rang my partner to ask if the cats had come in yet. He said no. A thought occurred to me so suddenly I tried to brush it off, I’m no stranger to intrusive thoughts, anxiety, especially when my adrenaline is high. What if they’d hidden in the engine? Just as I thought it, I saw a furry leg sticking out from under the car. Still outside the school, I did my best not to collapse. My poor babies. They’d hidden in the car and would have died a horrible death.

Then a head popped out too. I burst into laughter and tears simultaneously. One of our older cats (she’s only 4, but we have 7 month old kittens too) climbed out into the carpark. I scooped her up, settled her, and popped her in the car. I rang my partner back and told him.

‘Who else is missing?’

‘Both of the kittens.’

I knew I had to check. I popped the bonnet, terrified. By some miracle, one of the kittens was curled up, shaking like a leaf but completely unharmed. I put him in the car. No sign of his brother.

I drove at a snail pace the whole way home, sure his brother must have fallen out on the drive, sure I’d see him dead on the road. But there was no sign.

At home I shook all over, fed the (completely unphased) cats. I wasn’t crying, but my heart was racing, my skin was cold. There was nothing I could do to find the other kitten. He could be anywhere between our house and town, a fifteen minute drive. Just as I was about to get back in the car to go looking he strolled in through the cat flap. I burst into tears and didn’t stop sobbing for an hour.

This may all sound overly dramatic. They’re just cats, right? But I’ve always taken my pets’ welfare to heart, felt responsible for them, seen them as the dependent and often stupid creatures that they are. But they were all fine, I could get to work for the day.

Only, I couldn’t. I was shaking all over, couldn’t get warm. My head was foggy. My heartrate wouldn’t seem to go down.

By lunchtime I’d completely given up on work. I tried to nap. Not a chance. My body was stuck in a state of SOMETHING BAD IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN and only time would fix it.

It got me thinking about the years I spent with a serious anxiety problem. Distorted thinking that effected my every day. Someone I loved was getting in the car? They were going to crash. A phone call unanswered? Dead. Irrational, yes, but at that time my brain got stuck in a loop of complete conviction that this was the truth. Until something bad had been proved not to have happened, it both had happened and hadn’t happened.

How on earth did I live like that for so long? Now, with one morning of high stress, I could barely function. I felt sick, like I needed to sleep for ten hours, like my brain needed a wash. And that used to be me every day?

I don’t know the science of it. I can only compare it to a kind of hangover. A spiking of adrenaline and cortisol and the subsequent physical effects. (Ok, I googled it just now, apparently it’s called an emotional hangover!)

I was, like so many women, given a general anxiety disorder diagnosis. I know now that this was caused by undiagnosed ADHD, hormonal complications which effect ADHD. I was running on a state of constant overwhelm, never recovering fully, always a step away from code red panic level. And I just kept going, for years. There were eventually slow recoveries, removing myself from situations that triggered the panic (like, you know, caring about people). Eventually, after motherhood taught me that turning off emotionally wasn’t actually the cure all I thought it was, I got my ADHD diagnosis and began to piece it all together.

Now, when something does cause that reaction, it feels close to the edge I lived on back then. More in tune with my body, I know to give myself time to recover, not to let the disordered thinking slide back into the tracks it wore deep into my brain.

This morning, five of our six cats were happily curled on the bed when I left for the school run. I was thinking of the work I had to catch up on.

We turned onto the main road, and within a minute, I saw a dead cat.

Not our cat, not our cat, I told myself. The markings did look similar…but my brain was just primed for it after yesterday. My brain with its habit for jumping to the worst conclusion to try and prepare me, to keep me from being shocked.

At the school, I rang my partner and asked him to check, just in case…

He rang back. It was her. Our beloved Lola. What were the chances? After yesterday?

I cried my way home. A deep sadness taking hold. It was different from yesterday, possibly because I know this wasn’t my fault, couldn’t have been avoided. Or because the answer came quickly. My body didn’t go into fight or flight. It didn’t try to change the outcome. All it did was accept the heartbreak and be terribly sad.

This all just happened today. I’m not usually one to write and post immediately. But I found a strange urge to share this today. Maybe making a narrative of something makes it easier for me to process, maybe I just can’t take the sadness without trying to shove some meaning onto it. There’s no meaning to be found in Lola’s death. She was our pet, we loved her, we’re heartbroken.

Sometimes extremely shit things happen, and any sort of plans we have go out the window. I’m grateful to be freelance and able to tell the world to fuck off for a couple of days. I’m grateful to understand now how I need to pace myself when my body does go into a state of panic. I can only marvel at the years where I just tried to keep on swimming no matter what. How have we gotten to a stage where we think work is so important that we have to ignore what our bodies, our nervous systems, our hearts, are telling us?

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This is good, PCOS is not reflective of the disorder, it immediately puts you in mind of the problem being located in the ovaries, and not a much more systemic issue. Your endocrine system, your metabolism, even your heart, are all effected by PCOS. This new name is much needed.

Still, I feel a bit meh.

I didn’t have a diagnosis for years. I was the kid who said the wrong thing, struggled to make friends, and when puberty hit my body just slowed… Rather than getting stronger, playing sports, I was exhausted all the time. My periods were irregular, and my moods were wild and unpredictable.

Now, in my thirties, I know ADHD and the disorder formerly known as PCOS played a huge role in my early life. ADHD is linked to PMDD, which is like PMS on steroids. But when PCOS means your cycle is all over the place, you can get a looooonng bout of mood swings and misery, which no doctor ever figured out.

I’m delighted PCOS has a more accurate name now. That I can say ‘yeah, this affects my fertility, my weight, my energy, my heart, and NO IT DOESN’T MEAN HAVING ACNE ON YOUR LADY BITS’

But that delight isn’t tied to me emotionally, because frankly, my body has been doing what it’s doing for years before a proper diagnosis and if I’d tied my identity to an acronym I’d be a mess.

When I got my ADHD diagnosis, healthcare opened up to me. I received medication and therapy and more understanding. The PCOS diagnosis came with ‘have you tried not eating pasta?’

(A prize for whoever guesses what key difference there is between the two)

The movement to make this change happen gives me hope. Women on forums call each other cysters. As much as I loathe being on a screen all day, isn’t it amazing that women can speak to each other from their homes? Can share the honest truth across nations and be a part of change?

Why, yes, I am seeing this as a sign to keep talking about my body on the internet. It’s political.

I do hope this name change will bring more funding and research and actual healthcare will go towards PMOS.

So Glad I'm Me

A very short essay against 'as a mother'

When men preface their response to occurrences of violence against women and girls with ‘as a father of daughters’ I feel angry for the way in which their sympathies are only enlisted once they have something to lose. It’s as though they have suddenly found themselves in the role of protector, when previously they could just stand by and do nothing. I’m…

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3 years ago · 347 likes · 22 comments · Amy Key

and wanted to write a response piece. I wrote about this subject in more detail last year (linked at the bottom of this post). I’m revisiting it now after ready Amy’s essay, because I am a mother, and I was expecting some sort of massive shift in morality when I became one.

