My youngest son’s first two-word sentence is “follow me”

How appropriate, I think. Isn’t that what I’ve been doing all these years? Following your cues. Your newborn mouth, rooting and frantic for milk. Your furious fists, tight as conkers. The turn of your head, a compass needle towards my voice. Each very particular cry, I learned you like a language. Translation: knackered. Sad. Bored. Raging.

“Follow me, Mummy,” you say now, reaching out your marshmallowy hand, pulling me to hunkered knees. The blood-red money spiders, the armoured woodlice under the pot, a defiant daisy growing between cracks in the concrete—its little yellow face turned towards the light. Your collection of wonders.

You cup my face and steer my gaze upwards to the skeletal crane in the sky. My eyes are yours. We see the powdery clouds blanketing the earth and you think I can pull them down, wrap you up in them. Maybe I can.

I follow your wants and whims, your tip-toed calf stretch to reach the fridge, your scratchy sleep-warm morning voice asking for toast. Your tiny beloved worlds of Bluey and Spidey and Hot Wheels cars, the same three minutes of the same episode for the millionth time.

Your body heavy beside me, your giraffe eyelashes resting on your cheeks. How much time have I spent looking everywhere but here? ‘Follow for more’: hacks, homes, morning routines. Lean in, level up, shred ten pounds.

Soon you will walk into nursery school and I won’t be able to follow. I’ll have to stand at the door and watch you disappear inside with your backpack full of awe. I will hold back, trusting what I cannot see, waiting for us to be okay.

And I know we will be.

Because of you, I know where to look.

For the smell of salty seaweed, plastic inflatables, charcoal BBQs. And the East Antrim ocean, when it’s so still you could walk on it.

For self-permission to sign out.

For the little constellation of shoulder freckles that make it through despite Factor 50. For cakes baked on a Monday, just because it’s a Monday. And the feeling of a fluffy blanket pulled down over uncovered toes.

For pure, unadulterated vanilla ice cream that heals everything on a hot day, and the way bubblegum heals your inner child.

For outdoor chalk, Cascada requests at the bar, and lips glued together by stringy toasted marshmallow. For the strange joy of doing something badly, without trying to make it picture perfect.

For a pilgrimage to T.K. Maxx, the perfect linen jumpsuit, and dresses without waistbands. For the spiritual ministry of a really good romcom, fresh releases from all your favourite authors, and the luck of loving someone with a summer birthday.

For live music in unlikely places. And dancing your heart out, knee injuries be damned.

For apologies, extended and received. For all the laps of the pool, clear-headed and heavy-limbed, hair dried out by chlorine. For dusty-blue hydrangeas, coral-orange dahlias, and eating every meal outside, letting nature do the vacuuming. For condensation on a glass of bubbly prosecco. For long campfires, trading dad jokes and ghost stories like Pokémon cards.

For the first sip of sunlight before everyone wakes. For late-night chats and early-morning croaks, the way sleep still catches in your throat. For children emerging from sleeping bags like butterflies. And a whole week where the only ceiling is a sky full of stars.

For a changed heart, recently converted to camping; even the most hardened summer-hater and indoors-enthusiast doesn’t stand a chance.

For the little pocket of time before everything changes, the way it stretches and expands, but also contracts. The way a late August sunset kisses a cool September breeze and you know you are deep in the belly of school holidays.

For summer, while we still have it.

For September, as it waits at the door.

For all these things,

Amen.

N.B. I want you to know I could not have written a lil note like this last summer, or the summer before. I mean, I could have. But it would have felt completely disingenuous because I did not give a crap about all the small goodnesses worth noticing. Actually, this is what I wrote. Things aren’t perfect, but they’re better. We can breathe. So this is just me sending some virtual tight squeezes to the families for whom summer is hard and disorienting and far from sparkling. I see you.

Watching

(Please don’t judge me for how much TV I have watched recently. Sloth-mode has been out in full force, and I have no regrets.)

• Voicemails for Isabelle was close to being the perfect romcom, not least for the noughties soundtrack. It’s a good time to be a Robyn fan - did anyone else watch and then immediately learn the dance? Just me? (Full disclosure: for me it would lose a star for the ‘sick saintly sister’ trope. Maybe that’s just a personal pet peeve - “tragically ill girl exists to make everyone else appreciate life and fuel her sibling’s love story”.)

• In preparation for a movie date with my eldest to see the new Spider-Man, I did my homework and watched all the previous Tom Holland Spider-Mans (Spider-Men? Spiders-Man?). Paddy was resistant, but we both ended up hooked. I am not a Marvel Girlie (…yet!), but the thing I love about Spider-Man is the very mortal moments. The teenage humour and silliness and school crushes, all mixed in with, you know, saving the world. I love what happens when the hero is a boy with superhuman powers and responsibilities, but also doesn’t have a fully developed prefrontal cortex yet.

  
  Brand New Day was a bit different. Peter’s powers have been changed, irrevocably, by loss. His literal DNA has changed. But the story doesn’t tell us to heal from grief and go back to who we were before. It’s more like: this thing has changed you forever. And that’s okay. Did I ever think I would be waxing lyrical about Spider-Man? Absolutely not. But here we are.

• The boys randomly really got into the OG animated Scooby Doo (all available on BBC iPlayer!), and it was an unexpected delight - uniting all the ages and stages in our fam.

• Maid is the story of Alex, a young mother fleeing emotional abuse and coercive control. This has been saved on my Netflix ‘to watch’ list since 2021, and I distinctly remember clicking on it on three separate occasions with a breastfeeding baby in my arms, and I just… couldn’t. Then I forgot about it. Recently, a friend mentioned it in a ‘you’ve got to watch it’ kind of way and promised me there was hope in her story. He was right. It’s one of the best series I’ve watched in years. As soon as I finished it, I read the memoir that inspired it, and gobbled that up too. I’d say the series focuses more on Alex leaving the relationship, while the book digs deeper into breaking cycles of poverty and homelessness in corrupt systems. Both are fab, and both left me thinking about them long after I’d finished.

• I Swear is beautiful and awkward and messy and visually bleak - which makes it even better. It tells the true story of John Davidson, a Scottish man living with severe Tourette’s syndrome, and his journey into advocacy. It resists sentimentality and the twee happy ending I was half-expecting.

• The Four Seasons is the middle-aged ensemble cast I didn’t know I needed.

• The Woman in Cabin 10 and I Will Find You because addictive, escapist, twisty thrillers (with a million plot holes) are Paddy’s bread and butter.

Reading

• Whistler. I honestly feel a bit weepy every time I think of this book? If anyone wants to pick that apart with me, then please slide into my DMs. It’s the story of 53-year-old Daphne (I also love that name!), who bumps into the man who was once her stepfather for a brief period when she was nine. It’s about chosen family, childhood memories, and the tiny, seemingly inconsequential moments that define our lives. I’ve seen some reviews that lament, “Nothing happens in this book!!” but for me, the characters were so real and vivid, I felt like a million things were happening. I miss their voices. It shows that the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change your life.

I love what Ann Patchett herself said in an interview:
“Even if you are the craziest, most successful fiction writer there is, people don’t read a ton of literary fiction. So there’s a lot of freedom to do whatever you want to do. To write a book about kind people, it’s an underrepresented group. There are a lot more novels about dystopia and betrayal and terrible things, and yet everywhere I go I see so much kindness.”

• Few and Far Between. I’ve mentioned this one before, but I finished it and I’ve been thinking about it all summer long, so much so that I bought the audiobook to listen to on my way to work. I think Jan Carson is best known for her magical realism, but I love her most for the way she captures Northern Irish culture and characters, and she does so without cruelty. Her characters always feel like someone I know - my dad, my aunt, my mum’s friend - and in this novel especially, she gives centre stage to the mostly unregarded middle-aged: the awkward, flawed, strange, irritating and tender.
  
  It’s inspired by a bonkers piece of history, when Terence O’Neill in 1958 proposed draining Lough Neagh to create a seventh county for the North. The result: an island community formed by people intimidated from their homes during the Troubles, where Marion and Robert-John Connolly have remained on the ‘Ark’, their childhood home, long after everyone else returned to the mainland. Now they face the possibility of being forced out again. It’s my favourite of hers yet - maybe even bumping The Raptures from its No. 1 spot in my heart.

• The Anthropologists is only 186 pages, but every word counts. Asya and Manu, a young married couple, are house-hunting in an unnamed foreign city, while Asya films local daily life for a documentary, hoping to capture the “unremarkable grace” of mundane life. It’s warm and intimate and I feel like I never have the right words to do justice to anything written by Ayşegül Savaş - but please just trust me.

• Joyful Anyway is my queen Kate Bowler at her best: writing that is quirky, lyrical, important, and so deeply human. She describes ‘the ache’ as the persistent, universal feeling of emptiness, longing and unfinishedness that remains even when we try to fix or optimise our lives.

  I actually priced flights to London to hear her speak at the start of the summer, but couldn’t quite make it happen between work, childcare and the general summer juggle. Next time, though. Next time.

• Esther is Now Following You. I heard an interview with Tanya Sweeney on the Irish Times Women’s Podcast and knew I’d be hooked by her debut novel - and I wasn’t wrong. It’s about obsession and celebrity fandom, but really it’s about how trauma and loss and control and fixation. It’s funny and timely and unsettling, but also heartbreaking - and thankfully not the dark thriller I thought it would be. It’s much more real, human and hearty than that.

• I Want to Die but I Also Want to Eat Tteokbokki : Originally written in Korean, this raw memoir is structured around real transcripts of the author’s 12-week therapy sessions for dysthymia (persistent mild depression) and anxiety. I know, it’s as intense as it sounds. Although I think that feeling is universal: deeply weary of life while still craving simple, comforting earthly joys. Sadly, the author passed away in 2025. This one won’t be for everyone, but I liked it.

• Dolly All The Time. You know Annabel Monaghan is one of my ride-or-die romcom authors. I immediately loved Dolly, who is basically the patron saint of ‘eldest daughters’. There is a fake-dating situation and a rich, handsome guy but she’s also a single mum to a tween son and OBVS that relationship was the truest love story for me.

• London Falling. Not my usual vibe, but the audiobook is particularly good. It’s so good I shouted at Paddy from the shower to tell him he’d love it. Part murder mystery, part history of London, part social commentary, part journalism. And like all the best non-fiction storytelling, it feels like fiction.

• Fundamentally. is a dark, witty comedy about Nadia, a British academic who takes a UN job in Iraq to run a rehabilitation program for ISIS brides.

• Said the dead. had all of us at book club feeling like we maybe weren’t quite smart enough for the author’s writing style. It follows an obsessive narrator who uncovers the 19th and early 20th century casebooks of the derelict Cork District Psychiatric Asylum and turns them into a tribute to the women erased by history. It’s very lofty and poetic, and I know it’s doing something cool - but it went over my head. Maybe it won’t go over yours.

• Finally, a long drive and an impulsive download on Libby led me to All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert (the ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ lady). I still have no idea what to say about it. Unhinged. A wild ride, for sure.

Writing

(or lack thereof)

Tenx9 is a live storytelling night where nine people have up to ten minutes each to tell a true story from their own life around a shared theme. It was started in Belfast in 2011 by Paul Doran and Pádraig Ó Tuama, originally in the Black Box, and there are now Tenx9 events all over NI, Britain, the USA and Australia.

In July we took a couple of weeks off to go camping in Co. Down and then headed to my mum’s caravan on the North Coast, and my big plan was to not write a single word. My phone was dead half the time, so no Notes app, no laptop, no journals. I did pack a teeny tiny pocket-sized notebook JUST IN CASE, but it seemed pretty unlikely I’d use it because I felt so dead and empty and blank.

We’d booked tickets and a babysitter to go to the Tenx9 event in Portstewart as part of the Red Sails Festival, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the theme: Seaside Stories. I knew there would probably never be a more perfect time to tell the story of my summers at the caravan site. (Although, like all my stories, it wasn’t really about the caravan site.)

So I jotted it down in my stupid wee far-too-small notebook. Then Paddy got me his laptop, and I wrote it out properly and submitted it. Three sleeps before the event. Somehow it was accepted, and I joined the lineup with eight other incredible storytellers.

I wore the same dress I wore to my first spoken-word event in May because it made me feel a little bit brave for my bucket-list moment.

It wasn’t ideal. My hands shook. There were issues with the mic. My voice wobbled. I cried, despite having read the thing approximately one million times, and I felt extremely silly.

And I think that’s why I’ll probably do it again.

Because as much as I love hiding behind a laptop screen and squirrelling things away in notebooks, it is a very beautiful thing to bear witness to the stories of others, and let them do the same for you. In an actual room, in the flesh.

At the very least, there’s usually a big heart-to-heart with another woman in the girls’ bathrooms. And if there’s a babysitter, then there’s going to be dancing afterwards. That’s my rule.

In other news, I went viral. Twelve years of carefully crafted words on the internet, immediately eclipsed by a random little doodle of a snail.

As it should be, tbh. 🤷🏼‍♀️🐌

Living

Okay, that’s enough from me. Go and squeeze the last little drops out of August. I’ll see you on the other side of the September Scaries.

Lots of love,
Reb x

Hi friend,

It’s been a hot minute. Literally. At the time of writing this, the air con in our car is broken, and I just paused typing to check if my hands still smell like this morning’s suncream that I wrestled onto my youngest’s milk-bottle skin in an attempt to savour the last few days of the heatwave. Why does every single supermarket suncream have that distinct, nostalgic blend of something like plastic and childhood and synthetic coconut-vanilla? GAH, I love it.1

This week I got to sit side by side with two dear friends at Helen’s Bay, and despite a chaotic picnic smooshed into the sand and rogue runaway children (mine, always mine!), we LOCKED IN on the catch-up. So that’s how I picture this Soft Evidence round-up finding you: a virtual edition of the side-by-side beach hang.

I’m also just going to come out and tell you what I told my friends, which is that I’ve been feeling anxious recently. And anxiety, while I have enough experience to recognise it in my body when it wakes me at 3 am, it is not the mental-health affliction my body usually bends towards. So that’s been... weird.

I told my writing bestie the same thing over voice message, and I knew she’d make the connection when I also said that writing feels very clunky at the minute.

I’m currently cooking up an essay about the London Marathon, Mile 18 in particular, where I stood for four hours melting into the concrete waiting to see Paddy for a handful of seconds. I keep getting stuck trying to find a way to tell you about the people I met and the stories I absorbed, up close and from afar, like the eternal people-watching creep that I am. For now, it’s much easier to tell you about the day before the marathon, when I was left to my own devices while Paddy did all of his runner-ish, preparing things.

That morning, the freshly released Noah Kahan album blasted while I got dressed for the day veeeery slowly, a pure luxury, and then I got coffee and an almond croissant at the market and had a mooch around the shops, trying on clothes until I sweated all my make-up off and ripped the zip on my skirt from taking it on and off so much. There were tears in the Lush store, and I met Paddy for pasta and tiramisu thanks to the gift of a very generous friend, before parting ways again for him to get a good night’s sleep and me to see Wicked (!!!).

In case you didn’t know, Wicked releases front-row tickets for the following week’s shows every Wednesday, and your girl managed to bag a £27 front-row seat for her first-ever West End show (!!!).

As is my true nature, I left my prescription sunglasses on a bus, spilt Coke down my white skirt during Defying Gravity, got the wrong Tube back to the hotel because I was absent-mindedly following the crowd, and had to write the room code on a scrap of paper with eyeliner because my phone battery was about to die.

It’s no surprise, really, because if you know me then you’ll know about the purse I lost in Rome, the phone I left in an Uber in Lisbon (with my boarding pass on it), the other phone I left on a flight to Dubai, and a train in Cambridge (because I had a baby in one hand and a book in the other, to be fair!), among many other travel faux pas.

And still, this impromptu alone time in London was one of the best days of my whole entire life.

There used to be more of this kind of thing before I met Paddy, either with my eldest son, a toddler at the time, or on my own, thanks to grandparent sleepovers.

Despite being a pickpocket’s dream come true, I used to feel the exact same way about those wee bits of solo travel—suddenly fully alive, with a beating heart and blood pumping through my veins.

And then, because of some kind of misplaced forever-lurking motherhood guilt, the thought taunts me: am I running away? I always wonder if this is a city break or an elaborate escape plan.

At the same time, I still can’t stop thinking about the Artemis 11 mission and Moonjoy, probably exacerbated by also seeing Project Hail Mary in the cinema. Which, if you aren’t familiar, is the story of a school science teacher who wakes up on a spaceship as humanity’s last hope and forms a deep emotional connection with a stranded alien called Rocky while trying to save both of their worlds.