I’ve always been pretty empathetic. My love for animals in particular was painful when I was younger. I spent many a late night sobbing over all the death and suffering in the world. (Christ, I know). The thing is, if we feel ALL THE THINGS all the time, functioning at all is quite difficult. It scared me, when I was pregnant, to think how much more I was going to feel, and how on earth I was going to handle it?

Amy’s essay is wonderful, because she pinpoints an issue that lots of people overlook. Motherhood can make you more empathetic, but that doesn’t speak for the empathy other people feel, it only speaks about the individual. How much an individual feels for others varies massively from person to person. If it didn’t, we’d either have a much better or a much worse world, who knows!

Did becoming a mother alter my capacity for empathy? Yes.

I can without a doubt say that I am a much worse person now.

I’m joking…sort of…

In university during a philosophy lecture on ethics I remember a thought experiment about saving a bus full of children Vs saving your own child. Morally, the right thing to do would be to save the bus full of children, and yet, any parent is going to save their own child. Right?

My empathy has not grown, it has shifted focus. Where once I wanted a good world for everyone, I now want a great world for my child and everyone else can go to hell. I’m being hyperbolic, but there’s some truth in it. I do feel for people and like any sane person I’m horrified at the current geopolitical shitshow that’s murdering thousands of children. Not ‘as a mother’, but as a person. ‘As a mother’ I maintain a thick barrier around my heart to make sure I can function well enough to care for my child. ‘As a mother’ I’d kick your granny down the stairs rather than see my child break a bone. ‘As a mother’ my ability to empathise is compromised, because one person is my emotional focus.

This isn’t true for all mothers. Many many parents become better people when they have kids. But it’s also not true that parents are more capable of empathy than those without children.

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I’d skipped any birthday celebrations because I was on a deadline. In fact, I often skip celebrations for work or because I’m tired. I had a bottle of champagne in the press that my agent got me when Milk came out. Three years ago.

So, I decided I wanted to celebrate my birthday and divorce together by going to a spa and out for dinner with female friends. I called it a BiVorceday Bash. (turns out most people thought it was a coming out party as bisexual and/or celebrating a second divorce). Initially I’d wanted to have a family friendly party, but instead went for a strictly no husbands, no kids approach.

The morning of the celebrations I was wrecked and kicking my past self for arranging an outing. I just wanted to watch TV on the sofa and work on my to-do list. I wasn’t cancelling, I figured I’d power through with coffee and be fine.

Within minutes of being in the hotel my energy had returned. Rather than having to revise sentences in my head to remember how to communicate I was able to chat easily with friends. We swam and sat in the sauna and ordered an elaborate dinner and stayed up drinking bubbles in the lounge until the staff turned the lights off. It was GREAT.

I’ve been talking about fallow periods and taking time to rest for ages. I was hurtling towards burnout and wanted to somehow avoid it. I stripped back my schedule and only did the essentials. What can’t be skipped: parenting, work. Then I’d grab rest in between. Usually working from the sofa instead of the desk, or going to bed early. When plans came up I let myself say no and not feel guilty.

The thing is, I was physically exhausted even when I ‘shouldn’t’ have been. I turned down any opportunity to socialise on the argument that I didn’t have the energy.

The rest cure was a late 19th-century medical treatment, developed by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. It involved 6-8 weeks of enforced bed rest, isolation, forced feeding, and total prohibition of intellectual activity (reading, writing) to treat nervous exhaustion in women. You may recognise it from Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper. Weir Mitchell was her doctor.

When I read The Yellow Wallpaper in college I’d just come back from a summer at my parents’ house where I’d pretty much lay in bed reading for two months following a nervous breakdown. I had to admit, the rest HAD been very helpful.

I’ve slowly figured out that periods I’d previously seen as depression were actually ADHD burnout, and that removing the majority of expectations on myself and sleeping a lot I’d find my way back to functioning. I haven’t had a burn out period like that in years. I recognise the signs and slow right down.

Look, undoubtedly the rest cure left a lot to be desired. It was essentially telling women with legitimate concerns to lie down and be quiet. I won’t go any further into it than that or this will become a very different essay. But factoring rest into your life IS important. We know this!

What I’d never considered was how rest isn’t always literally lying in bed reading a book. Sometimes rest is swimming or walking or brunch.

The energy at the dinner was buoyant. We were ten women, all with jobs, many with families, a range of caring responsibilities and health pressures. In short, all grown-ass women who don’t get a lot of time to themselves.

In school and in college it’s normal to spend a lot of time with friends. There’s a slightly feral nature to young female friendship. It’s an intimacy that can rival any romantic relationship. I’m going to write a separate post about that, but it deserves a nod in here too. When college is over and people sprawl across the country it’s difficult to keep a friendship group together. And it’s famously difficult to meet friends in your thirties and forties without something specific keeping you together. Work, kids, etc. But when you’re only brought together by work/kids/ etc you don’t always get the time to be the sort of raw version of yourself your oldest friends know. We’re moms! We’re wives! We’re busy! It’s difficult to justify taking time out without a specific purpose.

Most of these women I met through book club. Yes, I’m in a book club. No, it was not something I ever thought I’d do as someone who spends most waking hours reading or writing for a living. Book club reminds me a little bit of a section I wrote in Milk about the baby massage class. It wasn’t about the massage, it was about meeting other mothers. Book club (at least for me) isn’t about the books. It’s about one day a month getting together with other women and just yapping.

Some people have a good work life balance. I’ve never been one of those people. You could probably guess that when you realised I was writing an entire substack essay about going out with friends one time. I work myself silly, then hide in my house until I can talk myself into going outside and trying to socialise. I don’t know why. I can theorise: guilt around productivity, sensory stuff, childhood insecurities. Who knows! It doesn’t matter, I’m happy to be getting to a stage in my life where I can see what I need to be the best version of myself. (Oh, gross, that sounds so inspirational and trite. Please forgive me, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Instagram trying to do a 30 day posting thing.)

When I think of the rest cure, of the mammy taking to bed, I think of how a woman resting can be seen as code for a woman with depression or having a nervous breakdown. I write a lot about ‘madness’, (NOT I’d like to reiterate a mood disorder, you can’t sleep that off) but the sort of mental collapse that happens from living unsustainably for an extended period of time. How many cases of postnatal depression could be prevented by the mothers being properly supported? How many Irish mammies that took to the bed did so not because they needed Lexapro but because they were carrying a whole family on their back? When surrounded by the pressures of modern motherhood it’s difficult to choose rest, to choose pleasure and friendship and not doing something ‘useful’.

One of my friends gave me a bag of lovely smelly cosmetic stuff and a card with this beautiful message in it. I may well frame it. Rest as resistance. Balance as resistance. A reminder to myself to rest, yes, but to also give time to what energises me beyond the essential. I love my work, I love my family, I love to sleep. But I also love friends, hobbies… I’d list a third thing for symmetry but can’t actually think of anything… spas! Yes, I love being in hot water and talking with friends. At the end of the day, I’d like my kid to grow up thinking a woman in bed is just a well-balanced woman, not someone having a breakdown. I just tried to finish this essay justifying my desire for rest as a parenting technique. Yes, I would like my kid to grow up with a healthy attitude to work, but I also want that for myself and that, quite frankly, is more than enough.