In our real actual life, we have the trailblazing Moonjoy crew completing humanity’s first crewed lunar flyby in half a century, and, in the midst of it all, they’re sending heart-shaped hand signals back to their families.

They trained for years to put language to their experience, and they’re still speechless at the beauty they see. They’re telling us here on Earth that they love us “from the Moon,” and they’re naming a bright spot on the lunar surface after Mission Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife so that her family can always find her there.

They’re saying things like:

“Planet Earth, you are a crew… When we burned toward the Moon, I said that we do not leave Earth—but we choose it. We will explore... But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”

All that equipment and intellect, scientific precision and terrifying vastness, and these astronauts are still just humans with Big Feelings pursuing beauty and connection at the heart of it all.

There is still love and grief and longing. There is still someone missing someone else across impossible distances between Earth and space, life and death.

Basically, it’s been a good and terrible month to be a romantic.

The distances in my life have been a bit smaller: A solo escape to London. A perfectly timed almond croissant all to myself. An aimless mooch around the shops. A front-row ticket to Wicked. And then home to children who smell like synthetic-coconut sun cream. Sandy sushi on the beach with friends. A body capable of anxiety and awe in equal measure.

I think it’s helpful to leave your orbit for a minute so you can see what you’ve been circling all along.

The astronauts came home talking about choosing Earth, and maybe that’s what I’m doing too.

Subscribe now

The Honourable Mentions i.e. what I’m reading, watching, writing + living.

Okay, buckle in, folks, there were a few bangers on the reading log recently and a few less so, but hopefully you can find a little something to wet your bookish tastebuds.

First up, some literary fiction: I have waited so long for Louise Nealon’s second book (her debut novel Snowflake is one of my favourites EVER) and Everything That Is Beautiful was just as gorgeous as I hoped. Few and Far Between by Jan Carson might be my favourite of hers so far? A good month for Irish writing. Plus, I FINALLY got my hands on Heart The Lover.

I may have said this before, but there are a couple of romance writers I would go to war for, and Abby Jimenez is one of them so I was excited for The Night We Met. Annabel Monaghan is another ride or die, and I am just waiting for my next Saturday off to completely dissociate and get lost in Dolly All The Time — but I’m not sure the self-control will last TBH.

Read two very different memoirs back to back, Strangers and Fame Sick.

Also read Wreck by Catherine Newman. And Yesteyear, which needs no introduction. I know there are a billion super-deep think-pieces going around about it, but I GOBBLED it up. By no means a perfect book, but deliciously addictive and so fun to discuss.

Two pieces I LOVED on Substack:

COFFEE + CRUMBS

The Inefficiency of Motherhood

Rubbing sleep from her eyes, my youngest daughter trudges to the kitchen in her pajamas. She grabs a small plastic bowl and walks it over to the table. She returns to the kitchen and opens a drawer for a spoon. She takes it to her bowl. Back to the kitchen, she grabs a cup. I watch her move the way I would a tennis volley: Cup. Table. Milk. Table. Cerea…

Read more

3 months ago · 32 likes · 5 comments · Coffee + Crumbs and Sonya Spillmann

Watching

So, you already know Project Hail Mary was a cinematic highlight, but if you aren’t convinced, then just know that my 12-year-old son sat to the very end of the credits then leaned forward with his hands clasped together and said, “Now THAT was a movie.”

I also recently watched The Rental Family with him, and while his review was less glowing— ‘a bit slow’, I LOVED it. It’s a bit of a love letter to Tokyo, but I can’t stop thinking about what it had to say about loneliness and human connection and purpose and adopted family and self-worth and human dignity and okay, yeah, basically All The Things. I’m so here for the Brendan Fraser comeback.

You know I was SEATED for the Remarkably Bright Creatures movie adaptation, and it was just as charming as I hoped. At the same time, I think it fell ever-so-slightly flat for me compared to the book, but I have an abnormally intense attachment to the book. Probably due to life circumstances during the time I read it. That happens sometimes, doesn’t it?

And now we’re taking a bit of a sharp left turn to chat about Off Campus, which I watched in, like, 48 hours??? It’s so bad it’s good and I keep seeing memes about happily married women in their thirties and forties obsessing over this yearning-filled college-kid romance where the hockey jock falls for the orchestra nerd and I have to confess I tick the box. It is the replacement we all needed for The Summer I Turned Pretty and reminds me of the nostalgic euphoria of summers bingeing One Tree Hill—but less toxic characters and more happy endings.

In a very different genre altogether, I am so sad the first series of The Testaments is over. I did not expect a spin-off from The Handmaid’s Tale to be… hopeful? I mean, we’re still in Gilead, so maybe hope is a stretch, but the focus on Gilead’s daughters and the coming-of-age themes are a much-needed breather from the intensity of the original, dark and relentless story. I think the final line of the final scene, when Daisy and her girl gang are walking down the corridor in slow-mo, sums it up perfectly: “I'm going to create my own army, because nothing can be more powerful than a teenage girl.” Chills.

Lastly, let the record show we survived watching Apex on Netflix, and while Paddy bowed out halfway through, I watched to the bitter end. Yes, I am still traumatised.

Writing

While writing itself feels clunky, a couple of weeks ago I was chosen to share my work at a spoken word evening exploring the theme of “belonging” and IT WAS THE BRAVEST THING I’VE DONE MAYBE EVER.

In the end, I went with a story (about cheese toasties) that I first shared on Substack, and I just want you to know: I never in a million years would have considered that piece if my gorgeous Substack friends hadn’t been so lovely about it. Obvs you guys were right—it was a hit. If you ever need to borrow some courage, you can always count on a Belfast crowd to hype you/hold you at the same time. Truly the most generous bunch of humans.

Here’s to creating in community. The isolated lil teen mum in me, who started writing on the internet 12 years ago, would be BUZZING.

And in case you missed it, I published this essay in April. It’s dedicated to the big, brutal (and beautiful, maybe?) housing estate where we live. It’s about all the surprising love stories I’ve been noticing. And about fighting for my own in the middle of one of the hardest seasons we’ve ever lived through.

That’s nearly it from me, but since the boys and I have been picking bouquets of dandelions and ‘wishies’ this morning, I wanted to leave you with this gorgeous blessing by my friend Kim, who just published her second book, Small Steps: Blessings to Lift Your Soul on the Pilgrimage of Life. Small Steps is a book of blessings meant to meet us in our daily lives, in all of the challenges and joys, struggles and triumphs. A few of the blessings include: For a Rough Morning, Listening to a Dream, Learning to Pray Again, and For an Ordinary Tuesday.

A Blessing for the First Warm Days

There’s a wisp of clouds
the snow piles are melting
glistening in the sun
the layers of sweaters and coats
hats and gloves
have been stripped off.

Oh, the glorious light and blue skies
the hope of all that’s waiting
beneath the surface.

May this thawing seep into our bodies
may we look into the eyes of our neighbors
with a wave and a good morning
may we reach out to friends and offer: I’m here for you
may any barriers and disagreements fall from us
like dandelions blowing in the breeze
may we be filled with listening and understanding
sentiments of mutuality.

May the reality of what is
not be greater than the potential for what could be.

And may we be the ones
unearthing this hope
together and in community
for the sake of the world.

A Final Few Lovely Things

Phew, I think that’s it. If you made it this far, you’re my favourite.

Lots of love,

Reb x

I’m on a late-night walk somewhere between winter and spring of 2025, when it’s still damp and dark but the bitter wind isn’t quite as punishing.

Our housing estate is in its own in-between stage, too.

Conversations can be sharp, opinions sharper, and typically there’s a watchful atmosphere as if the iconic tower blocks above are keeping guard. You could look one way and see what people expect from us: burnt-out cars, police tape, painted kerbstones—red, white and blue.

But you could also look the other way and see the cherry blossom trees starting to come in, lining every street with their powdery pink parade.

I never know which version to offer people: sometimes I’m honest—it’s a hard place to love—and other times, I’m oddly defensive, like I’ve personally planted every single blossom tree myself. It really depends on where you look, is what I’m trying to say.

The podcaster in my ears feels worlds away. She is all summer and sunshine as she talks about her marriage:

“I’m just so thankful I made sure to marry someone who won’t let circumstances come between us. I know hard things will come, but I also know my husband is so strong and steadfast, he’ll make sure it brings us closer together.”

That’s when I yank the wired earphones out and let them catch in my plastic raincoat, and then I march right up to an actual lamppost—and kick it.

Black pain shoots through my knee. So I lift my other foot, with a slightly less damaged knee, and kick it again.

Another spiky pain.

The whole reason I’m on this stupid walk in the first place is because of an ‘overuse injury’ that has me in knee rehab jail. Overuse, as in: seven mornings a week, I had been exercising until I basically blacked out. Yes, our leisure centre membership is cheaper than talking therapy. Why do you ask?

If I could speak to the woman on the podcast, I would tell her I also married the strong and steadfast man. The slow-to-anger, puts-everyone-else-first, present, emotionally attuned, opposite-of-my-exes, man.

And somehow, a few days before this, I still found myself asking him the question:

“Do you ever wonder if our marriage will survive this?”

His head jolted back like he’d been shot. But playfully, like a Nerf bullet hit.

“Um, no.” A nervous laugh. “I actually hadn’t wondered that, Reb.”

So I pressed him. Keeping it light, of course.

“Do you think we’re okay then?”

“Well, no. None of us are okay.” Another nervous chuckle, but sadder this time.

“Do you think we’re going to be okay?”

Silence. The space between us pulled tight with old grudges and unfinished sentences.

“Yeah…” he replied eventually, shrugging.

I don’t believe him, but I want to. I so badly want it to be true.

Maybe it’s that wanting that carries us into the next conversations. The ones that need to happen over weeks and months because it’s too exposing—tearing down the tower blocks all at once.

We didn’t notice it happening at first, the way the distance between us gathered slowly but then hard and fast, like a slinky dropping down the stairs—falling, falling, falling.

It’s no wonder, really. We were empty. Out of money, out of strategies, out of therapies and services to try. We had become so vigilant as caregivers, so obsessed with getting ahead of the next complex need, we were always braced for impact, always second-guessing ourselves and each other. We stopped talking about anything else.

What started as marital bickering turned into something sharp and sore, and I would walk away from every interaction thinking, this isn’t us. We were exhausted. There was nothing left to throw at it, no energy left to keep fighting the same way. Maybe this is why we were ready to let our guards down, to say the naked things, to let the other person in.

***

The day my 70-ish-year-old neighbour comes to the door with frozen sausages, it’s like any other Monday afternoon.

“Rebecca, I was just clearing out the freezer again and wondered if you’d want these?”

She’s always clearing out the freezer, and I, the feeder of three boys, am always grateful to rehome unwanted freezer items.

“Yes, definitely, thank you so much!”

“Oh, by the way, I got engaged,” she bursts out, handing over the sausages, left hand suspended in the air—papery and wrinkled, diamond ring catching the light.

And suddenly, it is not like any other Monday afternoon.

“Oh my goodness, congratulations!! Let me see! Tell me everything!” I say, gathering her tiny frame in my arms.

She waves her arms, protesting. “We aren’t going to have a wedding, just something small. We’re far too old for that nonsense, and the kids would be mortified!”

“What?! No, you have to! You deserve to! They would be so happy for you!”

She tuts and flaps me away, but she is effervescent. Glowing.

“They all love him,” she says, gushing. “We all love him. He’s a good man.”

Our street is not a romantic one. Or at least, it never used to be.

But then a new guy moved into the drug-den block of flats across the street. An older man, quiet and kind, with a solid head of white hair and a soft, round face. We don’t know his backstory—people around here keep their histories close. But he goes to work every morning and waters his hanging flower baskets every evening—a whimsical contrast to the political mural slapped across the building.

We first noticed these two talking during one of the COVID lockdowns, watering can in hand. But our neighbour is always chatting to somebody; she has her finger on the pulse of the estate, so we didn’t think anything of it.

Not even when it turned into hours every day.

That was, until she started walking across the street in a lovely, smart blazer.

Until she started getting into his car on Saturday evenings.

Until he started letting himself into her house at dinner time.

And we could hear them giggling in the garden through the hedge that divides us.

My kids would kick a football over, and he would kick it back.

Even then, we didn’t get our hopes up.

But one day, he stopped to talk to Paddy and told him how amazing she is.

Amazing. That was the actual word he used. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone around here use that word about anything, let alone another person.

Now she stands in front of me with a giddiness that makes me want to hug her again—just to catch some of it.

As she turns to leave, she says one more thing:

“Why did I meet him so late, Rebecca? Imagine I’d met my Prince Charming forty years ago. Imagine the life we could have had…”

My heart lurches.

“I know,” I say, though I don’t. “But it’s never too late.”

Even as I say it, I’m not sure what I mean. I’m aware my words are a drop in the ocean of her pain, and I have no idea how her capacity for love has survived. But I want to know. I want to believe in it.

The next time I see her fiancé, it’s from the window at the top of my stairs, carrying my toddler down for breakfast at 6 am. He’s heading towards his work van, and he doesn’t see me as he’s too busy looking at the house next door. Just a small glance. Checking, maybe, that she is still sound asleep.

The romance of it carries me down the stairs, floating through the rest of my morning. Through the rest of my week.

***

Around the same time, I start noticing something else entirely.

When my eldest son moved to secondary school, he went from a year group of 12 to over 200. Naturally, it wasn’t long before his friendships began expanding in all sorts of directions. One friend in particular, who gets the same bus, is on the phone every evening, their giggles shaking the house.

He sits on the sofa opposite me, with a large goofy grin and cartoon heart eyes. And when he catches me watching, he doesn’t look away. He just gives me a mischievous shrug and keeps talking, completely unguarded, like there is nothing to hold back.

I say hi down the phone as I get up and walk into the kitchen. More giggles. And as I busy myself washing dishes, I am surprised to catch my own reflection in the window—it turns out I am smiling, too.

“On the other side of the tower blocks,” I hear him say, and I realise they are organising a meeting point to swap birthday gifts. And for the next while, there is a lot of pacing and phone-checking. Obviously, I let him know I’ll be doing a casual drive-by.

And when I do, I don’t know what I expect to find, but there he is—walking her home, doing a full circle of the estate, both of them chatting with their hands—two little gift bags swinging in the air.

I think of my dad, who comes from a similiar place, who probably wanted more for me, and says the same thing every time he visits, “Horrible ol’ place, isn’t it?”

I know he’s joking; he just wants a reaction, so I don’t bite.

“Depends where you look,” I always say.

And where I’m looking, I see love holding on. I see surprising, bittersweet love arriving almost too late. I see bright, unguarded love arriving ever-so-slightly early. I see hard-won, bruised love plodding through the achy middle and learning to open up again.

And sometimes, on a late-night walk, I still can’t decide what I’m looking at.

But I’m thinking that, like the blossom trees, love doesn’t arrive just once in a lifetime. It returns, it endures, it renews itself. It circles back—even on ordinary streets like ours.

Share

Hi friends,

How are we all doing?

It’s been a gorgeous month over here, and somehow at the very same time, slightly feral. Appointments stacked on appointments, lots of loud parenting pivots, and what I’m fairly sure is end-of-term burnout in my children. School is never a given in our house, but the end of March was… not for the faint of heart.

Yesterday, though, I left work, and there was the most vivid, brimming-with-life rainbow. The whole thing, start to finish, just sitting on top of the navy-blue ocean like it had been plonked there. I was driving along with my mouth hanging open in a gobsmacked little ‘O’, when, before my brain had a chance to catch up, I took a hard left like a Mario-Kart driver into a little parking bay and jumped out into gale-force winds and sleet to capture it.

Actually, that’s probably all you need to know about how I’m doing: treading water, a bit buffered and breathless, but furiously chasing the rainbows when they show up.

Speaking of treading water (because I am, apparently, contractually obliged to bring everything back to swimming): onto the good stuff. Which includes a 24-hour getaway with Paddy, and all I’ll say is this: get yourself a man who not only plans and books the overnight stay, but also makes sure to pack your goggles and swimming cap.

We gymed first and then proceeded to what Paddy kept begging me to stop calling ‘the wet activities’, i.e., pool, sauna, steam room, hot tubs, etc. I had the whole swimming lane entirely to myself for ages, and it felt both luxurious and suspicious. It was a small lane, granted, but definitely big enough for another person (very Jack-and-Rose-on-the-door energy). Instead, though, there were hordes of elderly men gathered in the family area, bobbing about and shooting me looks. I tried my best to keep my swimming streamlined, not taking up too much room. I even invited one of them in, gesturing to aaaaall the space beside me in my most generous and friendly voice. But he scoffed (!!!).

“I’ll wait,” he said.

So, I made him wait.

Later in the sauna, I said to Paddy, “I don’t really know how to explain their facial expressions except to say… I think… and I’ve genuinely never said this about myself before… but I think they were maybe intimidated by me?”

To which he replied, without missing a beat, “I’m intimidated by you.”

Shrugs shoulders.

Here’s to taking up more room, I guess.

That evening we had big plans: cocktails, music, vibes. But instead, we retreated to the room, flopped onto the stupidly large bed, ate snacks, and talked for so long that we couldn’t be bothered going back downstairs. It wasn’t our normal ‘yolo’ style when we have a night away, but it felt, in the best possible way, like a sleepover with your best friend.

(Which, as someone who was already a parent when they met, married, and moved in with their person, still feels like a delicious novelty.)

PSA: Look away now if you are offended by photos of other humans in robes. We are not sorry.

In other March madness, my birthday, Mother’s Day and St Patrick’s Day all landed on the same weekend, so obviously we celebrated hard.

Really hard.

By which I mean I was in bed by 9.30 with a cup of tea and a family-size bar of chocolate.

Paddy, on the other hand, who has never baked in his life, stayed up until well past midnight the night before my birthday, making me a lemon cake.

From two lemon cake recipes smooshed together.

This man has never creamed butter and sugar in his life.

He fell asleep on the sofa, got up early to finish it before work, and somehow produced an actual, beautiful cake. Complete with crystallised lemon. Crystallised lemon!!!

I have a potential essay brewing here—working title: Another Bloody Crumb Coat. So I won’t go into too much detail now.

But as he ran out the door to work that morning, side-stepping the literal mounds of flour and icing sugar coating the kitchen, I said, “Why now? Six years into marriage? The year after a ‘big’ birthday? Thirty-one isn’t exactly a milestone.”

The look on his face was half mischief, half mockery.

“Because this is the first year I really felt like I could do it.”

I made some joke about marathon training making him feel invincible. Like, if you can run 20 miles after work, apparently, a light sponge is no longer intimidating.

But then I grabbed him on his way out the door and put both my hands around his neck.

“No,” I said. “I know exactly why you did it this year.”

But more on that another time. ;)

And look, I don’t mean to brag, but (proceeds to brag) I like to think I’ve become quite good at surrendering to our circumstances. Some might even say I’m a professional pivoter. But on this particular weekend, what with it being my birthday and Mother’s Day and all, it turns out I had my fists clenched tightly around some ready-made plans I wasn’t willing to let go of.

By lunchtime on Saturday, though, in the middle of Belfast city centre, it didn’t take a genius to work out that what we needed most was wide open space. (Picture Paddy and me bickering over who needed to run after the child most likely to dart into traffic. Paddy, obviously. He had just voluntarily run 18 miles for marathon training, while I am still somehow injured from a simple workout 18 months ago, where I was just trying to, oh, I don’t know… survive my life.)

Our eldest was at a grandparent sleepover, so we persevered with one less child and decided Botanic was our best bet. But first, we squeezed in a quick stop at St George’s Market, which is normally a no-go after one too many dramatic exits with an overwhelmed little human slung over a shoulder. But on this day, we managed about fifteen minutes: pastries, trad music, 50p cars. Worth it. All of it.

The pilgrimage around Botanic involved the usual hits: the Palm House (or the Monkey House, as my eldest called it when we lived here), the Ulster Museum, watching tourists get The Photo at the Queen’s University gate. And of course, a little nod to the McClay Library, where we sort of… fell in love?

My own personal highlights involved an iced coffee, five minutes alone in front of the Renoir painting, and a five-minute (or forty-five-minute) browse in No Alibis, which ended, entirely predictably, with me leaving clutching three new books. Perfect. No notes.

The whole day felt both alien and strangely familiar. Like being back in my university years with Reuben, when it was just the two of us filling long days in these same places, but he was a very different toddler, and I was a very different mum.

At one point, Jesse came screeching round a corner in the Palm House, and I was hit by a wave of something I can only describe as the opposite of nostalgia. The sharp, sick feeling of being dropped back into a version of your life you thought you had left behind. Or at least made peace with.

Of course, there are gorgeous memories from those years, too. Feeling held. Feeling surrounded. But there are more memories of being alone. Of ordinary outings turning, without warning, into violent meltdowns. People staring. Both of us completely overwhelmed and neither of us understanding why.

I thought I was too young, too soft, too inconsistent. I thought everyone else had been handed a secret map to motherhood, and I had somehow missed the meeting. These places became tangled up with that feeling. The Palm House. The museum. Botanic. They weren’t just places. They were evidence, I thought, of my failure.

But years later, with so much more understanding, language, grace (and therapy) under my belt, I can see that none of it was what I thought.

It wasn’t me. It wasn’t him.

We were both just trying to survive something we didn’t yet have words for.

And standing there this time, with Jesse darting between the exotic plants and Asher needing the same wide open space his brother once did, I realised those places no longer belonged to the hardest version of our story.

And if I were titling this one, too, I think I’d call it: Places Redeemed.

“To the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart. We all come from a lineage of women who continue to create against all odds.” Jessie Buckley, first Irish woman to win an Oscar for best actress. On her first Mother’s Day, no less. And on the week her daughter cut her first tooth. Loved this reflection on her words, especially.

On the St. Patrick’s Day agenda: the Spar Craic 10k run for Paddy, free pints for anyone named Paddy (with the request for ID, might I add), chocolate Guinness cupcakes for anyone married to Paddy, a full fry-up for dinner, more trad music, and obviously, as I’m sure Saint Patrick would have wanted: spiderman face painting and balloon swords.

Last year, we couldn’t leave the house on St. Patrick’s Day, so I guess March feels like one big marker of how far we’ve come.

March Reads:

I can’t believe it took me so long to get my hands on Close To Home by Michael McGee, a raw, bruising novel about Sean, who returns to West Belfast after university and finds that nothing has changed. The same dead-end jobs in clubs, the same drinking and drugs, the same inherited silences. I think it’s about masculinity, class, and the struggle to imagine a future beyond what you’ve always known. It’s sharp and sad in a hopeful way, and I think it’s my new favourite Belfast story.

I had the honour of being on the launch team for the new Coffee+Crumbs book, You’re In Good Company, and there’s still time to pre-order for the U.K. release date. I am still thinking about every single essay in this stunning collection, and I can tell you that the ladies at C+C are the most generous team who truly live out the heart of this book. It already has me thinking differently about community and friendship.

I’m aware it sounds like I’m saying everything is my favourite, but The Bright Years is actually my favourite read of 2026 so far, and it will be a tough one to beat. It’s officially up there with All My Mothers*1. The writing is so beautiful, I tried to ration it out but I have zero self-control. Which is maybe why it’s so strong - because every single word is doing something. The story follows four generations of one family trying and failing and trying again to love one another. Touches on addiction, inherited family patterns, grief, and most importantly: grace.

I must mention The Housemaid, which I had to read before watching the movie (easy escapism and not completely terrible), Water (still working through the Elements collection by John Boyne and really enjoying it!), The Echo Chamber (I’m obvs on a John Boyne kick, but this one is in a whole other wheelhouse—the man has range, I’ll tell you that much. Entertaining, if nothing else!), aaaand lastly, Five Tuesday in Winter (had to get some Lily King in my diet until Heart the Lover became available!).

Honourable Mentions:

Who knew a silly wee set of wrist cuffs could transform my silly wee evening skincare routine? I didn’t know how irrationally distraught I was about my soggy sleeves until they were gone. If anyone would like to hire me to market these bad boys, please get in touch.

On a slightly related and probably uninteresting note, I tried a new SPF in March and it annihilated my skin. It’s all hormone-related, and I’ve been referred to dermatology for the billionth time in my life, but I’m just curious: if anyone knows of an acne/rosacea-friendly SPF, then please also slide into my DMs.

The weighted blanket I got for my birthday is giving me life, even though it was almost the cause of my death the first night, when it crushed me. PSA: Make sure you buy the correct size for your body weight.

I’ve been on the hunt for a light jacket because I suddenly feel painfully aware that my school-run coat makes me look like a school-run mum. And I think I’ve finally found the one: this brown quilted gingham gem, complete with tiny frills on the pockets. I’m worried it’s a bit heavy for spring, but then again, this is Northern Ireland, and we need emotional support padding all year round.

In slightly more important news than my new jacket, in a few weeks, Paddy will be running the London Marathon for Starfish Soul Care, a charity that provides physical, emotional, and spiritual support for foster and adoptive families in Northern Ireland.

Paddy and Reuben’s story isn’t the most conventional version of adoption, but we have experienced firsthand just how much that support from Starfish matters. So, pleaseeeee sponsor this crazy, wonderful man who voluntarily signed up to run 26.2 miles. (Questionable judgement. Excellent heart.)

And if any London-based Substack friends will be there on the day, please hit me up! Hype-Girl reporting for duty.

Lately, I have been all up in my feels about things like this and this and this. Probably because my ‘baby’ is already at this stage and my eldest is at this stage (God help us all). And that’s also why I need a husband like this.

I loved every word of this interview (more ‘wet activities’, sorry!).

And in the spirit of sharp pivots, here is an essay in honour of Holy Week that I’m absolutely obsessed with: When Lent is Extra Lenty by Laura Kelly Fanucci. And yay, you can also get her new book, Living Easter: 50 Days to Practice Resurrection, on Kindle in the UK!

Naturally, I’m thinking a lot about the state of my own faith this Holy Week, and I remembered this essay that I wrote the year we had to swap communion at church for McDonald’s chicken nuggets at home. I’m still sitting with so many questions, but I’m not sitting alone.

“It seems too irreverent to think of God gasping and groaning like a birthing mother. It seems too fleshy to think of him climbing into the grit of real life and making himself close and washing our feet, labouring alongside us to give birth to hope.

But this is the presence he offers.

For a long time, my prayer life will consist of questions. But maybe questions cultivate intimacy, because when we offer our questions, we offer our whole selves. And maybe I need him more than I need his answers. I’ll have to re-learn this afresh tomorrow and the day after that, but he isn’t going anywhere. God waits open-armed to receive all of me.”

And if you’ll indulge me one more essay, I’m also thinking a lot about this story of pregnancy and resurrection:

“On the cusp of Easter, I labour through the night, tangibly aware that something or someone is carrying me through.

We arrive in the birthing room of the hospital as the day breaks and there is a changeover of staff. And just as the pain climaxes, I notice the fresh April sun fighting its way through the tiny speckled window in the door: a hint of the spring to come.

My waters don’t break until my son bursts into the world in a gush of fluid—a tidal wave baptising us both. I wait for the fog of depression to steal this moment from me, as it has stolen so many others, but instead I am wholly present. Instantly in love. Washed of all fear and fatigue.

For weeks, I wait for the despair or the disinterest to take hold. But with each passing day, I am released from the grip of depression a little bit more. With each glimpse of the blossoms in my garden and every snuggle of my new spring baby, I am reminded of the work of winter: the work of digging my fingers in the dark dirt and laying it all down and waiting for God to resurrect something good.”

A final few lovely things:

Phew, I think that’s everything. It was a long’un!

Lots of love,

Reb x

In Northern Ireland, I’m fairly sure this is what we call Fake Spring? Still. I’ll take it. February felt like another slog of sickness and survival mode. (Truly, every conversation with my mum involved me relaying a fresh drama and her replying, why do these things always happen to you?) And as much as the deep-feeling, lyrical essays are my bread and butter, the thing about writing Soft Evidence at the end of every month is that it forces me to pause. To rummage around in the month’s memories and see if there’s a small, sparkly thing worth holding up to the light.

So, here goes:

February Deets & Honourable Mentions

It turns out this month was, rather appropriately, a date-heavy one. It began with a trip to Spoon Street with Reuben—a decade-long Valentine’s tradition stretching back to our uni days in Belfast, when it was our favourite treat, and it was my fundamental belief that shared dessert could fix everything.

Peep the photo of toddler Reubs. Honestly, he hasn’t really changed.

Although this is the first year our date included a strategic detour into Claire’s Accessories so he could shop for his other Valentine. It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything is absolutely, completely fine.

Paddy and I—rather spontaneously, if we do say so ourselves—went for Thai food and then to see Wuthering Heights and look, I was fully prepared to defend that film. I wanted to love it. I genuinely did. And I think I liked it? But I also think I basically… hated it?

The visuals were stunning—the setting, the costumes, the soundtrack (now officially my new cleaning playlist)—all gorgeous. I very nobly kept it separate from the book in my mind. I did not sit there whispering Emily would never. And yet, even as its own separate thing, it fell so flat for me. A very meh movie. (Not my most eloquent review, but perhaps the subject does not inspire greatness? Lol.) If you want to see a gothic 50 Shades of Grey, you do you. But maybe don’t call it Wuthering Heights.

We had a great time anyway, purely on the merit of being out of the house, mooching around Poundland beforehand, looking at each other throughout the film like wtf?, and absolutely demolishing nachos and Pic n Mix. Shoutout to Uncle Jonny, doing the Lord’s work and taking care of the boys.

I won’t leave you in a pit of movie despair, however, because I did watch two other films this month that I loved. Coincidentally, they’re both independent, but even if that’s not usually your vibe, I’d still say they’re worth a watch (do check trigger warnings though, please!). Aftersun and Die My Love both explore parenthood, grief, and mental health—in veeeeery different ways. For context, these are the films I watch alone when Paddy falls asleep or, more often these days, is out on a long run.

Die My Love in particular, is hard on the nervous system, but I deeply appreciated its flat-out refusal to spoon-feed any solid answers. We’re seeing everything through Grace’s fractured state of mind, and Jennifer Lawrence commits in a way that feels almost invasive. You don’t get neat explanations. You just have to sit in it.

Aftersun, with Paul Mescal as a young, struggling dad, is haunting and profound and beautifully devastating—though much gentler on the nervous system. It’s the kind of film that creeps up on you days later while you’re washing dishes.

Together, Paddy and I are enjoying the new season of The Night Agent and of course I’ve been on a Bridgerton binge—can we all stop slabbering about Sophie’s Cinderella storyline this season? It’s sweet. We are here for the escapist vibes. And instrumental Taylor Swift, obvs.

Last week, Anna and I went to a book club event with author Niamh Hargan to hear her chat about her new novel, Nothing Good Happens After 2am—a contemporary romance following the careers and personal lives of Robbie (an East Belfast boy) and El, rival cocktail makers in a London speakeasy. The story spans twenty years and traces this long, complicated arc of friendship, creativity and art, career ambition, and evolving relationships. It’s basically pure magic.

I’ve shared Niamh’s books before and how much I love her writing voice—warm and sharp and observant. Turns out she is every bit as cool and lovely in person. It’s always reassuring when the people you admire turn out to be dead on.

In classic Anna-and-Reb fashion, we didn’t get a photo together, and it took us approximately two cocktails to shake off the phantom sense that someone at home was crying or boking and remember how to be normal, functioning, sociable adults. But all in all: a very successful Wednesday night out.

Other books I read and enjoyed this month: Sounds Like Love, Cleopatra and Frankensten, The Family Upstairs, and Air. Currently reading The Housemaid because Megan started it and I had fomo and it’s fun to experience a twisty thriller with a friend for emotional support.

Aaaaand, last but not least, currently reading the new Coffee+Crumbs book (!!!) You’re In Good Company as a part of Launch Team Privileges, and oh my goodness, it is beyond gorgeous. Can’t wait to share more soon.

Some Substack pieces I loved: From Dust We’ve Come, Meet Me in the Ash, On Liminal Space and Doorways. Basically I will forever love anything to do with Hamnet and anyone who puts beautiful words to how I’m feeling this Lent. I don’t know what it says about me that my faith feels most at home sitting beside darkness and death these days. But I know this: a hope that has stared at ashes and stayed is the only kind I trust anymore. More on that some other time? lol

Incase you missed it:

This month I had an essay published over on the Coffee+Crumbs Substack, “I Was Raised In Borrowed Kitchens”. It’s the twisty-turny story of how my cooking and baking skills have evolved since I was an eighteen-year-old mum googling how to mash potatoes for my baby—but really, it’s a love letter to the women who take us under their wings. To how all of us are made up of a million small, ordinary, holy moments like that.

Here’s something about me: when I was eighteen, I wrote about motherhood because I had something to prove. I didn’t dare show the hard parts in case I became someone’s cautionary tale. Now I can write about those years as they were—without defending them. Without flinching at the raw, gooey middle—and honour the girl who thought she had to earn her voice.