Dunham’s description of her parents unrelenting support was familiar. My parents didn’t have money or connections to facilitate making a feature film at 23, but they never ever made me feel less than. I believed I could do anything, because they told me I could.

Now…there’s a lot of criticism of this approach nowadays. Has it led to a generation of entitled lazy disillusioned depressives? It’s something I think about a lot. Should I be telling my kid they can be an astronaut or a filmmaker when genetics and socioeconomic background has at least as much to if not more to do with where you’ll be as an adult?

Here’s the thing. I was already being told I couldn’t do anything. A bullied oddball in school. The media’s representation of women and the working class. My teenage insecurities and mental health issues. Or once I got into the literary world, it’s almost all rejections, if you don’t have a borderline delusional confidence, you haven’t a hope. And that has to come from somewhere. Without my parents instilling me with self-belief, I’d never have kept writing.

Someone with neurodivergence is predisposed to addiction, mental health issues, struggles to keep down a job. Some people are scrappy and could make it on their own. Not me, not a hope. Without my family I’d almost definitely be a homeless alcoholic. I don’t mean they’re holding me together now, but without the ongoing confidence and support through the first two decades (who am I kidding, three decades…and three years) of my life, I’d never have made it.

Two: Being chronically ill shapes your life, even before you get the diagnosis

Listening to her describe her teen years dealing with OCD and heavy periods, and all the medications and appointments involved, made me feel sorry for the awkward teenager and how you may adapt to those conditions. Fat and moody from medication? Who wouldn't embrace being the funny loud mouth?

I was the kid who said the wrong thing. It would come out of my face before I could stop it. That can’t have helped in my struggle with making friends. When puberty hit, my body slowed. Rather than gaining muscle and playing sports, my legs couldn’t keep up, I was exhausted from just being awake.

Now that I’m in my thirties, I know the role ADHD and PCOS (a metabolic disorder) played in my early life. I didn’t get those diagnoses until my thirties, but your body doesn’t give a shit about a diagnosis, I had the illnesses long before the certificates. Without early diagnoses I internalised a lot of shame and ‘I’m lazy’ or ‘I’m weird’, and I was definitely pretty lucky in the grand scheme of things. Going back to my first point, if I hadn’t had my parents telling me I was wonderful I’d definitely have found it a lot more difficult.

Since ADHD is genetic (like, extremely genetic, 50% hereditary rate with one parent, 80% (I think?) with two, and since neurodivergents travel in packs…) I think a lot about older or, you know…dead, family members who lived their whole lives without knowing they had ADHD. I think of the addiction and mental health disorders that pops up along the family tree. All that shame. It’s sad, and it’s also encouraging to see the generation after me having such a healthy relationship with how neurodivergence effects their lives.

Three: fear holds you back, but sometimes for good reason

As a child, I wrote without inhibitions. Whether on paper or by playing alone, I let my imagination flow without fear. I never thought about what these stories looked like, I was just having fun.

By my late teens and early twenties, I was a ball of inhibitions. It may have looked otherwise, I was loud and liked to drink and swear, but there were invisible rules I’d set myself.

Early noughties media around women. You’ll be familiar, I’m sure. Too fat, too skinny, a slut, asking for it, etc etc etc. If you don’t think the media shaped the psyche of every twenty something - fifty something woman that you know, well you’re probably a man.

I’d genuinely hate to be famous. It gave me great solace to know even successful writers are rarely ‘famous’. But the Internet does open up the dangers of celebrity to us lowly normal folks.

Still, I wanted to write, to make art. Which would involve some people liking my work/ me, a hilariously difficult prospect for someone who grew up being picked last for every team or at least felt like she was because she was ‘sensitive’. There seemed to be two ways into life as a writer.

-Education, publishers, representation, keeping yourself quiet.

-Grassroots. Self-made, creating opportunities that didn’t exist, putting yourself out there.

I didn’t do the DIY route, at least not for a long time. It seemed cool, which I was not. The establishment route, doing the Right Thing and Getting Rewarded seemed much easier for the precocious child in me.

I agonized over publishing, because once something is published it’s no longer yours, and what if I was WRONG? At least going the ‘proper’ route would mean someone else, a whole team of people, would be there to protect me from my own stupidity.

I hadn’t factored in things like cultural privilege, the market, me being a sensitive little monster, or, most of all, that I actually like the grassroots route. Most of my favourite artists are scrappy self-made lunatics who only got publishing deals when their audience backed them. (I know LD isn’t self-made in the sense of being from a privileged background, we’ll get back to that.)

Every now and then I’d slip into the DIY approach, but that approach involves doing a huge amount of your own press (spoiler alert: so does trad publishing) and distribution and without the internet that seemed impossible.

Sharing myself online is something I resisted so much for so long. Best case, it was cringe. Worst, downright dangerous.

You couldn’t be online without risking your safety. Lena Dunham and co received relentless harassment. But they were rich! Surely they could handle it?!

I remember seeing tweets about this story Six writers were being harassed online. All public figures, but none of them could have been called famous at the time. They were, however, all Irish, creative, liberal, women.

I remember tweeting once about nothing in particular, a feminist pun, and some future MAGA hats found the tweet and tried their best to dox me. I was 22 and had maybe 400 followers?

There’s stuff in my own past that makes me anxious around stalking, but really, all I’d need to be anxious about sharing online is just to have looked at social media in the last fifteen years.

Lena Dunham showed all loud chubby creative fuck ups that it was ok to be themselves, as long as they didn’t mind having the entire internet hate them.

Not a chance, I thought at the time. Now, I’m a bit more fearless, quicker to block and less likely to hyperventilate opening a DM. Then again, I’m now settled into a pretty niche literary corner so on the off chance obscure poetry &CNF about maternal mental health becomes the Next Big Thing I will be wiping my social media and moving to the mountains.

*note on things I don’t like about the book
I’m very hesitant to criticise Dunham because, hello, talk about being part of the problem. But I’m fairly confident my low three figure readership won’t reach her, and that my criticisms are pretty balanced.

I’m interested in the book as a woman who watched Girls in college and as a writer of memoir. To read how people in the author’s life are presented not because of who they are but because of how a memoir writer presents themselves and others. It made me think about the importance of subjectivity, being self-aware, and taking risks. I’m posting what I didn’t like as well as what I did not because I’m very interested in Dunham’s life, but because it’s relevant to anyone writing about their life.

I enjoy her work, but I wouldn’t call myself a fan? Like in Girls, there's a lot of annoying stuff in the book, but it's worth considering how much more critical we are of women, and how much more critical I personally am of rich women.

Saying that, I’m not blind to the sheer craft of storytelling being employed in this book. She’s undeniably an excellent writer. The reader naturally cheers for the narrator, and by being self-critical she encourages empathy even from those who had written her off. But I wouldn’t have minded a little bit more acknowledgment of legitimate criticisms. Money is a huge one. She does admit she’s very lucky, but still can’t resist saying that no one at HBO had heard of her parents, while breezily mentioning that her parents’ friends funded her first film and that it was her mother’s connections that got her an agent. If you read the book and feel like a failure because you haven’t accomplished what she did even when she had health concerns, please remember that economic privilege is about more than getting in the door. It’s about the energy you have because of the jobs you don’t have to do. It’s about believing the arts are a legitimate career path. It’s the network of people that can give advice and donate money. It’s about the safety net that lets you take risks. I don’t hold that lack of awareness against Dunham. I suspect being removed from the real world from such a young age possibly does leave one cut off from the wealth and privilege disparity in the arts/world.