Grateful to Coffee + Crumbs for always being the perfect home for words like these.

If nothing else, you’ll love the muffin recipe—the first one that made me feel like I might actually stand a chance at becoming the mum I wanted to be. It’s a good’un. And I have photographic proof from friends both locally and across the ocean (!!!) baking them too. 🤍

COFFEE + CRUMBS

I Was Raised in Borrowed Kitchens

For more about belonging and the fierce hope that generosity might lead to connection, don’t miss the latest episode of the podcast…

Read more

7 months ago · 80 likes · 31 comments · Coffee + Crumbs and Reb Smyth

Speaking of writing: I also published another essay on my own Substack, “The Loneliest Shower of My Life”. I had a small gynae procedure under general anaesthetic this month, and the last thing I remember is the guy at my head joking that he’d let me know if I had any creative epiphanies. Never saw him again, obvs. But I did write this story the next day, about the first shower in hospital after having my first son, and also about my gross crusty-cheese-eating habits, and the small ways that Paddy and I—against all odds—actually get it right sometimes.

My friend messaged me to say she was so engrossed in this piece her husband had to physically remind her to look up while they were walking down the street. In. ROME.!!! And that’s the best compliment I could ever hope to receive.

A few people have asked me about my little rage-crocheted hearts, and I thought I’d share the YouTube tutorial I used—super easy if you know the basic crochet stitches.

Now you probably understand why the only outfit selfies I took this month were in a surgical gown and cap (gynae-procedure chic) and at IKEA, draped in approximately four other people’s coats (half-term chic). No in-between.

Which probably means something. But I am not unpacking that right now.

However. I have fallen back in love with my Beyond Nine barrel-leg linen trousers—the perfect balm for a slightly battered body. They were an * investment * but I’ve more than earned my cost-per-wear stripes at this point. Comfy and timeless. We love to see it.

In more sparkly news, this month I started a part-time job with Ivy & Gold (!!!) in the new Bead Bar at Glenarm Castle.

Some of you know that, apart from the odd freelance gig, I’ve mostly been at home with the boys for a very long time. During my pregnancy with Jesse, the needs of our crew ramped up a level (or ten), and I knew I wouldn’t be going back to anything resembling the job I used to do.

Despite our less-than-ideal (read: brutal) financial situation, I’d kind of given up hope of finding work that would let me contribute and still be available for my family. So when I went for this interview, I’m not ashamed to admit I was basically a lil work-orphan, pleading with Erinn and Alice to adopt me into their work family.

I am still processing so much of the last few years, and there is so much I could say, but for now I’ll just say this: it means the world to be welcomed with open arms onto a team of women, mothers, creatives—who understand what real life is actually like—who know that careers don’t always climb neatly upward but sometimes bend and re-route and rebuild themselves around school runs and hospital appointments and children who need more than you ever expected.

Women who don’t blink when you say, “I had to pivot.” Because they did, too! Women who, of course, make stunning jewellery, but have also built something deeper. A community where women aren’t just connected to their loved ones, but connected to one another. Where they are seen and celebrated in every season, from loss to new life.

It always feels vulnerable to be the New Girl (I almost talked myself out of applying!), but I’m so glad I did. And that feels worth sharing about.

Come do a workshop with us!

Some other lovely things to close us out:

I’ll leave you with a few videos from my February scroll that made me laugh and cry. For the mothers of Spider Boys everywhere. I really hope one of my boys sings this to me some day. (Emer Maguire is a national gem at this point.) And what is it about the Olympic mamas that always gets me going?

That’s everything for now! Hopefully, I’ll be back in your inbox soon with a wee essay or something.

Lots of love,

Reb x

Subscribe now

Share

Then, and only then, he will come back, wipe down the grill and put it away.

He absolutely hates the leaking cheese, the smell and sight of it welded into the metal grooves. My habit completely grosses him out. But still, he puts extra in his toastie, to be sure it will leak for me.

Unfortunately for him, it is now a habit I have passed on. So much so that Paddy will tell the boys, “Don’t eat the cheese I left on that grill, it’s for Mum.”

Every single time, it makes me think of my first shower in the hospital after giving birth to my first baby.

My own mum had gone home at this point, leaving me, essentially a postpartum teenager, on the ward to rest and reckon with my new reality. I didn’t know how much help I was allowed to ask of the midwives, terrified they would already think I’m a useless mum if I asked for too much.

So I pushed my baby in his little cot to the bathroom, blood oozing down both of my legs, leaving a mortifying trail behind me like a murder scene.

In the large bathroom, I looked at my stretched fleshly body in the mirror for the first time. My stomach, soft and collapsed. My breasts, heavy and veined. I felt split open, leaking with milk, blood, tears, and need. The pool of red swirled down the drain while my 8 lb 13 oz son snoozed in the corner and I thought, this is it. It’s just you and me now, baby. Because who is ever going to want me like this?

It was one of the loneliest moments of my entire life.

After I went home, after the stitches had healed and bleeding slowed to a rust-coloured dusting, I decided I would try to present a version of myself that did not leak.

By the time I met Paddy, my son was a growing person with opinions and light-up trainers, and I had mastered the art of appearing courageous and contained. I had a well-rehearsed breeziness about being “a package deal.”

But I did not feel breezy.

On early dates, I excused myself to the bathroom to check that nothing was showing. No strap or label or evidence of the life I had already lived, as if motherhood might leak through the seams. I was sure he would think: Too much. Too complicated.

I should have known, really. The way he befriended my son in a room full of adults and always talked to him at eye level. How he didn’t flinch even once. Or the complete lack of ceremony with which he folded himself into our already-in-progress life.

And now, years later, I see the grill left out, and I think: it might be one of the greatest human acts. To know another so completely, and decide, daily, not to look away.

There are still times when I feel embarrassed by my own appetite. When I don’t believe that someone can see the whole, leaking, dairy-stealing version of me and still want in.

Sometimes there are whole categories of need we miss in each other, because we are not, it turns out, mind readers.

But then there are moments when, against all odds, we get it exactly right. In the boring domestic choreography of our lives.

I’m not even sure Paddy knows this story but in that hospital bathroom I truly could not imagine a future where anyone would know me like this. Where anyone would know my scars and stains and gross eating habits—and still think of me while making their lunch.

Share

January Deets

Okay, friends, buckle up: January has been nothing but reading, watching, and surviving. Bank account: empty. Car: broken (different car from last month). Tonsillitis: ping-ponging between Paddy and me like the cruellest pickleball match ever. Not a euphemism. We were truly, spectacularly sick. Can someone, anyone, please remind me to finish my antibiotics this time?

My favourite book this month was actually a re-read: All My Mothers by Joanna Glenn. And I’m glad I turned to it again because the rest of the month’s reading was a bit meh. At the start of the year, I shared a roundup on Instagram of all the books I read in 2025, and someone asked which I loved most. I decided to put my favourites to the test, and after a re-read, All My Mothers is still Top 3.

Eva Martinez-Green is an only child with a thousand questions about where she came from—and no one to answer them. Her mother is emotionally distant, her father is physically absent, and both dodge anything about her early years. Why are there no baby pictures? Why do they refuse to talk about her beginnings? When her parents’ relationship falls apart, Eva sets out to find the answers herself. What starts as a search for her origins becomes a journey across decades and continents, where she encounters women who challenge everything she thought a mother could be—and who leave their mark on her life forever.

I ADORED my 2025 reading year. Forever shaped by/at the mercy of Libraries NI, eBay and charity shops, gorgeous loans from friends with top-tier personal libraries, and of course, my wee mum, who usually sends a new book in the post when she thinks I need a treat. Harry Potter slowed things down over the summer, but I wouldn’t change a thing. Did you read any of these? My faves were Nesting, The Names, It’s A Love Story, Long Distance, and Snowflake (which isn’t on this roundup for some reason), and The God of the Woods (although my mum, a lifelong fervent reader of thrillers, said it didn’t do much for her, so take my review with a pinch of salt). Maybe I will go into more detail about these in another post because I could harp on for days.

The rest of January, I read Liars by Sarah Mungaso, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (finally!), and Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin: a fascinating plot idea where a lapsed Irish Catholic living in London, finds out that her deceased priest brother is being canonised as a Saint. I hated it and loved it in equal measure, lol.

And as for Sally Rooney: Intermezzo was my favourite of hers so far, but my friend Megan just read her first book from our Sally (God bless the Normal People era of 2020 lockdown), and I was trying to untangle my feelings about her books. Her writing is mesmerising, undeniably brilliant, but do I actually enjoy it? Not always. I keep reading because there’s usually something captivating about her characters, and I get why she’s hailed as the literary voice of a generation, but also, do I just lack the brainpower to “get” it? Probably. At the very least, I adored Ivan in Intermezzo—he was crafted with such tenderness.

I’m still finishing Cleopatra & Frankenstein by Coco Mellors: A whirlwind marriage between a young artist and an older advertising executive unravels into a raw, messy exploration of love, loneliness, and addiction. I am enjoying it, but not as much as her other novel, The Blue Sisters: three sisters reunite after a devastating loss, navigating grief, desire, and self-destruction as they try to find their way back to themselves and to each other.

Also, as a lifelong Rage Monster, this Substack essay To The Angry Ones by one of my favourite writers, Sonya Spillmann, was *chef’s kiss*.

“We all get angry. Getting angry is normal.

But I’m talking to the ones with anger in their bones.

You know who you are. You know what I’m talking about.

Because you hold it, so precariously, in the space behind your heart. Or in that hollowed-out place within your gut. Or in the back of your throat. Or in your tender hands. You’re the one who knows how to breathe fire, whose fingers burn, whose mouth needs but open to unleash the flames within.”

Now, on to film & TV:

Can I just say one more thing about Hamnet? I didn’t absolutely love the book, but I went to see the movie by myself at the cinema, and I have thought about it every single day since. In case you aren’t familiar, it is a haunting, tender story about Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, and the life they build together in 16th‑century England. When their son Hamnet dies, the grief is raw and consuming, reshaping their love, their world, and even the stories Shakespeare tells. It’s less about history and more about how loss lives in the heart. And how art can grow from that ache. The scene at the end with the hands took my breath away.

I want you to go see it (in the cinema, because this movie needs to be EXPERIENCED) and then picture me SOBBING into a bag of popcorn. I have warned a few friends that it might not be the one for them if their current grief feels particularly close to the surface, but if you can brave it, the ending is the most healing thing I have seen onscreen in a very long time. Jessie Buckley deserves every single award. And also, does anyone remember her on BBC 1’s reality show, I’d Do Anything? I remember it so vividly. Make sure you watch this AFTER the movie to help you recover from the trauma.

Other movies I loved this month: Goodbye June (a Kate Winslet creation: need I say more?) and Steve (Cillian Murphy as the headteacher of a last-chance reform school. Raw, manic storytelling in a cinematography style similar to Adolescence. 10/10).

Wake Up Dead Man was a WILD RIDE, but the scene where Father Jud stops in the middle of the murder theatrics to pray for receptionist, Louise, on the phone genuinely moved me. There was such a disarming, overt tenderness and warmth towards Jesus(!).

I was sceptical of Netflix thriller series Black Doves and assumed it would be a bit 2D like Runaway (sorry Jimmy Nesbitt—cringe and drawn out) BUT, Kiera Knightly was brilliant and the whole thing was full of the best twisty turns and hearty characters and dry humour. Excited for season 2.

Binge-watched both Emily in Paris and This Way Up while I was sick, and genuinely think Little Women (2019) healed me more than the antibiotics.

Honourable Mentions

Everyone must be doing big clearouts in January because my local charity shops are full of treasure. Check out these jackets I found for Paddy. We went with the green bomber one. And two adorable dressing gowns for the younger boys!

Look, I am already a hormonally out-of-whack girlie (thank you, PCOS), but since I stopped breastfeeding in October, things have been a whole new level of *imbalanced*. My adult acne is back for revenge, and I have had to do a total overhaul of everything I put on my face. This Purito Moisturiser is my best find. It has a really simple ingredients list, dries quickly, and leaves you with that glass-skin look under your makeup.

On that note: if anyone has an acne-friendly SPF to recommend, I’m all ears. And if any local friends are in need of skincare for less dramatic/more resilient skin than mine, I have a mountain of products looking for a new home because they just didn’t work for me :(

The gift that keeps on giving:

In December, my mum gave me a huge cardboard box full of household cleaning, toiletries, and laundry supplies. Not as a Christmas present, but as a ‘I remember how hard January was when my kids were young’ present, and I already know I want to do it for my children when they grow up <3

Nothing gets you out of the house on a soggy Thursday in January quite like one of your girls getting engaged. Here we are, completely drenched, stuffing our faces and clinking our glasses <3

In case you missed it, I published this essay featuring (but not limited to) Play-Doh families, shark facts, Winnie-the-Pooh, and the mercy of motion:

It is a somewhat melancholy essay for a melancholy January. 🥴 I really did work hard to find the thread of hope, though. Blink, and you’ll miss it, but I PROMISE it’s there. <3

Shoving chocolate into other chocolate. This is where my creative energy is at. Parent points for having edible eyes on hand, surely?

Want to remember this day forever <3

To finish, here are some wholesome corners of the internet that made me smile:

Confetti Community.
January Mood.
Don’t you dare shrink your softness.
Another January Mood.
Dublin Airport in December <3
Author Nesting (who I’ve seen in real life!!) winning all the awards.
Rihanna hyping up a Magherafelt boy (creative director at Dior).
And his proud mama.
My life with a 12-year-old boy.
You must always send me your whale videos.

Okay, I'd better stop there.

Lots of love,

Reb x

Subscribe now

Share

The next summer, I took a change of clothes to work and went swimming after my shifts. I didn’t know I was pregnant, but I did know I couldn’t stop again.

***

We are making people out of Play-Doh. Rolling, pulling, pressing. Almost everyone has been sculpted—friends, family, teachers, the postman. All the while, I am trying not to point out the obvious family member my four-year-old has seemingly left out, praying for a grand finale. In each figure’s fleshly hands, we have placed a teeny tiny ice cream cone or, his favourite, a sprinkled doughnut. I, personally, have been gifted a hot pink love-heart handbag.

“Hmm,” I say, aware that I am losing him. “I wonder if anyone is missing here?”

He studies his creations for a minute, then smacks a tiny flat palm to his forehead with a dramatic cartoon eye roll.

“Silly meeeee,” he says, “Silly mummy.”

Then he is dead serious. “I’ll make it now, but can we make him a good one? Not scary. Not sad. No hurting. Make him good?”

The piece of dough in my hands is taut, stretched to its limits.

That night, he sleeps like a question mark, as though he is asking me, Will you keep me safe? I climb into bed beside him, wrap my body around his, thinking of how much suffering he has seen up close in his short life. I want to reset his memory to factory settings. Instead, I place a kiss on his parted lips, his sticky forehead, each closed eyelid—spidery lashes, a dark contrast to his porcelain skin. Each one a prayer when the words don’t come.

For better or worse, the last few years have changed me forever. I have suspected for some time that I will never be the same, but I am scared to stop and find out—terrified of the snap, the unravelling. You can only watch your children struggle so much before it rearranges you. It is like the phenomenon in pregnancy, where a small number of fetal cells pass from an unborn baby to the pregnant mother. They take up permanent residence in her DNA. In her heart. In her liver. In places meant to last.

When I finally retreat to my own room, Paddy is sleeping deeply after a long working day. But even after several episodes of Emily in Paris, several chapters of a novel, I will be awake for hours—my body braced for the next need. Always keeping vigil.

***

My two-year-old is newly obsessed with the audiobook of Winnie-the-Pooh. Especially the chapter where Pooh and his iconic, honey-filled tummy get wedged in Rabbit’s doorway for weeks. At first, Rabbit reads to him, offers snacks, and hangs the washing on Pooh’s tail. But as the days go by, Rabbit grows weary—sunken eyes, droopy ears, a dishevelled dressing gown.

In a season when everything is too much for one or more of our boys, when burnout is blocking the doorway—our world, too, begins to shrink—until Paddy and I find ourselves gasping.

Often, we can’t leave the house. Can’t go to school. Can’t eat meals together. Can’t go to sports clubs. Can’t go to the park. Can’t invite friends over. The space between us is pulled tight with old grudges and unfinished sentences. We absorb the pain of our children, and it leaks out sideways—into the same disagreements we’ve circled a million times. We know it’s the pressure, that it has to go somewhere, but all we have here is each other.

***

Apparently, there are certain species of sharks that must keep moving, or they can’t breathe. Apparently, some can rhythmically open and close their mouths to pass water over their gills and rest. But whale sharks, great whites? They need to keep swimming, or they die.