That age thing is the only other major thing that bugged me in the book. Dunham repeatedly makes reference to age and ‘adults’ while positioning herself as not an adult when she was in her early twenties. She positions herself as a child and emphasises age difference when the other party is the perpetrator, but during situations like rule-breaking with a 19 year old at rehab (or the whole sibling thing) age is practically ignored. At one point she says “I was only 27”, that may be appropriate if you're talking about some sort of disease associated with middle age, but it's about some sort of self awareness and responsibility that actually most 27 year olds are perfectly capable of. She does acknowledge how celebrity stunted her development as an independent adult, and fair play to her for that. There are lots of situations where a legal adult should be given more grace and care. It’s not illegal for a 40 year old to sleep with an 18 year old, but does that mean it’s right? Young adults are vulnerable to exploitation, and undoubtedly a 23 year old Dunham didn’t stand up for herself as she would if she’d been older. But 23 is not 18, 27 is definitely not 18, and two people in their late twenties are not little babies. She had an agent, a supportive family, and a buttload of money. Should she have been treated like a child by her colleagues? Colleagues that were often below her in the pecking order? The age difference between her and her co-writer (a friendship that ends in flames) is mentioned several times, but she never mentions the age difference between her and Judd Apatow, who champions her from early on in her career. Power imbalances seem to be more of a relevant theme in the book, but it’s not really touched on unless she is the one with less power. There are several situations in the book where someone, usually a man, is portrayed as treating her poorly, but where she is the one with more power. She’s their boss, she’s wealthy, she can offer them professional opportunities or a place to live. Something felt icky in these situations, in particular her descriptions of Adam Driver, an actor who comes across as an asshole, but who she also admits to openly lusting after. Girls was his big break, she was his boss. If the genders were reversed there’d be no doubt on who was abusing power. Though, if genders were reversed, he’d probably have fucked her, and, to her credit, she didn’t do it.

Early twenties are rough, but once you hit 25 and your brain is fully developed I think you need to stop using age as an explanation for things that are not age related. It’s ok to say ‘I am deficient in this area’ or ‘I made some big mistakes’ without using age as an excuse. Adults fuck up too, and the belief that there’s some arbitrary age at which we’ll be more responsible does no one any favours.

Both of these points have a similar effect, a vague tone of ‘yes I’m not innocent but I’m not as lucky as everyone thought’. Which, I suppose, is a risk of sharing yourself at all. It was never going to be easy to relate to a millionaire, and it’s mildly terrifying to read about what she’s dealt with as a chronically ill woman considering how wealthy she is. (What’s the hope for the rest of us?!)

While I wouldn’t say I’m always a fan of her work, I appreciate her talent and bravery (yes, even if you’re as privileged as her, getting naked on screen and playing characters that are more annoying versions of herself is brave!) There’s a part in the book where her co-creator tells her to put on weight because she’s too thin and if she’s thin Girls isn’t funny. Of course when Girls came out Dunham’s body was criticsed and judged and presented as an object of disgust. Imagine forcing yourself to gain weight knowing that it’s too make yourself comically disgusting. That she kept going through six seasons is astounding.

Dunham could have written a Mr Men book and she’d still be getting criticised for it. She is the voice of a generation, and with that she’s been a target for the hatred of women who think too much of themselves. I haven’t had her opportunities, but I also know that I wouldn’t have been brave enough to take them if I had.

I may not agree with half of what she says, but I, and thousands like me, owe her for everything she says even though she knows the risks.

If you’re familiar with pygmy shrews you’ll know that there’s no way in hell one of them wandered through the cat flap to set up camp in my kitchen. Which means one of my fluffy gobshites went outside, caught it, brought it in, and released it. Look, I get it, it’s their nature to hunt, but MAYBE they could start with one of the 87 mice living behind the skirting boards.

I wrote a poem to explore the hypocrisy of cat ownership, which funnily enough mentions shrews. Rather than repeat all of those ideas in sprawling text, I’ll share the poem.

Here it is

I hate marketing myself. I also hate not having any money, and that tends to trump my more honorable dislikes. I’d dance with the devil to pay my mortgage. I’m not saying I won’t market myself, I’m saying I can’t. I’m genuinely really awful at it. Regular posting, short form content, repeating themes in easily consumable slides? Nope. Never gonna happen. Well, it might, but for a week, then I’ll find it infuriating and try to retrain as a lollypop lady or plumber or something that doesn’t involve a laptop.

While being gimmicky online and hating myself for it, I thought how similar this felt to being early in my career. The name of my second poetry pamphlet, Sexy Fruit, started as a joke.

I was 24, unpublished, and I’d been writing poems which were lyrical stories in rural settings, generally inspired by ballads and my own childhood. I was getting nowhere. I made a crack about being a young woman poet the only way to get published is to compare parts of your body to fruit. My friend said ‘write that poem then’. So I did. And BOOM. Fastest acceptance I’d ever gotten.

Sexy Fruit is tongue in cheek for that reason. There is a lot of comparing women’s bodies to fruit, but there’s also the vicious side of sex, a poem about BDSM, a poem where a strawberry becomes a sheep’s heart, a chicken breast is a cunt and catholic guilt runs riot. It was a lot of fun. Would I have ever written it if I wasn’t trying to sell myself? I don’t know.

A bit of advice I got during my MA was ‘make your problem your character’s problem’. It has repeated itself throughout my career. I was a young woman who was only seen as a sexual object, or that’s how I felt. So I played into it. I got an outrageously sexy headshot taken, and wrote poems that were furious with lust and injustice.

Both the ballad pamphlet and the sexy pamphlet were published within six months of each other. Ironically that sexuality got me pregnant and I did no marketing for the latter cause I was busy growing a human and puking on the dog, being extremely unsexy. But it’s a slim little reminder of the girl I was, and that helped me grow as a writer in unexpected ways.

If I had stayed with my coming of age ballads I wouldn’t have grown. Playing the hand we have is just good marketing. Get the reader close enough to hear you say: Don’t read my poems because of my big brown eyes. Read them because they’re full of fury and lust and the desperation of being human. Just like you.

Did it work? Probably not. But I got some good poems out of it. When the time came to write Milk, that sexy sexy anger was fine tuned and ready to riot. Any sense of thinking of how I might be perceived in my work was gone. I wrote because I had so much to say, and people were going to hear it whether they bloody well liked it or not.

I try to remember that urgency on days when I really really really don’t want to put myself out there on the internet. Which is most days. Being myself online hasn’t felt natural. Not really a surprise considering the early days of my internet use included the dregs of twitter where a young woman saying, well, anything, resulted in replies from complete strangers calling them a cunt. Being myself, knowing who that is has been an arduous process. Maybe it’s neurodiversity (oh hi, hobby horse) and a lifetime of masking. Maybe it’s aforementioned chronic systemic sexism. Though I’m more inclined to think that seeing yourself as an identifiable static thing (read: brand) just isn’t natural.