If you Google, “how do sharks breathe?” you’ll also find a motivational quote from Brad Pitt, very Nike-esque: Be a shark. Keep moving. But Brad Pitt isn’t thinking of the mother who has spent years carrying the weight of Big Hard Things in her home—so intense, so relentless, that if she pauses to think, she might break.

I know I’m supposed to trust that I can stop, that someone else is in control. But there isn’t enough air. Stillness feels dangerous, like the weight of it all might crush me. So I keep moving. Holding, building, folding.

Moving to survive, moving to carry, moving to keep breathing.

***

A girl is sitting alone on the bench beside the pool, arms wrapped around her tummy like a hug. She plucks at her fluorescent floral swimsuit. Sucks in. Breathes out—but only an inch. I am sure she is ten at the most. Her goggles perch on her forehead, ready to swap places with the glasses on her button nose, thin metallic frames with a subtle cat-eye flick. She looks like she might bolt at any minute. I don’t know if she is just nervous, if she had a hard day, or already feels the ingrained pressure to look flat and smooth. I am a tightening coil beside her, ready to spring out of the water.

Finally, the swimming teacher arrives. He says something funny, and she laughs so hard her arms drop to her sides. Shoulders relax. They chat, he directs her into the water with a splash, and she is delighted. Ducking under already, wiggling her legs like a mermaid. Yes, girl, keep going, I think, you’re going to love it.

I return to my own laps, sluicing the water, overtaking the gym-bros who have just arrived to cool down. My eyes follow the faded black lines up the pool, the yellowing tiles. Flipping at each end, my limbs awkward and angular, plagued by knee injuries, but still, it is my favourite feeling in the world. Totally immersed, cradled and carried by the water. I wish I could grow gills. I am unreachable. If only I didn’t have to come up for air.

My goggles fog, but my mind is clear. Swimming to move. Swimming to make sense of the world. Swimming until the salty tears turn to chlorine. Swimming until laughter comes again. The mercy of motion.

***

We are racing down the path to nursery school now, hand in hand, giggles lapping in the wind. We are almost flying. It is rare, but this afternoon, he is happy to leave me, dressed as Batman and excited by the promise of more Play-Doh. Three and four-year-olds swarm around us, everyone hurrying in, but he lingers at my legs. I bend down to eye level, and he presses his forehead to mine, strokes his cheeks on my cheeks.

“Noses,” he says, and we rub our noses together.

He runs into the arms of a classroom assistant. I look at the teacher, and both of us exhale, relieved.

“I’ll message you if there’s any problems,” she says.

“Should I hang around? Just in case?”

“No, no, it’ll be okay. I promise. Go on ahead.”

And I do. I keep going, choosing to believe I am being carried, even if I cannot be still.

Share

December Deets & Honourable Mentions

I swear we lost half of December to sickness, half-stripped wallpaper, car breakdowns, deadlines, and general meltdowns (mine). I was so sure I would be clutching at straws for Soft Evidence, but as it turns out, we really rallied in the last week or two—so I have lots to tell you about!

Starting with 24 hours in Dublin: highlights include lots of Baby Guinness, lots of cosy, twinkly pubs, lots of second-hand book shopping (a moment of silence for the lack of abundant second-hand bookshops in Belfast!), and a good long mooch around the National Gallery—where I spent about an hour getting misty-eyed at every single entry for the AIB Portrait Prize + Young Portrait Prize (running until 15th March FYI!). An hour spent here is cheaper (and maybe better, in my case) than therapy, I promise.

Last year we took 24 hours together on the 1st/2nd of January, and while it was so cheap it might as well have been free, and it was exactly what we needed at the end of a gut wrenching Christmas break; everything and everywhere was a bit dead. It was fitting. A bit too fitting. Our spirits weren’t exactly lifted.

This time we felt giddy about getting away when things were still all hustle and bustle (because there’s just something about being surrounded by busy people while your only job is to be still) and more importantly, we were delighted that our wee people are okay enough for us to take a beat. And also extra delighted to have extended family who make it possible.

On the drive down to Dublin I realised it was the shortest day of the year. And upon further googling, I found out that ‘solstice’ means ‘the sun stands still’. A wee pause at the darkest point before the slow climb back up towards summer.

• In case you missed it, I wrote this little piece in the middle of the month—consider this your permission to have a Big Christmas Cry TM if you haven’t yet. It’s never too late.
  

  

• The Enchanted Winter Garden in Antrim has been a December tradition for us for years. We try to keep things low-key, so it’s the one big Christmassy event we usually pay for. But over the last couple of years, it’s become clear that it’s no longer a good fit for our family. The event itself is beautiful; our experience of it has not been. Last year was so awful, I swore we’d never do it again.
  
  That decision made me feel unexpectedly free. I kept making choices like it throughout 2025—opting out, letting things go. And then December rolled around, and guess who asked to go back to the Enchanted Winter Garden? Yep. Every single person who hated it.
  
  So we went. And it wasn’t awful. It wasn’t perfect, and we didn’t stay long, but we didn’t have to be escorted out by security. All month—all year—I’ve been leaving rooms and schools and events, clocking the exits, living on the fringes. This was the evening I needed. The reminder that all things are possible. It put air back in my lungs.

  

  

  
  

• A new-to-me recipe for chocolate fudge cake that I used for the Hagrid-inspired birthday cake. I think the light brown sugar made it really moist!

• The Names by Florence Knakk was my favourite read of the month, but Snowflake by Louise Nelson and The God of the Woods by Liz Moore were joint second. Laura’s Substack has been on fire lately. This post was my fave. It’s been a good reading month—and it isn’t over yet!

• I made this pie for our church Christmas dinner and followed the recipe loosely. I had my gallbladder removed when I was 19, and rich creamy things often make me sick (I know, it’s the true thorn in my side), so I’m always on the lookout for lighter swaps. I can’t remember where I got the idea, but for this one, I blended a tub of cottage cheese with half a tin of white beans to make a thick sauce. Trust me, you can’t tell!

  

• The comfy dress of dreams.
  

• An update on the Jennifer Lawrence hair (featuring the grey baggy jumper I’ve actually been wearing every day.) I think I’ve figured out how to make the fringe maintenance, well, less maintained.

  

• Finally, we finished stripping the wallpaper and celebrated by painting the living room a buttery yellow. Rogue choice, but this is where the younger boys do all their playing, so it seemed right to make it bright. The sagging star is also fitting.

I don’t have much to report from Christmas Day or Boxing Day. We figured the best way to guarantee success in this season was to stay home and let the boys lead the way—which, this year, looked like one of them coming and going from his bedroom all day, another ate his turkey naked, and another hopped between kinetic sand and Play-Doh like it was his day job. All of us congregated to watch the premiere of Julia Donaldson’s The Scarecrows’ Wedding on BBC1—and raised a toast to the happy couple.

Christmas Eve, however, was soaked in nostalgia. We spent the day at my parents’ house, running sugar-fuelled laps of the tiny village where I grew up, and cosying up to watch Narnia (a tradition unintentionally started by my dad and me when I was 12), on their not-so-tiny TV.

I keep thinking about the end of the movie when Aslan performs a bit of an Irish exit from the party, clearing off to leave the Pevensie siblings in charge. And Lucy is like, “He literally just got here, and now he’s leaving again?!” The answer she’s given is something along the lines of, “He’ll be coming and going. One day you’ll see him, the next day you won’t. But we mustn’t press him. After all, he isn’t a tame lion.”

I’ve always understood that he’s a wild lion; he can’t be trained to perform for us. He doesn’t follow our commands. And although I’ve read the books multiple times at this stage, I think I’ve always missed the bit where Lucy is upset. It’s important that she is allowed to be upset.

It’s a familiar ache, after a year where I have been absolutely devastated by His comings and goings (mostly His goings). Sometimes I can see Him (mostly I can’t).

I keep telling myself that absence is not abandonment. The story isn’t over. And Lucy’s ache only exists because she knows Aslan. You don’t mourn a stranger’s leaving.

The ache is proof of His proximity, even when He’s gone again. Maybe that’s the hope I’m carrying with me: not that He’ll always intervene, but that I’ve known Him well enough to miss Him when He goes.

I think that’s us all caught up. I’ll leave you with this blessing for these in-between days, from my chaos to yours.

Lots of love,

Reb x

November Details & Honourable Mentions

• Recipe for Wicked cocktails: On the opening night of Wicked: For Good, I complained to Paddy about our cinema being the ONLY Movie House not selling themed cocktails. I mean, even Maghera (a tiny rural non-place) had them! So Paddy, my own personal mixologist, made his own when we got home.

  Don’t worry, I won’t add another needless opinion to the online noise around the movie, but what I’ll say is what I’ve always said: Wicked is a love letter to female friendship—a celebration of the women who change the trajectory of our lives. And if I did want to add to the noise, I would say: Ari gave the performance of her life. (Plus, the movie's brilliance totally purged my mind of the actresses’ unhinged behaviour in promo interviews.)
  Oh, and this is how Paddy watched me the whole way through—until the final song, where he also wept like a baby. 10/10 husband. Here’s something I wrote after we saw Wicked: Part 1 last year.
  

• This month, I finally re-read Pride & Prejudice and re-watched the 1995 version, in honour of Jane Austen’s upcoming 250th birthday. Honestly, I forgot how funny it is. Surely it’s the OG romcom?
  I also enjoyed Yours Truly and Part of Your World both by Abby Jimenez (I’m on such an unashamed escapist Abby kick!), Holding Her Breath by Eimear Ryan (things got weird at the end but I loved how she writes about swimming—maybe boring for non-swimmers though?), and The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes. None of these are new but as always, I am wholly at the mercy of Libraries NI. On that note, there was one other viral read and I absolutely hated it, so I’ll spare you!

• In case you’re invested in my impulsive hair saga, I have indeed had the exact same hair for over a decade, but last week I arrived at the salon armed with an album of Jennifer Lawrence and a request for a full fringe *gasp*. Thankfully, I have also had the exact same hairdresser, Tanya, for over a decade, and she is a queen who knows me. (Can we talk about the weirdly intimate relationships we have with our hairdressers?!) Immediately, Tanya was like, “Respectfully, with kindness, just no to the full fringe.” Instead, she gave me a low-maintenance ‘French Fringe’ which also works as bangs and I LOVE IT. Except, low maintenance is still too much maintenance for this gal who brushes her hair once a week, just to keep on top of the dreadlocks growing at her neck, so I will absolutely be letting the fringe grow out. It’s also super overstimulating. But still, so much fun! Like getting a new jumper you wear every day for 3 months.

• I’m still thinking about this piece by Megan Hogg at A Continual Feast.

• The Stick Man pyjamas that are breaking my heart and putting it back together all at once.

• Still obsessed with the cosy awkwardness of Film Club on BBC iPlayer. The protagonist Evie, a high-achieving twenty-something, has a mental health crisis and finds herself unable to leave her mum’s house for months, but she continues to have her weekly Film Club in the garage with her best friend, Noa. Half the dialogue is basically movie quotes and insufferable accents and chaotic impersonations, so it might not be for everyone but it feels like a coming-of-age story. Except more like coming-alive-again story. I also love how she manages to create worlds within the very restrictive space she exists in, both for herself and for other people. Owen Cooper from Adolescence has a cameo and his dynamic with Evie is probably my fave—what can I say? I’m a sucker for a misunderstood school avoider: if you know, you know. PLEASE let me know if you watch it so I have someone to finally talk to.

• And last but not least, I’m aware there are approximately one billion Advent resources out there and honestly, every time I return to this devotional of mine I expect to feel absolutely scundered. I expect the words to feel immature or trite or land in all the wrong places. I expect to eye roll at younger me—at her hope, at her faith, at her Jesus.
  While there is some writing I absolutely want to burn to the ground, actually, every single time I return to this devotional, I feel myself collapsing into the arms of Jesus, maybe for the first time in a long time. Awaiting the Rising Sun is the product of an Advent year in my life, a year of waiting on bloodied knees, and I’m so glad I wrote it. It’s for the doubter and the depressed. The one limping to the end of the year with personal pain in one hand, and the public chaos of the world in the other. It’s for those of us struggling to believe we are really held in the palm of the promise keeper’s hand.
  You can get the eBook here and the print book here. If you’re interested in something else, I’ll be reading Be A Heart: Mary’s Way of Advent: Prayers & Practices to Slow Down & Seek God by one of my favourite writers and humans, Laura Fanucci, and also dipping in and out of Bless the Advent we Actually Have by Kate Bowler because she just gets it.

  

  
  Okay, that’s enough from me.

  All my love and gutsy hope,

  Reb x

  
  
  

It’s our final night in Paris, a thirtieth birthday trip forever in the making, and Paddy thinks we should say goodbye to the City of Light with a special dinner. I agree: we should people-watch on a twinkly terrace for hours, slathering everything in doorstops of butter, much to the dismay of our civilised French waiter who pretends not to hear us when we refer to his establishment as “our new local”. We should savour every last morsel as though Paris itself were a tangy glass of red wine we’d never taste again.

Instead, however, we flop against our teal-blue headboard and start fighting. (Because of course we do. Because even the dreamiest trips come with baggage you don’t pack.)

To be clear, it isn’t a loud, billowing fight, because that would feel sacrilege beneath the exposed wooden beams of our charming boutique hotel room. It’s more like the low-stakes, bickering kind. The you’re-pissing-me-off-but-let’s-not-ruin-the-day sort of squabble. Which is, somehow, harder to come back from.

We just can’t agree on how to do All The Things in the time we have left. I start to suspect I’m the problem, but I can’t seem to let it go. (Looks like I’m the kind of person who can ruin Paris. Good to know.) I’ve spent all week hunting for a children’s book series I still haven’t found, and I refuse to leave without one. Meanwhile, Paddy’s anxiety is skyrocketing because it’s his first time here and he still hasn’t seen the Eiffel Tower up close.

On reflection, very understandable.

I stand up, sighing dramatically as I open the white wooden shutters and look out over the ornamental balcony. There is a breeze with distant sirens. The hiss of someone, somewhere, frying onions. The antique-clad apartments opposite us are a far cry from the drug-den block of council flats I usually see out my bedroom window.

And I begin to wonder what we’ve done with our time here.

I think of Hamid, working in the little underground dining room of our hotel, chatting with us each morning about Irish literature while rustling up fluffy scrambled eggs. One morning, Paddy made me laugh so hard it echoed through the empty stone fireplace beside us, everyone else eating in silence and politely averting their eyes. Hamid, unphased by my cackling, appeared at our table with a book recommendation and a basket of fresh croissants from the bakery down the street–plus jam from “the countryside.” (Which countryside, I don’t know, but it definitely wasn’t the one where my Tesco jam comes from.) When I asked about his recipes, he came back with his email address written on a napkin, as if it were 2004.

We arrived wrung out, with nothing planned except my secret scheme to get a French Fringe or Birthday Bangs.And Paris, in its infinite wisdom, didn’t hand itself over all at once, but revealed itself in crumbs of conversation, a hidden courtyard, a sudden wash of light across the Seine.

Paris has given me pause. Maybe because I’ve spent twelve of my thirty years mothering in ways that don’t follow the typical script. Thirty is hardly the peak of wisdom, thank goodness, but still, I have seen some things. And the last few years, especially, have scraped me down to something raw. I feel like an exposed wound, thin-skinned to every thoughtless word, every insensitive comment, every speck of dust in the air.

“Right. Let’s go,” I announce to the room with sudden resolve, unable to spend another second in my thoughts.

We march across the bridge toward the Sixth Arrondissement, the tip of the Panthéon poking out at the top of the hill, where I hope we’ll find The Red Wheelbarrow, an independent bookshop, with The Red Balloon, their children’s store, two doors down.

It’s a Saturday evening, and the light is turning dusky over the Luxembourg Gardens. The chatter spilling over from café terrasses gives me a pang of shame about my Saturday evening plans. I can’t admit it to Paddy, but I am furious with myself. Furious at this stupid fixation on a book, a children’s story about a dang crocodile called Kylie who lives in the Canal Saint-Martin, and spends her time exploring Paris secretly by day and lavishly by night. I am furious at my insistence on spending the whole week flâneur-ing—wandering aimlessly without plan or purpose—a concept so entirely French it has no English equivalent.

And now, look at us. On our final night with the freaking Eiffel Tower on our to-do list.

Paddy takes my hand, and I wonder if he, too, is thinking of our endless walks to every nook and cranny this week. The lovely Italian photographer who stopped us on our way to Notre Dame, freshly risen from the ashes, and through my broken French or her far-better English, we pieced together that she wanted me to model some jewellery. (She’d noticed my hands from across the road, so obviously I tucked away her compliment, “noticeable hands,” for some future low self-esteem day.)