Myself is one of the most fun things I’ve created. Filling that girl with books and experiences and wine. Dressing her up, growing and breaking and learning. She’s always changing, with a few essential things staying the same. I still love romantic ballad inspired literature, I still love writing about sex and shame and all the stuff women are told to only speak about in hushed tones.

I’ve written about sex for my essay in ‘s new book, which can be bought for only a few more days! You can buy a copy here.

Now when I show up online I try to remember that feeling of being a young woman who thought she’d never be taken seriously, so decided not to take things to seriously either.

Don’t start dancing on Tiktok Alice. Just show up, take the piss a bit, be real, keep going. And when in doubt, compare your nipples to grapes.

I love to travel. Actually, that’s bullshit. I hate planes and trains and anything that isn’t my car, but I love going new places. Stripped of the context of setting, I find it easier to connect to who I am, who I could be. All the possibilities of novelty. Plus I love supermarkets in other countries, they don’t have those crisps at home!

My family didn’t really do holidays. We didn’t have the money. When I was in my teens we went away a few times, either to England to visit family or the brief Tuesday - Thursday 99c Ryanair flights which saw us do manic urban dashes across Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris that gave me the ‘travel bug’ (ADHD craving for novelty).

In college, the sudden influx of cash (scholarship) meant I finally had the means to travel. Not interrailing for a summer, but I could have swung a week or so. Sadly I was crippled by anxiety and the idea of going away without predictable structure was generally too much.

I went on my first sun holiday with my ex and drove him mad by trying to see an entire country in 6 days. He’d been all over the world, lived in San Francisco, done a month in Australia, seen every major European city. We were staying in his family’s Spanish apartment, which he’d been to several times a year for a decade. He couldn’t understand the manic desire I had to absorb the foreign, the certainty I had that it would be my last chance.

By the next time we went I was pregnant, unable to do much beyond waddle near the sea, and I wouldn’t leave Ireland for another 4 years.

[Interlude of unshareable personal details that kept me island bound until last autumn]

Now, for the first time in my adult life, I find myself both able to afford to leave the country and with no mental health, pandemic, family, or other issues preventing it.

That is, except the one I never considered.

School.

For the next 12 years, I can only leave the country during school holidays.

Goodbye, winter mini-breaks.

So long, off-peak budget travel.

This restriction has motivated me to drag my child to the airport the second the bell rings on the last day of term. We’ve done two trips so far, and both of those were to London.

London is great and all, but there are a LOT of cities out there, cheaper ones.

But they don’t have our tribe, and London does.

A few years ago I met a writer through work and we quickly bonded in the way I suspect only happens a handful of times in a lifetime. What’s more, so did our kids. My son calls her kids his cousins. She’s seen me have a meltdown over forgetting the swimming stuff after driving an hour to the pool. Without her guidance I’d probably never have gotten an ADHD assessment. We can go months without talking and then pick up like normal. I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation that would be classed as small talk.

We live in different countries, and it would be easy to let a long distance friendship with only a couple of years of history fizzle. But twice a year or so we make the effort and all pile into one of our houses and let the kids run wild and do our best to avoid burnout while grabbing snatches of adult conversation. It’s family. I often forget we’re not related, that we haven’t known each other for decades.

Finding your tribe, the village, all that stuff. It’s so important. And it’s so so fucking hard.

Last year my kid made friends with another kid. It was his first ‘best friend’, where they really got on and had loads in common rather than just playing alongside because of forced proximity. Imagine my delight when it turned out the mum was also lovely and easy to talk to. Hanging out with them, having coffee with her while the best time, was what I imagined motherhood would be.

Then they moved across the country. It was like a heartbreak. Maybe it’s because we live somewhere with a lower population, or because my kid goes to a very small school, or because I work from home and need to be kicked in the face to go outside and socialize. Whatever it is, meeting people and sticking with it is HARD.

When you become a parent it adds another dimension to the difficulty of making friends. Now you not only need to meet someone you like, but ideally someone you like who has kids that your kid likes. As my son said to his godfather and his husband “will you guys hurry up and adopt someone for me to play with.”

I dream about winning the lottery and buying a holiday village. Living in one house and giving the other houses to artist families.

My biggest fantasy isn’t a mansion or private island or a plane, it’s a small village where my kid can play on the green with other kids. I can’t figure out if that’s pathetic or just says a lot about the state of the world.

I have good friends. Friends I can pick up with like we’ve never been apart. But we’re always apart. Dublin, London, various other cities and countries. I know we’ll never all be in one place.

This longing for a simpler life, where I wouldn’t need a plane to have a cup of tea with my friend, but could open the door and holler over the fence. It’s something I hear so many people longing for, particularly women, particularly mothers.

We all know the village it takes to raise a child has long since disappeared. I’m wary of craving the small town with your whole family on top of each other. The neighbours dropping in, five kids sharing a bedroom, I was raised to see the space and solitude of my own childhood as a luxury compared with the busy family life previous generations endured. Times of scarcity. There wasn’t enough to go around. Then why, when so many of us are undeniably better off than our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, do we still feel lacking?

Oh, the usual, capitalism, pressure to keep up with the Joneses, helicopter parenting, doom scrolling. Some other things, probably.

I can’t help but think there’s more to it than that.

I’m generation avocado toast. (Not literally, I don’t really like avocados, they taste like phlegm). Yes, many of us own homes and cars and our kids do extracurricular activities and order off menu in cafés. But there’s a precarity to life, and an awareness of that precarity, that seems to be going backwards.

The housing crisis. Unemployment. Healthcare is a shambles. Our generation is widely known to be the first generation (in a while??) to earn less than the previous one. Accumulating wealth and security is gone, as are the structured careers that allowed it. It’s side hustles and internet entrepreneurs while watching the cost of living rise and rise and rise.

Wow, we’ve come a long way from talking about holidays.

Mothers now, (and probably other people but I’m a mother so that’s the angle I’m coming from) are thinking about their kids, their parents, the climate, the economy, microplastics, summer camps, well rounded school holidays, pets, bone density, UPFs, neurodiversity, solar panels, the list goes on. We don’t get the same chance as we’d like to sit around and talk about these things with other mothers, with sisters, cousins, our tribe. The tribe is sprawled. The tribe lives in different towns and cities, where houses are affordable, or different jobs come up. Property markets and unstable careers drive families from town to town to town.

So for now, our school holidays involve lots of travel. Not to resorts or tourist treks, but to the family we’ve chosen, scattered across the globe as they may be. And when I win the lottery, I’m moving them all to my commune village.

Disclaimer: today’s email may contain typos as I’m on week four of an upper respiratory infection and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve given myself a mild concussion from blowing my nose.

I don’t usually take on commissions. When I write, it has to be something I want to write, or I get bored and just can’t make the words work. I’ve taken on a tiny handful of them over the years, and only when I really really can’t resist.

emailed me last year inviting me to write an essay for her upcoming book. Writing about motherhood? I’d done that already! But, the more of her email I read, the more I knew I was going to say yes.

I’m so glad I did. I got to write about eggs and boobs, which is always fun, but more than that I got a chance to talk writing and motherhood and all that entails with three wonderful women.