She pulled the necklace from its velvet pouch, and we all saw how the river light danced across its threads of gold. Say no more. It didn’t matter that we were strangers, that my only modelling experience involved whatever my four-year-old asked me to shape from Play-Doh. We were just three humans, connected by a quiet, shared wish to catch the sunlight and hold onto it–if only for a second.

And then she asked me to roll up my sleeve. On display: three scrunchies, a streak of fake tan, a bulky black Fitbit, and a bracelet with my children’s initials which unfortunately spell RAJ. Not quite the delicate, romantic image she’d had in mind.

But another surprising addition to the charcuterie board of people and conversations, discoveries and stories.

Back in the present, the bookshop comes into view, and Google Maps hasn’t even announced our arrival when I spot it in the window. The book. Right there, just behind some actual red balloons bobbing lazily.

Then my eyes follow the bunting to the door where a sign reads: CLOSED.

Silence. We both stare straight ahead, willing it to change.

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” I finally say, prickly sobs gathering in my throat.

Naturally, none of this is about the book anymore.

I’ve been counting down to Paris for months, and now it’s slipping into memory. No longer a future hope keeping me afloat in the currents of caregiving, like a rubber dinghy wrapped around my heart. It’s not that I don’t want to go home–because I do–but home hasn’t felt like home in such a long time. The thing about being a safe place for children who are struggling is that we become the home, the walls and heartbeat, the light left on in the dark. And it feels like living in the shadow of an earthquake, mustering strength before the ground moves again.

Paddy nudges me along toward the adjoining adult bookshop which is still open, though clearly winding down. Inside, it’s something straight out of Beauty and the Beast: deliciously creaky floorboards, mahogany shelves kissing the ceiling. Penelope, the owner, scurrying about, her voice instantly familiar from a podcast I listened to. She keeps pausing mid-conversation to dart across the room and pluck a book from a shelf to recommend.

After a quick mooch, I approach her with Long Island by Colm Tóibín and Paddy’s pick, Character Limit: How Musk Ruined Twitter (we are very different people). Suppressing my fangirl nerves, I admit I’d actually been hoping to find Kylie the Crocodile. Maybe, I say, the children’s shop will open early enough for one last dash before the airport.

“Would you like to take a look now?” she says, handing me a big bunch of jangly keys like a school groundsman, her eyes lighting up at the mention of Kylie.

I slow blink like a cartoon cat.

“Is this actually happening?” I whisper-laugh, shaking the keys over my shoulder as we step back onto the street. The lock takes three attempts, and I shove it open with my whole body. On the front table, there is a big stack of Kylies perched, waiting.

The Red Balloon is every bit as enchanting as her ‘mother’. Any minute, a ladder could move across the shelves of its own accord, and the mouse on the cover of Pip & Posy might wink when we’re not looking, the hand-drawn Moomin cutouts might walk across the window display. A portal to adventure, spellbinding in the way all the best stories are.

After paying, Paddy places the tote bag on my shoulder - my crowning moment - and pulls me into a tight squeeze. The books weigh on me, a reminder that I’ve spent my thirtieth-birthday cash on children’s stories. Maybe it is the most adult thing I can do: admit I need wide-eyed wonder to survive, that I’m starting to believe in good stories again.

This feeling, beauty and hope brushing against me, has been sneaking up in unexpected places. Not before Monet at the Musée d’Orsay, or at the WWII memorial, but at the Galerie Dior, a museum of dresses, of all places.

Dior’s pieces seemed to move and breathe like morning mist, and yet it was the smallest, quietest corner that got me. The Dressing Room, with brushes, hangers, mirrors—ordinary tools frozen in time. I could almost hear the soft rustle of fabric, feel the thick silence before a model stepped into the spotlight. A reminder: this really happened.

Then the tears came—a bit of a jump scare.

Surrounded by tourists, looking at his sketches, I felt it. Beauty, not an escape, but beauty as survival.

In a Paris still rationed and raw from war, Dior created The New Look: nipped waists, full skirts, extravagant fabrics. He didn’t join the Resistance like his sister, but in his own way he resisted–choosing to make beauty in a world stripped of it.

We don’t pretend the world isn’t broken, but we witness and endure and respond with what is most alive in us. And we believe someday, all of this will be made beautiful.

The sky has slipped into deep indigo now, the last streaks of pink tucked behind the rooftops, and the streetlamps blink awake one by one, like watchful eyes. We walk to the soundtrack of clinking cutlery, letting the moment carry us untethered, toward the Seine once again.

“To the Eiffel Tower,” Paddy says.

***

The next evening, EasyJet flight EZY3034 is bursting with sugar-coated children and prosecco-drunk parents fresh out of Disneyland. On the drive home, we take a left into our housing estate just as a police car drives out.

“That’s how you know we’re back,” Paddy jokes, but my laugh is flat, like a deflated tyre.

Inside, the hallway is a sensory assault: the half-stripped wallpaper we’ve been working on since Christmas, one of the boys’ drawings taped to the wall, curling at the edges like it’s tired too. The air is lived-in: used nappies tucked in bins, the lingering scent of lasagne or McDonalds. A rose-scented candle, unlit, but working very hard nonetheless. My heart is focused on my babies, but I notice the hole in the roof from a years-long leak and another hole in a door.

In the following days, I bury myself in books because my world feels small and suffocating. I’ve arrived home full of crackly croissants and smelly cheese, but I’m starving. Ravenous. For something I can’t name. How do I return to UVF murals and therapy appointments, endless social services meetings, and being an advocate at every turn? How do I keep my eyes open to beauty in a world this complicated?

“Paris is gone, and I don’t know how to keep going,” I tell Paddy, so many times it stops meaning anything, like the sea lapping against my mind.

But then, 6 p.m. on a Thursday evening, and a knock at the door pierces the audiobook in my ears. I fling the sponge into the sink and open the door to a blast of confetti in my face, settling in my hair like festive dandruff.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAAAAAY!”

All at once, I’m enveloped in the arms of some of my longest friends, the waft of Indian takeaway unmistakable in my nostrils.

All evening, there are the chuckles of rascally boys putting rice and naan in places rice and naan should never go, and curry sauce drips down the sides of containers like candle wax as we catch up on work, school, church, Paris, and all of our latest hopes, fears, and doubts.

There are gifts, cards, vouchers, each one like a glass bottle washed ashore with a message inside: we see you, we know you, we love you.

It seems that here, too, the world can offer moments that are soft, strange and sustaining. Here, too, in a life where caregiving feels like walking a tightrope, where each wobble feels fatal, beauty is a companion. It survives alongside us, while we do the gutsy work of patching doors and gathering shattered pieces. It stays, just like the friends who refuse to look away.

When the dishes are done, I walk upstairs and pause in the doorway of my boys’ bedrooms. I imagine Kylie the Crocodile, slipping out of the canal, curious and brave.

Somewhere deep down, something flickers again, small and steady and stubborn. Still here. Still capable of hope.

In the words of the tween looking over my shoulder, what is THIS?

A very appropriate question for the year that has been 2025; nonetheless, THIS is just a wee bit of fun. THIS is Soft Evidence.

I don’t know if anyone will believe this about me, but I’m not terrible at painting. I always forget about it until life is life-ing, the words aren’t wording, and I feel an overwhelming urge to check myself into a hospital with only a paintbrush and a sketchpad.

It’s giving mentally unwell, unhinged Van Gogh—I know.

The thing is, because of (or thanks to) GCSE Art, acrylic paint is my jam. But acrylics are messy and take forever to dry—generally a terrible idea in a small house with small boys. More importantly, I don’t actually have any left after the Great Acrylic Destruction of 2015. I’m not naming names, but the cutie-pie tween looking over my shoulder was not always a tween.

I know what you’re thinking. Reb, why don’t you use watercolour paints, a fast-drying, much safer motherhood choice? And honestly, I’ve tried. I’m still trying. But they bore the life out of me.

Pre-paint-destruction, I especially loved painting different pieces and collating them together to tell one big story—probably a product of a noughties girlhood spent obsessing over subscription magazines. Does anyone remember the Angelina Ballerina one? Or maybe you remember when we graduated to Top of the Pops, Shout!, and Sugar. I swear I fact-checked those names.

When I was about to start A levels, a careers advisor in school steered me away from Art as a subject because I already had some coursework-heavy subjects. I needed a few exams in my life, apparently.

For balance, she said.

And we both acknowledged that Art was all-consuming for me. I received an A* grade at the expense of all my other subjects—especially the ones I ‘needed’ to do well in (you don’t need to do well in Art, obvs)—and therefore at the expense of my mental health too.

So, I dropped Art. And I’ve felt its absence ever since.

I’ve also, pretty much, been a mother ever since.

Tell me, what’s a girl supposed to do with that?

I’m realising, at thirty years old, it’s the all-consuming-ness of painting that I actually need.

I can’t buy time and space, but as a starter, I can sell my husband’s unwanted clothes on Vinted to buy new paints (because I’ve run out of my own to sell). In the meantime, Paddy let me loose on his Canva account, and I’ve been having SO MUCH FUN making little magazine features of my life. Because this, I can do sitting outside a classroom or while the curry simmers.

You know, in 13 Going on 30, when Jenna takes the chic minimalist fashion edit and turns it into a 13-year-old’s scrapbook? That’s the vibe. Anytime I’ve thought about sharing here, I always miss the moment or chicken out completely. I kind of missed the moment again (hello, November!), but I think you’ll forgive me. Somewhere along the way, I absorbed the untruth that creative things, unless they’re big and beautiful, are a waste of time. And I don’t think the little girl sitting in her bedroom in rural Northern Ireland, messing around with magazines and newsletters on Microsoft Publisher every single day, would stand for that.

So maybe, for now, this is enough. Proof that we’re still here, still making something, even if it’s small. A brushstroke here, a story there. Soft Evidence of a bigger hand at work.

October Details & Honourable Mentions

• The Best Fakeaway Ever - we always double the sauce ingredients.

• Long Distance by Aysegül Savas - a book of achingly beautiful short stories where every single one lingered long after the last page.

• Smart Romance by Rena Rani - my new favourite Substack read every week. “But the truth is: romance novels are some of the most emotionally complex, culturally relevant, and narratively sharp books being written today. They deserve real attention. Serious conversation. Literary criticism with heart.”

• Thirst Trap by Grainne O’Hare - this book won’t be for everyone, so tread carefully, but I will never skip a Belfast story.

• While it’s fast becoming a national treasure, I’ve been on the fence about Blue Lights for years, BUT they finally won me over with season 3. The female characters absolutely carry the show and give it an emotional depth it’s never had (except for everyone’s beloved Gerry in S1, of course). Interesting from an apparently all-male writing team.

• North Coast Riders, a stunning documentary following a group of surfers, climbers and free divers chasing “freedom, meaning and wild beauty” on Northern Ireland’s North Coast during winter. Did not expect to get all misty-eyed at parts—the cinematography is intimate and magical. I can’t believe there’s a whole world of stories under this coastline we think we know so well.

I’ll leave you with a link to the brown suede jacket of dreams, worn below with one of my favourite outfits, eating my favourite sorbet, in my favourite place, with my favourite person; but usually worn with leggings and an oversized knit on the school run—which works just lovely, too!

Lots of love,

Reb x

Subscribe now

Share Thin Places

Lots of love, especially to the tender September mothers.

Reb x

It’s 3:30 a.m. on the first morning of September when I learn that I’m a mother.

At some point, I stop sobbing long enough to fall asleep, but I wake shortly after to the excited hum of parents and children walking to school outside my window. It’s the first day back after the summer holidays, and I wonder how they can carry on with their normal lives while mine has just blown up in my teenage face.

Usually, I love September. The fresh start it ushers in—a second New Year of sorts. I love the audacity of each and every hued leaf hanging onto a tree for dear life in the face of dropping temperatures, charging winds, and changing seasons. September has always seemed ripe with promise and generous with courage.

But not this year.

Before I can take it captive, a wild thought crosses my mind: someday I will walk this baby to school. I start bawling all over again, opening the notebook that will become my pregnancy journal and scribbling the only words I can bring myself to write.

How will I do this? How will I do this alone?

And I really like the name ‘Reuben'.

***

A black blob creeps across the wall. I rub the sleep from my eyes and fumble for my glasses at the side of the bed, but the clarity of vision brings no comfort. It is, in fact, the ugliest, fattest spider of all time. It’s so fascinatingly grotesque I almost can’t look away. I race out of the room, grab my husband, Paddy, and place both hands firmly on his shoulders.

“I am not going to scream, but I am probably going to cry if you don’t deal with the massive spider in our bedroom,” I hiss in a firm, even voice, glaring at him so intently, he doesn’t dare break breath.

I busy myself picking up laundry until the deed is done, and he appears in the hallway again, triumphant. He is a gentle giant, never one for violence or aggression of any kind, so I can assume our eight-legged friend now lives in the back garden—but I don’t ask.

I, on the other hand, used to own a special weapon, fondly christened The Spider Mallet by my then three-year-old. The Spider Mallet was reserved for this specific breed of monster—the kind that only graces Northern Irish homes as summer edges toward its end, coming out of their hiding spots for one last humid hurrah in breeding season. But as a young single mother without a mate of my own, empathy was hard to come by.

Now, I look up at my husband whose mouth is curling at the edges, seemingly allowing himself to enjoy my hysteria. I manage to hold in the question hanging on my lips.

That question.

The one I wondered when my second born was thrust onto my chest to the soundtrack of Paddy’s weeping. The one I ask every single time he plays football with Reuben and somehow manages to have the kind of chats I can only dream of from my spectator spot at the kitchen window. It’s the question that comes to mind every time he works late, leaving me at home with the wolves between the hours of 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.

How did I do this without you?

How did I ever do this alone?

***

Between you and me, I used to secretly call myself the Patron Saint of Unplanned Pregnancy.

I don’t know how I became that person. Maybe it was the public online blog where, in a way-too-honest fashion, I documented my premature entry into motherhood.

Often other girls would reach out, having just watched a pregnancy test turn positive, desperately seeking some solidarity with someone who had also sat on the bathroom floor post-pee, and thought, What am I going to do?

Some stayed in touch, and some disappeared. Some continued with their pregnancies; some didn’t. All have a permanent spot in the crevices of my heart.

It happens less these days. You know, since I’m an old married woman with more children, and it’s socially acceptable to be a mother.

But recently I’ve had the gift of getting to know someone who finds herself carrying a baby she did not plan for.

Set up by a mutual friend, we are an unusual fit in every other circumstance, and she makes it clear from the first awkward phone call that she wants to know every single gory and glorious detail. Pull no punches, she says.

I’m not sure I want to relive every detail, but there’s a tug in me I can’t ignore. So, over several sweaty August evenings during an uncharacteristic heatwave, I sit in my car—the only soundproof “room” of my home—and I lay it all bare.

Her story is one I’ve heard over and over. She wants to continue with the pregnancy, but her family is less keen. The dad doesn’t want to hear from her until she “gets it sorted.”

In one breath, she asks about pain relief in labour, and in the next, she asks if I think an abortion would be less painful. She wants to know what it was like squeezing my studies into naptime, but also if I preferred having a baby when I was older.

As we’ve gotten to know one another, we’ve picked up on the other’s ethical stances and politics and spiritual beliefs. And yet, it doesn’t matter. In these moments, it never does.

On paper, we are opposites. In person, our stories and opinions and pain and questions are so gray and nuanced and entangled; it’s hard to know where she begins, and I end.

No matter what choice she makes or how her future unfolds, we both know she will never be the same—forever changed by that double line, catapulted into motherhood without will or warning.

I want to assure her this is only the beginning, that this baby is the best thing to ever happen to her.

I want to tell her a village of people will get around her and carry her.

And in her darkest, weakest, most desperate moment, the love of Jesus she has always heard weird people banging on about will suddenly become real to her.

But I can’t. I can’t promise she will be given the same story as me. I can only promise it’s possible.

So, I also tell her about the nights I held my son on his bedroom floor, both of us crying until we fell asleep in one another’s arms on the hard, wooden floor beneath us.

I tell her about the shadow of depression that seems to have followed me as long as I have followed the call to be a mother. And then, because I can’t quite help myself, and because hope is irresistible, I tell her about taking my son to university with me. And to Paris, London, Rome, and Amsterdam.

“But how did you do it alone?!”

I hear the begging in her voice. She thinks I have a secret formula. Some words of wisdom that will make her brave.

All I know is this: when a baby is handed to me, I am not a married woman or a single woman. I am not a teenager or a geriatric. I am not a statistic or a stereotype. I am a mother. I am just a mother holding her newborn child, like every mother who has gone before. And I swear the world holds its breath to watch every time.

“I don't know how I did it alone, but I did it. And you can too,” I eventually respond, sighing in surrender at my lack of answers.

***

When that first ripe morning of September rolls around again, we are suitably sleep deprived as tradition would have it, and so we argue over breakfast options. The toddler spills water all over the table and Reuben feeds his little brother Weetabix while I make the packed lunch.

It takes twenty-five ridiculous minutes for everyone to locate their shoes and put them on, and when Reuben is fully dressed in his new school uniform, I fix his collar without thinking. It’s been two months, but my hands haven’t forgotten.

Paddy rallies us for photos before rushing to work—the one morning of the year his rule-abiding conscience allows him to be late. On the walk to school, we talk about Minecraft and Ninjago. And at the school gate, Reuben doesn’t hang around long, but his tight squeeze is unprompted—a tuft of his wiry hair brushing against my ear.

“I love you. I’m proud of you. I’m praying for you. I’ll have cookies for you,” I whisper. And then I head straight to TK Maxx to buy a cinnamon-and-something candle to celebrate.

It isn’t until after bedtime that I get a chance to hoke out my old pregnancy journal. I send a photo of the first entry to my new friend and I hope September gives her the courage she needs.

I don’t know how I did it, but I did. And if my worst fear came to fruition and I had to do it again, I know I could. Because I’m a mother. And that’s what we do. Even before that double line appears, a mother is born with a special strength to do what is right in front of her.

Mallet or no mallet.

In the meantime, the essay below was published in the Coffee+Crumbs Spring Collection this month—which is forever the biggest honour of my life. And I don’t know if this goes against Substack rules or whatever, but I would quite like my essay to have a wee home here too. It’s a story about parenting through trauma and permanently living in fight or flight mode. But really, it’s a story about a different kind of fighting (for each other) and a different kind of flight (into possibility and play). Let me know if it resonates with you at all. 💗

“Are we really doing this?!”

Paddy looks at me, then at the sign that reads Belfast International Airport, and back to me again. We wave goodbye to my friend, blessing her for saving us a sunrise taxi fare, and I flash a giddy smile as I meet Paddy’s eyes. Nervous laughter explodes in his chest like popcorn, and my emotionally horizontal husband has never looked more unhinged—in the best way.

The night before his birthday, I had tried to keep it casual as I asked him to iron a shirt and vacuum before my mum arrived to babysit. He did neither of these things. We’ll have lots of time in the morning, he told me.

So once he was asleep, I moved like an MI5 agent, ironing the shirt and packing an overnight bag. While I’m not in the habit of keeping a spider web of secrets from my husband, an extra set of clothing is only one of many things I’ve squirrelled away to make this Big London Sleepover possible—another being cold, hard cash.

Just before 6 a.m., on cue, our youngest comes into bed for milky cuddles, and I whisper over his silky head to Paddy, “Hey, are you awake? Do you want to know where we’re going today?”

When I confess that we’re off to London for 24 hours, he whisper-shouts, “WHAT?!” His shock pierces the morning silence, and it’s the most satisfying sound, like thwacking through an icy puddle.

WHAT? He keeps saying to himself as he runs to the shower.

Already, this is the most fun we’ve had, just the two of us, maybe ever.

***

Ten years ago, on any given weekday at 5 p.m., Reuben, my three-year-old, would have fallen asleep on the way home from daycare. At this stage, it was just him and me. At this stage, Paddy was just the guy I saw grabbing a cup of tea in the canteen at university.

Every evening at the same time, I turned the corner onto my street, hoping there would be a car outside my house—no car in particular. It became a ridiculous game, the closing chapter of my daily commute. I hoped someone, anyone at all, was waiting for me at home. One day there was a car, but it was for my neighbour, and I just about lost my mind.

And yet every evening, there was only an empty space waiting for my raggedy Peugeot 306. I don’t know where this specific brand of hope came from, but it needed to leave.

Sometimes, our little family felt so whole and normal to me; I could hardly believe some families had two parents. And sometimes, at 5 p.m., I felt my loneliness on me like a disease.

I parked up and peeled Reuben out of his car seat. I put a key in the lock, turned on all the lights, and reheated the spaghetti Bolognese. I read The Gruffalo, held Reuben inside my dressing gown until he was asleep, and transferred him to the crib before schlepping soggy towels off the bathroom floor and into the laundry. Then I sat by the fluorescent glow of my laptop working on an assignment for university until my eyes were scratchy.

***

As we board our flight, there is a family in front of us with two little girls wearing matching taxi-yellow backpacks, and I think of our three boys grounded on Northern Irish soil without us. The mum tells another passenger they are going to Legoland, and I look at Paddy, who is chugging a black Americano from Starbucks.

“We could never do that as a whole family,” I say to him, thinking of one boy in particular whose nervous system just wouldn’t cope.

“Never say never,” he says with the saddest smile I’ve ever seen.

“Just to warn you,” I say, moving our minds to the adventure at hand, “Our hotel in London is giving major hostel vibes.”

“I don’t care where we sleep,” he says, “I just care that we’re sleeping in London!”

“No, seriously. Just wait until you see it.”

My confidence wobbles, and I give him a list of all the lovely things I could have booked for the same price as one night in our hostel-hotel; a spa day, for example. Or an Airbnb on a coast closer to home. We could have hardcore napped for twenty-four hours, read back-to-back novels, and taken long silent walks on the beach.

“I really wanted to get on a plane, though,” I say, mostly to myself. He laughs, and I know I don’t have to remind him it was my childhood dream to become a pilot.

He squeezes my hand, “Reb!” (Code for, wise up!) “I love those things too, but this is a whole other level of fun!”

His reassurance quiets my thoughts, but there is one question that just won’t quit: Am I running away?

***

The day we said our vows in front of ten people in a garden, there was a bouncy castle. We jumped and jumped and jumped, the white silk skirt of my dress ballooning around us, and relief catapulted me into the air. We flew to the moon, touched the stars, and counted oceans.

The year was 2020, and I spent months in lockdown waiting for permission to marry my best friend. But really, I waited years. For someone to choose us, to delight in us, to share in everything.

Like other naive newlyweds, we looked at the couples a few years ahead of us and said, "Oh no, we will be different. We won’t fall prey to stereotypes. There is no way our love will go stale, like a leftover slice of bread. This love of ours isn’t perishable."

In some ways though, we entered marriage with eyes wide open. No Hallmark movies here. We knew there were people close to us who didn’t approve of him falling for a single mum, or loving my son as his own. We knew something of the juggle it takes to manage a home and family and finances, how that strain might threaten to pull a marriage so taut it nearly snaps.

We knew all of this, and yet we still felt winded when, not long into our marriage, parenting began to ask more of us than we ever knew possible. We didn’t know you could share in everything, become one person—and still feel alone. Same storm, different boats.

***

In a fight-or-flight crisis, I take flight every single time. I am out of there. I imagine my soul leaving my body like a little translucent ghost girl, floating up and out. She smiles and waves, “Bye guys, LYSM!”

It wasn’t a problem until motherhood needed me to be a safe place for a precious boy struggling in his mind and body. I noticed that in moments that feel too painful to endure, I go numb. I want to be a mum who embodies spark and fortitude, but instead, I’m all shadow and silence. I’m lost, and there are no Google map routes for parenting through trauma.

A children’s counselor has been teaching Paddy and me to do therapeutic play sessions at home, and when she talks about the power of play, how it rewires our brain chemistry and brings us out of our survival brains, I realize how badly I need play as well.

***

Before searching for flights to London, I texted my mum: We need a break, or I’m not sure we’ll survive this. I wondered briefly if I should shield her from our pain, but she is my safe place–the beautiful and brutal life cycle of motherhood.

She encouraged us to go. So, I popped the younger boys in front of Cars 2 and hid in my bedroom, the Skyscanner app open in one hand and an apple in the other, because eating something crunchy is supposed to regulate your nervous system.

You do not have the pay grade for booking flights on a bad day, I scolded myself. But three apples later, the flights were booked.

When my dad heard about my rogue plan, he asked my mum, “Twenty-four hours? What’s the point?”

“For the fun of it,” she replied.

And now, as the engine of our plane roars to life and we vibrate up the runway full of possibility, I feel carbonated, ready to cross oceans.

***

We sit side by side on a London tube, and I feel a stranger’s eyes laser into the side of my head. The tube car is silent except for the squeals of metal on metal.

She’s going to talk to me, I think, staring straight ahead. She is absolutely going to talk to me in this carriage full of silent, cool Londoners.

Finally, I give up and turn to smile at her.

“I’ve just been to see a show!!” she says, combusting. And I notice all at once her purple eyeshadow, cotton-candy pink sequin dress, her Lilo & Stitch trainers. I am immediately sucked in. “I've never been to a West End show!”

Incredulous, she tells me she goes once a month. Today, she saw Next to Normal, a musical about mental health. I name as many shows as I can think of, having just heart-eyed the ads on the escalators, and she has seen them all. “I couldn’t sleep last night, like an excited kid,” she says. Her delight is contagious, like a signed permission slip to go out and play. I’m mortified at the water droplets forming in my eyelashes.

“It’s my husband's first time in London,” I say, “We’re only here for 24 hours, so I don’t think we’ll see a show.” Code for: We have 24 hours alone, and we can’t spend three of those sitting in silence.

At our stop, we jump out together, but she is already a shimmering pink blob in the distance. I strain my neck to follow her, to absorb every last mesmerising ounce of her. Was she my fairy godmother?

“That was sweet,” Paddy says, interrupting my creepy stare, “I love that she gets dressed up and takes herself to a show every month.”

Me too, is all I can say as she disappears. Me too.

***

We exit the underground and at first, Paddy and I are cautious with one another, the way you are with an arm that’s been in a cast—except it’s our hearts that have been broken.

But by the time our watches and trainers have clocked 20,000 steps, we are connected again—to one another and life itself. I cry at a group of mothers and daughters singing and skipping through Covent Garden on their way to see Matilda. Paddy uses his camera for something other than work. I admire the style and confidence of the man in a trench coat wearing hoof-shaped boots. We order cocktails that look like Hogwarts potions and go crazy over the magic of it all. I search for the woman at the bar who asked me to find her when we were finished with our table, and because she didn’t believe I’d come, her friends pull me into a group hug. We choose the longest route to the internet-viral apple crumble, and maybe I’m dehydrated, but it is a firework display of flavours in my mouth. It takes half a day to get around Borough Market because I must know the history of every vendor. Paddy ticks Buckingham Palace off his bucket list. I sit down on nearby steps to watch, and I feel deep in my bones that we’re going to be okay.

We have been in fight or flight for so long, trapped in our survival brains, we haven’t been able to feel any of this—curiosity, wonder, openness—the hallmarks of being alive. Maybe this trip wasn’t an elaborate escape plan but a practice in play—a rebellion and battle cry in the face of all the reasons we shouldn't. Maybe play, especially when it makes no sense, is a middle finger to hard circumstances, a flag raised for our family.

We can’t hop on a plane every weekend, but we can hop in the car and go for an ocean swim. We can pull out the old watercolour paints, make a music video with the kids, or say yes to jumping on the trampoline—for the fun of it.

Share

Buy me a coffee

He turns the phone screen around to get my approval, and the heavy Belfast rain plops on my screen. Despite the obscured image, my face shows exactly how I feel. Which is to say, scared out of my mind. Which is also to say, like a lady about to chicken out. 

“Well, here I go,” I say, not going. 

“Reb, you’ve given birth three times—you’ll be grand.” 

I hover in the deserted red-brick alleyway, our two youngest boys getting restless under the rain cover of the double buggy.

“Yeah, but my body was designed to have babies. My nose, however, was not designed to have a needle shot through it,” I say, not missing a beat, repeating the same answer I gave my friends last night. 

Paddy rolls his eyes, gives me a peck on the lips and shoos me away. He watches me scurry in the door before disappearing for a walk.

When my friends were experimenting with fun piercings as teenagers, I was already a mother. And I considered my life itself an act of resistance against the trashy teen-mum stereotype. To look more mature, I wore modest dresses with black tights. Every. Single. Day. 

And even in my most sleep-deprived moments, I would not be seen within a five-mile radius of a pair of cosy jogging bottoms, lest someone think I didn’t have it all together. There was no room for vulnerability when a whole world was waiting to be proved wrong. A nose piercing was too irresponsible, too noticeable—and the baby on my hip was already sabotaging my mission to blend in. 

A decade later, the desire to pierce my nose is a craving that won’t quit. So, I gifted myself permission to do it on my thirtieth birthday—to do something permanent and visible and fun, just for me. 

But today, more than a year before that big birthday, on an insignificant grey Saturday afternoon with nowhere else to be, I have decided I’m doing it. I’m running on some serious Big YOLO Energy™ and that’s what finally carries me into the piercing shop.

***

For as long as I can remember, my mum has told the story of how she wanted to be a nurse. But at sixteen, she had to step up as the mother of her household after her own mother left the country with another man. My mum got a clerical job, and an older friend taught her how to cook for her dad and siblings.

“That first Christmas, my turkey was so dry no one could eat it,” she always concludes with a chuckle. “But we all have to start somewhere.” 

She tells the story without a hint of bitterness. She has long made peace with her beloved mum and has been invaluable at any workplace she’s set foot in.

But let this be known: my mum is still the nurse-iest person I have ever met. As a child, I was besotted with the idea that, in a different universe, she got to live out her dream. I wanted that for her so badly. I have spent a lifetime longing for a creator of the universe who is in control, so I don’t have to be, and then constantly telling him to do it differently. 

I am still a sucker for a multiverse story. Give me any movie or novel set against the backdrop of multiple universes where multiple versions of ourselves co-exist. Don’t ask me to explain the quantum physics theory, but I love the idea that every time we flip a coin, and it comes up heads, there is another universe where it comes up tails. Or every time we come to a fork in the road, there is another version of us taking the alternative path. 

There is a universe where my bachelor’s degree is in English instead of Theology and another where I am still a single parent living with my parents. Maybe, somewhere, I have three daughters who dote on their dad, but also, I live in London with two Dalmatians. If we must be realistic, there is probably a universe where depression wins, but also there might be one where I get tickets to the Eras tour. I hope there are universes where no one cares if I identify as British or Irish, and surely there is a world where I have short hair with bangs (but rest assured, there is no universe where my hair is its natural colour). In a terrifying version of my life, I stayed in the toxic relationship I was in before I met my now-husband. And in another, I got to punch that ex-boyfriend in the face. 

In my mind, the variables and forests of forking paths are endless, except for one factor: in every universe, I am a mother.

***

The decision to book a piercing appointment started with an index finger jammed in the double buggy. Obviously. 

In an attempt to hustle everyone in and out of the shop as fast as possible before school, I flipped the buggy open and folded my finger in the catch between two metal bars. It felt like a low-key Final Destination scene, an intrusive thought brought to life. I expected to look down and see my finger on the pavement beside someone’s discarded shopping receipt and a half-eaten croissant. 

I don’t know how but eventually I was set free by my ten-year-old who, thankfully, afforded me the dignity of looking away while I doubled over on the ground and screamed silent expletives into my knees. 

When I stopped huffing and puffing, I immediately thought, well, that’s my violin career over. And then I walked into the shop with my gaggle of children like nothing happened, reflexively wrapping my left hand around the neck of an invisible violin. My finger did not move. 

What you should know is, I haven’t played the violin in ten years. I took my final violin exam in my last year of school, and I hadn’t planned on taking it any further. But I could have—if I’d been willing to work hard. If I hadn’t taken my kaleidoscope of options for granted. 

I didn’t know everything I still wanted to be until I became a mother. Until motherhood became everything. I didn’t know a mother could feel effervescent at who she has become—more alive than ever—whilst also carrying a million tiny griefs for who she hasn’t. 

***

The thing I’m noticing about my friends as we inch closer to thirty is how at home they are in themselves. 

They know who they are and whose they are, where they belong, and what lights them up. Instead of coasting through, they’ve done the gritty work that leads to growth. They aren’t afraid to dream and pivot or prioritise fun. They are steady, no longer unmoored by insecurity or the opinions of others. And their previously wallpapered souls have been stripped bare, all pretence peeled away.  

I look at the women they’ve become, and I think it’s the greatest gift—to know who you do and don’t want to be. What I mean is, I’ve been a mother my whole adult life, and I’ve never really had time to ask myself that question. 