These conversations, which so often happen in private, are nourishing when you spend most of your time cleaning up yoghurt and yelling at cats. Not that that’s how I spend my days…

publishes such interesting books. Hannah’s project includes two books.

Mother, Inc. is a memoir on work, motherhood, and feminism.

It is a deeply felt exploration of what it’s like to raise babies in a tech-powered world, often in isolation, juggling the conflicting demands of corporate tech employment and roles assigned to women. Hannah questions how “having it all” has morphed into doing it all—and why trapping of anguish and guilt are stopping mothers from living free. The story tracks Hannah’s journey including redundancy, multiple miscarriages, giving birth during Covid, and post-natal anxiety disorder.

Through unravelling a tangle of events, Hannah seeks to pinpoint where today’s systems are failing mothers, and how imagining alternative futures—where work and motherhood coexist harmoniously and where technology heals instead of hinders—is a most radical feminist act.

2. A collection of essays split into three themes - work, mind, and body:

   Aimee Ballinger - Solidarity (with children) forever: Can a workforce ever truly function outside of the needs of our children? We need to construct a world that puts them front and centre.

   Alice Kinsella - Break a few: A woman’s changing relationship with her body - through sex, motherhood, and love - shows that the real struggle wasn’t with her physical self, but believing it was never truly hers.

   Kerri ní Dochartaigh - Now you have her: How love and motherhood reshape the mind, turning it away from itself and towards others in ways that are lasting and profound.

The project is available to preorder now for just three weeks.

We’ll be in conversation live in a couple of weeks. Subscribe to any of our substacks for the link.

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A few months back, emailed me to commission a piece for a book on motherhood. Initially, I was hesitant. I’d written my motherhood book, and in that book I’d said I wasn’t writing about my child anymore. The promo for that book (Milk) drove me crazy because I was asked to pitch essays and articles on the subject of the book, while my selfish little writer self was just like ‘eh, if I had more to say, it would be in the book’. (Newsflash: it was not a bestseller. I am not built for publicity.)

But I admire Hannah’s work and the brief was enticing, so I said ok. I ended up writing indirectly about motherhood, without mentioning my child much at all. You can check out Hannah’s page for more info on the forthcoming collection.

During a conversation with Hannah and the other writers in the book I said something about not writing motherhood anymore. But today I’ve been thinking about that. Why did I say it? Do I mean it? What made me think that was the right thing to do?

Why I thought I was done with writing motherhood

• In Milk I stop writing about my baby when he is almost 10 months old. I do this, and explain in the book, because he had become an individual beyond the MotherBaby dyad. I’d written about representation, expectation, being photographed as a child, and how I didn’t want him to grow up feeling like there was an external representation of him which was more him than how he felt.

  I stand by elements of this. You won’t catch me posting photos of my kid or giving any details of his life. It’s his life, and while I don’t judge those who do write in detail about their kids, I would have hated to have been written about and he and I have enough in common that it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

• I no longer had a baby. My kid is six now. I have more time than I did when he was a baby. The book I wrote after Milk was about whales. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a mother writer. I spend enough of my time with motherhood outside of work the last thing I wanted was to sit down at the laptop and think about it.

• Secondary infertility. I’ve been pretty open about struggling with secondary infertility. I’m not sure this was a conscious reason not to write about motherhood, but I suspect I felt that writing about motherhood when I only had one child and might not have another made me some sort of fraud? I know, sounds ridiculous, but women doubting themselves is hardly new.

Why I think I was actually trying to be done with writing motherhood

• Shame. Look, I’m an Irish woman. The shame runs deep. I reckon it’ll be another few generations before we shake it completely. Was I just complaining? Don’t millions of people have it harder than white mothers in an EU country? Also who wants to hear from me, going on about me, AGAIN? I loved writing about whaling because it was so far from my everyday life and I was, frankly, sick of hearing about myself and figured everyone else must be too.

• Fear. I was quite openly critical of the HSE in Milk. Ireland is a small place. In fact only recently my ex-husband told me one of his doctor’s told him his wife had read my book. If, by some miracle, I did get pregnant again and end up back in maternity care, did I want to be at the mercy of a medic who thought I was an ungrateful asshole?

• Gratitude. I’m so grateful to have my child. To have made it out of birth and the postpartum period alive. Some of the midwives in that hospital went above and beyond the call of duty to look after me, and do the same for dozens of women every day. When I criticize the HSE, I sometimes worry it comes off as me giving out about doctors and midwives. I’m not! At least, not intentionally (except for you, snarky midwife of the dirty fingernails in 2019, yes I remember your name and no I didn’t put it in my book, you can go suck a lemon).

Why I’ve realised I’m not done writing about motherhood

Motherhood seeps into every aspect of my life, and I write about my life. I’m almost always a character in my own work, and that character is a mother.

The thing about writing a fairly niche book is that sometimes you’ll get commissioned for work on the subject.

About this time last year, I was commissioned to write a poem by Institutions and Infant Care, an AHRC-funded research network that explores the comparative history of residential institutions for babies in twentieth-century Europe and their meaning, then and now.

The brief was quite broad, and I chose to focus on Mayo County Home, as I knew it had been somewhat neglected from a research perspective, and was not included in the Mother and Baby Home Commission Report in any significant way. When I started the research, I quickly came up against obstacles regarding archives. It turned out all of the archives from these institutions belong to?…. you guessed it, the HSE.

Across my research, I kept thinking that the voice of the women and children was the voice that was missing. It reminded me so much of the experience of women giving birth now. I have so many friends who didn’t recognise their experience when they read their own medical notes, who felt like they couldn’t complain without being at risk, who felt voiceless and scared and even chose not to have more children to avoid the maternity care experience again.

I believe part of the problem is financial, the services are under funded, and part is cultural. We’ve been taught that the women don’t matter, and that culture is only changing very very slowly post repeal, with Covid restrictions having a massively negative effect in maternity wards.

For the initial commission I put a callout among local mums and made a compilation piece of their stories. This was shared at the conference as part of the performance. I’ve now expanded the callout nationally, and am in the process of exploring a digital space for these stories. (If you’re interested, follow here, it’s just an empty page for now but it won’t be for long).

The stories that have come in so far have been equal parts heart breaking and inspiring. All of the reasons not to write motherhood that I listed above are part of the reason the next new mother comes to the experience unprepared and afraid and unsupported. Pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period are incredibly intense and often difficult. Few people have the time to take notes. When we’re unhappy with our hospital experience, the idea of making an official complaint can be overwhelming. What has happened to women who complain? Need I point out how women are treated in family court, assault cases, or just the world to suggest that a woman may not want to cause a fuss by making a valid complaint and risk being accused of overreacting, remembering incorrectly, or even lying?

In writing motherhood, I’m not being solipsistic, and I shouldn’t be ashamed. Because writing, yes about my own experience, but also using what little skills I have to share the stories of others, is a small way of change making. And that’s the job of the artist, the job of the mother.

This poem, which I shared today, was written after a conversation with my friend about needing a break. It’s funny, but also, not funny, and a good reminder to me that I shouldn’t be finished writing about motherhood.

A great movement, in many ways. Post-crash Ireland saw people of all ages flinging themselves into rivers, hanging in barns, overdosing on whatever they had in the medicine cabinet. You learned to read between the lines on the death notices. ‘Unexpectedly’, ‘family flowers only’. The Facebook post eulogies included pleas to speak out if you don’t feel ok. It was an epidemic, and the reason behind it was clear: shame.

When I think of the word crisis my brain automatically thinks ‘mental health'. Before climate crisis and housing crisis had reached the popular lexicon, mental health crisis was something everyone in Ireland was familiar with. Not just an individual having a breakdown, but the unbelievable number of people suffering, enough to suspect there was more to it than an individual with unfortunate brain chemistry.

I’ve been writing about mental health for as long as I’ve been writing. I thought I was mentally ill for years. I thought this was an innate part of who I was, rather than a symptom of different difficult circumstances.

I spent a few years researching the history of mental health care in Ireland. (Because that’s what happens when you’re prone to obscure obsessions.)

In the mid-twentieth century Ireland had approximately one in every 70 adults in an asylum. It’s a complex history. Unlike the more famous laundries and mother and baby homes, the mental asylums were state run. The asylums were build during the 19th century, following the 1817 Act for the lunatic poor. By 1870 there were 22 of them, with almost 20,000 occupants by the turn of the century. Many many residents were mentally ill, though there were also cases of ‘difficult’ people being committed by family members. Unwanted wives or husbands, unmarried siblings, people who couldn’t earn their keep. When the family was not able or willing to support a person, the asylum was a solution.

It’s no wonder that in the late twentieth century and early twentyfirst century admitting you struggled with your mental health was not entirely sensible.

So when the tone of public opinion on this shifted, It’s Ok Not to be Ok felt revolutionary.

Finally, people didn’t have to struggle in silence. Surely now that it wasn’t shameful, the numbers of suicides would fall? Our young people would be safe? We’d become a country of well rounded individuals skipping through the fields sharing our feelings.

Hmmmmm….

There was a review of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in County Kerry recently. The results are appalling. Hundreds of families effected. I wasn’t even a tiny bit surprised. My own run in with the service as a teenager involved being told I was ‘too smart’ for my own good and that making a study schedule would help. Then I was sent on my merry way to university where I had a full blown breakdown.

I’ve had plenty of dealings with mental health services since then. Sometimes for myself, though more often not. I’ve torn my hair out at the lack of responses, poor support, frankly obscene suggestions. The waitlists and referrals and re-referalls and contradictions. I’ve had loved ones screaming that they are not Ok and watched the HSE all but shrug.

I’m a parent. My child is small, puberty a few years off yet. Still, with neurodiversity and mental illness in the family, there’s a good chance they’ll require mental health support at some point in the future. I’m already loading my arsenal, preparing for the fights with bureaucracy to come.

The asylums didn’t all close at once. It was more of a shift of attitude and services. Numbers declined, and Ireland adopted the ‘care in the community’ model of Thatcher era UK. Designed, apparently, to keep people in communities and not institutionalized. Though it could also be interpreted as a way to offload care labour on to families.

People talk about writing as therapy. It can be cathartic, sure, though I’ve never found it in and of itself to serve the function of healthcare. I find it more useful as a way to communicate, to rally, to express frustration and passion. The HSE needs a serious overhaul. Change doesn’t happen overnight, not because of a lack of resources, but a lack of political will. While we keep writing, keep making art, keep shouting, there’s hope that we won’t go backwards, that the powers that be may finally listen, whether they want to or not.

Below is part one of the poem that came from several years of research, if you fancy hearing it. The full thing can be found in The Ethics of Cats (Broken Sleep, ‘25). (It can be bought in all bookshops or if you want a signed copy message me. )

Times have changed since It’s Ok Not to be Ok. Speaking out about mental health isn’t the taboo it once was, but the terrible suspicion is that no matter how shout we loud, there’s no one listening.

My cat got hit by a car.

If you want to know where the phrase a cat has nine lives comes from, I can tell you. My cat. If ever there was a cat that seemed to be propelling herself through a feline version of Final Destination, it’s Ziggy.

She turned up after a storm last autumn. She was six weeks old and already malnourished, dehydrated, and had only one eye. The vet said she was incredibly lucky we’d found her. We already had three cats, and I didn’t intend on having another, but a week later, no one had claimed her from the vet, and no one had offered to adopt her. Despite being tiny, she was incredibly affectionate, and when we went to pay the vet bill she climbed onto my shoulder, where she remained more or less for the next year.

Cut to a Monday in October a couple of weeks ago. On the school run, I pulled onto the main road and saw what looked like a heap of orange leaves in the layby. It was Ziggy, still alive, but with her only functioning eye, let’s just say it was no longer functioning. Having successfully moved her without my child seeing her nightmare inducing face, I brought her to the vet, tearful and preparing for euthanasia.

The vet, who has looked after almost three decades of my pets, put it as tactfully as possible. She may survive, but finding out would be expensive. There was that unspoken question: is it worth it? I left her there and brought my child to school.

I have always had pets. As a child I delighted in animals, but did not see any major distinction between us and them. I longed to speak to my dog, my cats, and often pretended that I could.

People are quick to tell you that animals don’t love you. That a cat’s tenderness to you is because of need, a dog’s affection out of instinct. There is an assumption that instinct and human love are somehow distinct. That animals can’t feel love. However, there are many studies that show this not to be the case.

My child was born by emergency caesarean section. The flood of birth hormones never came. I had been waiting not just nine months, but my entire adult life for that moment of immediate connection. When it didn’t come, I, like many before and since, thought there was something wrong with me.

The instant falling in love with your newborn that is mythologized can heavily depend on the surge of oxytocin that accompanies birth. When this is overpowered by general anesthetic, trauma, or the myriad complications that can come with birth, you can be left feeling a little lacking.

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So many mothers await that instant connection and feel like failures when it doesn’t come. The complex working of our bodies, our animal bodies with animal hormones, does not always prescribe to the myths of the ideal birth.

It is preferable for humankind to hold some superiority over animals. If we can see ourselves as above them, we can exploit them. Most people don’t want to think of themselves as capable of inflicting pain. A rationale that says, ‘if I did this to a person it would be awful, but it’s just an animal’, removes that guilt. A slippery slope, dehumanizing as an excuse to commit atrocities is a tactic so often seen across history.

The above is from my most recent book, Wake of the Whale which explores industrial whaling and its demise. One of the key factors in the decline and eventual banning of industrial whaling was a shift in public opinion about the animals. Through exposure to whales from nature documentaries and, somewhat ironically, the likes of Seaworld, whales became beloved creatures, and the public didn’t want to see them become extinct.

Now we’re learning even more about whales. Project Ceti is using AI technology to translate the communication of sperm whales. Language, by definition is a human communication system. But if a communication system has all the elements except of language except humanity, is it not still a language?

The vet rang the following day. The car that hit her head did not fracture any bones or cause brain damage. The only part of her that was damaged was the one eye she had. A week of rehydrating, drips, x-rays, and yet more vet bills, and she came home. Blind, but completely alive. Back on my shoulder. Back to ruling the roost, though bumping into walls slightly more often than before.

Mammals can love, use language, and my blind cat can use our printer. Maybe there’s not quite so much separating us after all.

2026 update

Ziggy is still alive. Can animals love? Maybe, but I’m pretty sure she hates me.

Things Ziggy has done since I paid thousands of euro to save her life:

Bite my ankles when she doesn’t get the good wet food

kill a mouse and then lose the mouse when it stopped moving so that I got to find it with my feet

knocked down the Christmas tree (2024)

steal my favourite blanket for her own

escape from the cattery

attend a funeral (we live beside a graveyard, but still, have some tact)

knock down the Christmas tree (2025)

consistently show affection for Cat Dad despite ME being the one who feeds her

Jump on my bed and pee on it WHILE I WAS IN IT

feature in a poem (ok, she had no say in this, but it’s the least she can do). Poem at end of post.

We’ve grown our menagerie by two. We’re outnumbered 2:1 felines to people. That’s, not right, surely?

In this case, they were the kittens of a friend of a friend who was in an accident and needed someone to foster her kittens. Further tests showed she wouldn’t be in the position to change litter trays for the foreseeable future. We found them a new home, and the person who was supposed to take them suffered a medical emergency. As one friend said, ‘have you considered getting those kittens saged?’

Ziggy is delighted with the kittens. They’re interactive squeaky toys! Perfect for a blind cat! Where the older, bigger, and more gentle cats won’t take her shit, these little minions are happy to wrestle and be terrorised all day. After several weeks of Cat Dad saying ‘we’re not keeping them’ every time they did something cute, he’s started to sigh and say ‘they’re never leaving, are they?’

Why do we, people in general, have pets? Is it not strange to keep animals of no practical use in your house, costing money, destroying furniture, generally driving you crazy?

If you know, fill me in, because I suspect I’m just a soft touch.

‘As a child I delighted in animals’ I wrote 18 months ago. Well, past Alice, as a child you delighted in animals that YOUR MOTHER LOOKED AFTER. Now, as the mother and looker afterer of the house, I delight in them a lot less.

If I was being sensible, I’d rehome the whole damn lot of them. Every time Ziggy bites /pees on me I tell her I’m going to flush her down the toilet. They make no sense to keep. They don’t catch mice, they cost a fortune, and they’re an environmental disaster.

But…people don’t make sense either. I’ll never buy a pet, in fact I’ll never intentionally go out of my way to get another pet (don’t hold me to that). But, I have one of those four-chambered hearts. When someone needs a home, needs someone to care for them… I’ll reluctantly accept.

The vet has a theory about Ziggy. We brought her in for something, and Ziggy climbed right around the vet’s neck and started purring. Among her many health complications, she has a liver disorder that has kept her small. She was only 6 weeks old when we found her. The vet thinks that she was so young when she lost her mother and found people, that she still behaves in may ways like a kitten.

A while back, my kid was angry at Ziggy for scratching him. (He knows she’s just an animal, but honestly she did just go for him out of nowhere.) He wanted to send her back to wherever she came from. When I explained she had to stay here, that she had no one else, we were her family, he softened immediately. Now even when she’s annoying him he accepts that’s part of being in a family. (He’s an only child and has never had to tolerate an annoying younger sibling).

Pets really are a part of the family: even when they drive you absolutely nuts you still love them.

Recently I shared a post about the worth of writing a book that was never going to earn back its hours. The response was quite humbling. It didn’t go viral or anything, as you may expect from a ‘last week I shared a post and the response SHOCKED me’ post. Clickbait and virality is something that holds no interest to me. What it did do though was start a conversation with a handful of people who are also feeling the strain and pressure to always be on, to fit writing around paid work, or to make writing be their paid work.

My paid work is something I, perhaps counterintuitively, leave relatively offline. I’m a creative writing teacher, with a particular focus in community based work.

All Weather Words is the name of my creative writing workshops & retreats. At the moment, they’re all in person in Co. Mayo, Ireland, but that’s changing soon.

Let me give you a little background. I started community facilitation as a teenager through youthwork. Although I spent most weekends dossing about abandoned buildings and drinking, every month or two I’d go to Dublin to take part in a youth advocacy group at Youth Work Ireland. Once, admittedly, going to a ‘say no to drugs’ photoshoot while hungover. Hey, I contain multitudes.

During my time with the group I trained to facilitate workshops, picking up a lot through exposure, and then worked on and off with them through college. I took those skills to facilitate creative writing workshops with the literary society in college. I may not have known much about creative writing, but the workshops were free and we were all relatively young and inexperienced.

After university I spent more time doing workshops as a participant, wanting to learn more about writing. I found the community aspect so familiar, and it reminded me of why I’d wanted to work in youth work initially. Enabling people to use their voices, providing opportunities that weren’t necessarily there otherwise. I’d grown up very rurally, and there was nothing available for young people unless your family could afford extracurriculars, and even then, it wasn’t much.

I’d never wanted to work full time in youth work or community development. I wanted to be a writer! But I realised quite quickly that I didn’t want to be a full time writer either. Writing had helped me through a fraught adolescence, a breakdown in college, those difficult post-college years.

I got a gig as a writer in residence, which involved leading workshops in a community setting and to a writers group. Before taking on the role I did a course with the Big Smoke Writing Factory (sadly no more) on teaching creative writing. Being a creative writing teacher isn’t an accredited industry, but I wanted to be sure I had the skills.

That first residency went really well and I’ve never looked back. I took time off from teaching when my child was tiny, which coincided with Covid, and then when Milk came out just so I had enough time for all the extra book stuff. But I really missed it.

I don’t live near a university, and while I’ve taught a little at third level, I won’t lie, it doesn’t really interest me. Those at university are privileged, they’re there to write and have a team of excellent tutors (and that’s great!) but it’s not where my heart is.

I love to teach in small groups, to get to know someone’s work over many months, to see them grow in confidence and skill. My biggest career highs have been emails from past students who have gotten book deals when a couple of years previously they were the quiet unsure ones taking a course on a recommendation.

Bar a handful of one off workshops, I haven’t taught online since lockdown. I don’t love screens, and I love going into the local arts centre here and teaching in person. Recently I’ve been getting more emails requesting online courses and groups. I realised that I was being entirely hypocritical in my reasoning. What’s more accessible than workshops you can do from your own home?

All Weather Words started as a retreat. I came up with the name because I’d been saying what an amazing location this retreat venue would be if it wasn’t always raining in Mayo. Then decided, hey, I can write in the rain, maybe other people would like to too? It seemed to line up so perfectly with the creative philosophy I’ve carried with me my whole life that I’ve kept it for more than just the retreat.

In fact, it’s so similar to Creation in Crisis, that I’m not setting up an entirely new newsletter. They’re creative twins. Part collective despair part ‘fuck it let’s make the thing anyway’. This section of the CiC substack will be for news on workshops, offers, and essays on writing in all weather. Keeping it all in one section also means if you’re not interested in writing yourself and just want to read my non teachery posts you can opt out of AWW emails!

This space will be ideal for people who write or want to write that are finding it difficult to carve out the time and motivation to get a project started and/or finished.

We’ll be getting started slowly over the next couple of months.

If you only want to receive the Creation in Crisis posts you can change that in your subscription settings.

An old video from before I killed those plants. But listen to that sound.

That’s all for now folks.