I have been adrift in survival mode, constantly searching for somewhere safe and dry to land. I hear other women talk about losing themselves after having babies, about trying to find themselves again, and I think, I don’t even know who I’m looking for. Like sea glass hidden in the shore bed, I’m treasure hunting for the pieces of myself I haven’t yet met. 

I am more okay than ever with the fact that motherhood has shaped every part of who I am, that it pumps through my veins. But I’m beginning to wonder if it’s possible to be a mother who plays the violin and loves taking photographs and cooks with her husband, just for fun. A mother who waters the seeds planted in her adolescence, swimming and painting and learning French. A mother who exercises in the morning, goes to counselling in the evening and learns to make her favourite cocktails in between. A mother who knows herself. A mother who chooses one universe and vows to love being alive in it. 

Of course, a person is more than the sum of their likes and dislikes, but these things are not meaningless either. These are the recipe ingredients for a woman who is okay with who she didn’t get to be, but excited about who she is becoming. 

***

When the lovely and not-scary-at-all piercing man holds the humongous needle up to my face, I close my eyes and breathe in one, two, three, four, and out, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He senses my nerves and asks about my plans for the day. 

I know his tactics but still, I’m grateful. I begin telling him my eldest son is spending the weekend with his grandparents, and then, in one sharp swoop followed by a throbbing nip, it’s done. 

“That’s it,” he says, far too casually, as if to make a point. 

When I leap at the mirror, I stand there staring and staring and staring, because I love it. I cannot remember the last time I looked at my reflection and thought, I love it. My eyes are watering from a pinch of pain but a dollop of pride. Because I Did The Thing. 

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” I say to the piercing artist as I say goodbye, my voice coming out more like a squawk.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” I say to the receptionist on my way out the door.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” I say to Paddy as he wraps me in his arms.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” I say to myself and to my twenty-nine-year-old self and to my eighteen-year-old self because each version is still a piece of me. 

I want to start my day slowly, with a coffee and a journal. A book and a blankie. I want to start the day untangling my thoughts. I want to be a beacon of peace, curled up on the sofa when each family member tiptoes down the stairs with shaggy bedheads.

Instead, I am a bundle of lycra and mismatched socks tripping over myself in the glow of iPhone torchlight as I rush out the door at 5.45 am. I arrive at the local leisure centre with the ghost of yesterday’s mascara melted under my eyes and my body is lifting heavy things before my brain has even registered that I am awake. And I’ve been thinking, surely, this is no way to start a day?

When class is over, the sun is getting her last minutes of beauty sleep and the sons at home are wide awake, slathering porridge over the table. The scurry to get ready for school begins and for the rest of the morning, I will ride those exercise endorphins hard. The noise in my mind will turn to a lull and the lows of my day will feel less fatal. My brain health, for lack of a better phrase, will get out of the gutter.

When I want to quit, my husband will say, “Those gym classes are keeping you alive right now.” And I won’t argue with him, because he’s probably right.

I repeat it to myself: I won’t argue with him, I won’t argue with him, I won’t argue with him.

When I became a mother, some well-meaning people treated me like a deer who might bolt or break at any minute. The health visitor visited way too often and sprinkled our conversations with mentions of social services and my friends spoke to me like I was covered in red tape that said handle with care. My own mother was on high alert, as anyone would be when their baby has a baby. Although she tried her best to act casual and for that, I loved her even more.

By the time my baby was about six months old and summer was at her peak, all fresh-cut grass and bird-song lullabies, everyone seemed to chill the heck out. The last time I saw that one particularly concerned health visitor, she watched me circling moisturiser into my baby’s dry cheeks and said in the quietest voice, you’re a good mum, Rebecca. I was bolder at eighteen, less doubtful of my place in the world, and I looked her dead in the eyes. I know, I smiled.

My mum confessed they had been convinced I was on the edge of postpartum depression, just paddling in the shallow end daring the waves to swallow me whole, that it was inevitable after a traumatic pregnancy. And I remember telling her it was a miracle I’d escaped.

What I didn’t tell her was that the whole way through my teens I’d felt perpetually lost, trying on different hobbies and friendship groups like pairs of jeans. And like everyone’s favourite Topshop Jamie jeans at the time, they never fit me quite right. I didn’t tell her I felt like something in my mind shifted with puberty and never shifted back into place again. I didn’t tell her I escaped postpartum depression because running from the beast was already my normal.

How could I tell her when I still didn’t know, myself?

I will turn 30 in March and my chapped-cheeked baby had another birthday on the mouth of Christmas and despite my biggest and bravest and bestest efforts, he is no stranger to the complexities of being human. He knows what it’s like to feel betrayed by your brain and body.

But here’s what brings out my inner fragile deer, here’s what squeezes all the life out of my heart: I have seen glimpses of that familiar shadow settling over him. And I wonder if it’s hereditary. If it’s always been in his blood, just lying in wait like all who came before.

Towards the end of my second gym class on a grey Tuesday morning, I feel hot tears crawling to the edges of my eyes. The same hot tears that used to rise in my chest at church when we put lovely melodies to vulnerable words. I am shocked and mortified all at once because this is wholly unlike me. These days I am a dry well, completely parched. But it turns out they are urgent tears. It hurts to catch them in my throat and hold them there as prisoners and I think my ducts might explode.

I want to scream, which is also unlike me because normally I am completely spaced out at the stage of a workout, my soul has usually left my body. I want to climb off my bike and stomp up to the instructor and karate-kick the sound system and grab her mic. I want to tell everyone how much I hate this.

I hate getting up every morning and fighting for my life. I hate all the invisible work it takes to function as a person. I hate that the medication only sort of works and I hate the side effects and I hate that it claims to keep you alive but it doesn’t give you life. It doesn’t give the full glittering kaleidoscope of life that I know is out there for all of us. I want to ask my exercise friends what we’re supposed to do about all of this, not because it has anything to do with them, they might be here fighting for their lives too, but because I believe in a God who is very, very quiet these days.

I want to tell them these classes aren’t keeping me alive, I am keeping myself alive. I am tallying up all the reasons to keep going and I am painting them on a canvas of life for my son to see.

Here, come try out these endorphins / Look at the colours in those 8 am clouds / How funny was that movie? / Feel how buttery soft this blanket is / Let me make you your favourite brownies / You can eat them with the green apples you asked for / Have you ever seen a cuter puppy? / Tell me what’s happening in your audiobook / Listen to the crackle of this croissant when I take a big bite / Do you see the green daffodil shoots blending in with the blades of grass? / Promise me you’ll keep looking, even when it all looks lifeless / Did I tell you about the Box Jellyfish? How after giving birth, the mother jellyfish just drifts away, leaving her offspring to fend for themselves in the ocean currents / I promise I will never drift / And can you promise me you’ll remember you are part of something bigger? / Something so boundless and so beautiful, surely we can keep going for another day.

The class is over now. A man hands me a paper towel to wipe my bike and I use it to wipe my eyes instead.

A wee photo roundup from the past month:

The things I’ve loved and have been meaning to share with all the people I love:

I’ve read many meh books in the last couple of months but All My Mothers is not one of them. I think it’s going to be one of my favourites of all time. Tender, stunning storytelling with threads of motherhood/coming-of-age/female friendship/grief/big spiritual questions. Basically, all the good stuff. A slow burn, yes, but one to get sucked into for a very long time. I read the paperback and listened to the audiobook and wept over both. I get a little nervous sharing book love because we all know that sometimes a book is just the right one at the right time for the right person, but I feel like there are quite a few of you here who will adore this one.

Also, has anyone read Dinner for Vampires? I didn’t know I needed a One Tree Hill/religious cult mash-up memoir, but it turns out I did.

Books have been letting me down but Substack has not, especially every single word from my friend Megan. Most recently, this one and this one have blown me away.

I can’t stop thinking about Making A Mother, a new narrative storytelling podcast from Coffee + Crumbs. I particularly enjoyed the first two episodes, but the whole thing is beautifully nuanced, powerful, and important. 10/10 recommend.

I can’t say Goodbye to February without sharing this lovely essay on marriage by Allie King.

“Tonight, we’ll watch an entire movie together. It really shouldn’t be a big deal. But it is. Because I know children and life and heartbreak can wedge themselves into cracks in your marriage that you never knew were there. I know you have to keep moving towards each other to keep from moving away from each other. I know two heavy beds are much easier to move together than two heavy hearts.”

And finally, I dare you not to grin from ear to ear at this post. The Christmas tree one is my fave.

Okay, that’s all I have. Hit me up if you have any secret miracle cures beyond physio for a knee injury. I’ve been on bed rest for so long that I’m starting to consider this kind of Irish cure. (Just kidding. Sort of.)

Lots of love,

Reb x

Share

Buy me a coffee

He’s particularly sensitive to sound and rhythm and tends to feel it with his whole body. Sometimes, this means we’re clambering for the nearest quiet corner, and sometimes, it means we’re embracing a rave right where we find ourselves. I enjoy both in equal measure, to be honest. It was a risk, taking him to a new church with a very fun music set up on a day already filled with hype, but it was a risk that seems to be paying off.

“I yuv Jesus’ birthday party mummy, I weally yuv it.”

And I kind of love that he carries Christmas Day in his body.

We are always changing how we do The Big Day in our house. We take a stock check of everyone’s current needs and make a plan of action based on what worked and what didn’t in previous years. Last year, for example, really didn’t work. The chopping and changing never felt strange to me until we spent Christmas Eve at my home-home i.e. my parents’ house—something we’d never done before. The nostalgia was real. Pictures and memories flashed across my mind like a slideshow on a retro projector—click click click (even though basically my whole life has been digital). I’m talking about the kind of safe cosy Christmas memories you can wrap around you like a fluffy blanket. For all eighteen of my childhood Christmases, until I became a mother and adult overnight, we had the most consistent traditions. They never changed because they never needed to. They were perfect.

Long before the 2024 twinkly light season was upon us, we knew there was something that had to be optional on Christmas Day—church. I know, I know. It isn’t a biggie, or maybe it is a biggie? It’s always been a biggie to us, and I’m not sure if I’m at risk of sounding like a heathen or a Holy Joe, but it really was a whole thing for us to hold this tiny part of the day with open hands.

In the end, our hunch was right and I volunteered as tribute for anyone who needed to stay home. I filled a backpack full of new Hot Wheels and popped it in the passenger seat of the car where I normally sit. I waved Paddy off and then I closed the front door and sat on the bottom stair and had a cry. Just a wee one. And then I got up, dusted myself off, and zoomed through the wrapping paper with a bin bag, making a yellow brick road of sorts through our living room to the kitchen. We played a board game and my kid made me coffee and then we retreated to my bed to read side by side. He used a new octopus-shaped book light that attached to his novel via its tentacles and I knew we’d done the right thing.

I knew we’d chosen regulated nervous systems over traditions. I believed in our choice. I believed in it wholeheartedly and at the same time, my heart didn’t feel whole. For the time being I chalked it up to December tiredness and some festive FOMO and savoured the sweetest of reunions when the others got back and joined us in bed.

On a recent podcast episode of Everything Happens with my queen Kate Bowler, her guest Parker J. Palmer talks about how we as humans live in the tragic gap between what is and what should be. He shared his experience of plodding through seasons of deep depression—when he wasn’t just lost in the dark but felt he’d become the dark. He talked about enduring life in unfinished times, especially when your heart is breaking or broken.

And the more I think about it, the more I think my festive FOMO might be heartbreak in a Santa hat. It might be grief. It might be a note from my heart to my head of all the ways things aren’t as they should be—or as I thought they’d be. The tragic gap feels deeper and wider this time of year when all of the Happies and Crappies of the year gone by are held under a microscope. And that, my friends, is how you find yourself sitting on the bottom stair having a silly wee cry on Christmas Day.

But the thing about living in the tragic gap isn’t just what should be, but the promise of what will be. I can’t believe how many tiny losses and tiny hurts and tiny deaths my heart has absorbed this year. I can’t help but carry them in my body. But somewhere along the way, I forgot about that promise. I rolled my eyes at it or just stopped looking for it. But it’s there. The light is there. Glimpses of what will be. Even if it’s tiny and octopus-shaped.

A wee photo roundup:

P.S. I saved a few other lovely things to share but I thought I would keep the January noise to a minimum.

From my heart to yours,

Reb x

Share

Subscribe now

I’m sitting in a sticky leather chair, one hand bearing the full weight of the baby at my breast and the other releasing a toddler’s curls from the clutches of two tween girls. The noise level of a group of three-year-old boys playing cars rivals the Belfast traffic outside. It’s my turn to volunteer in the church creche and there’s no other way to describe the scene in front of me except absolutely feral. 

Eventually I realize one of the tween girls has asked me a question.

“How long have you been friends with her brother?” she gestures to the curly-haired toddler again, tugging on a perfect ringlet and watching it coil like a slinky spring.

I pause, confused, because her brother is eight months old and lovely, but I wouldn’t call him a friend just yet. I clarify, “Do you mean her mother, Anna?” 

She mutters something to her friend in what I think is Arabic or Kurdish and her self-conscious giggle fills the room, “Yes, sorry. Wrong English word. How long have you been friends with her mum?” 

I wish I could swallow my correction. There is much to be embarrassed about at twelve, but speaking English as a second language isn’t one. This time, the end of her question rises in pitch with a noticeable Belfast twang. 

I crunch the numbers. “We were eleven and now we’re twenty-eight, so seventeen years.” 

“Oh. My. Gosh!” Her mouth drops open to form a perfect, dramatic little ‘o’ and she nudges her friend.

Together, they fangirl our friendship. 

If Anna and I still lived in our rural hometown area, this revelation would be less impressive. But since we’ve both ended up living on the same side of Belfast and going to the same church, I join them in their delight. Home is forty minutes and a world away—in Northern Ireland, if there’s a motorway separating you, then you might as well be in Timbuktu. 

The girls tell me about their longest friendships, and I wonder if they’re infatuated because of the way moving has marked their lives. I know what it is to crave the anchoring roots of a ride-or-die friend when the landscape of your life is constantly changing. 

“Is she your BFFL?” one asks, and I laugh. Ten years ago, I would have declared, “Yes, three billion percent, yes.” But now, I think, do adults still say best friend? Is it okay to claim her? Would Anna say yes? And, what about the Missing Years?

At this point, I realize they want an actual answer. 

“Yes,” I say, “She’s my BFFL.”

*Squeals*

***

It was 2013. I was about to become a teen mum and everyone’s reactions were as expected—Oh s*** I'm so sorry and What are you going to do? But worse was what they said with their eyes: I’m glad it’s you and not me. 

The morning I planned to meet Anna and break the news to her in an ice cream parlour near our school, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop crying either; huge gushing sobs that felt too big for my body. So I got out of bed, and I wrote in my sequined pregnancy journal by the light of a street lamp. Today I’m going to tell Anna about the baby, but she’s a Christian, and I’m scared she’ll judge me. 

I don’t remember my exact words, but I remember Anna didn’t miss a beat—Congratulations, Reb! 

I did a double-take. Sorry, what?

She was the first person to celebrate the little human inside me and to make me believe this was more than an accident I should have prevented.

Anna was the friend who delivered chicken-tikka-and-stuffing sandwiches to the call of every craving and loved my baby as if he were her own. She made us spaghetti bolognese to fill our bellies and hearts and let me camp out at her house when I couldn’t be alone. After a much needed night out when my son stayed with my mum, Anna held my hungover head and picked glass out of my foot. And then she was the one who held my hand when I decided that maybe I could get on board with the love of Jesus she was so keen on. 

She was, and is, my BFFL.

***

During those formative young-adult years when my girlfriends were getting to know themselves and one another, I was getting to know my little boy. 

I lost out on the era when friendships were planted in the soil of communal living, when boundaries previously upheld at school became blurred by the vulnerability of seeing one another at their best and worst. While I was wiping tomato ketchup off plastic Ikea plates and wondering how to pay my next electric bill, my friends were talking about dating and hopes and dreams, sprawled across one another’s beds. They were swapping dresses for pub crawls and honing their make-up skills on fresh faces, both of which I am still sorely lacking—the skills and the fresh face. I listened hungrily to stories from girls' trips to Donegal, Greece, and Lisbon, living vicariously through them.

***

Of all the history classes I sat through during my undergraduate degree, there is one piece of information that still lives rent-free in my mind. The Phantom Time Hypothesis—a brainchild of amateur historian, Herbert Illig, who made himself known in 1991 by claiming the years 611 A.D. to 911 A.D. never actually happened. 

These years, dubbed as the missing years by Illig, have very little going on in the European history books, so according to him, they were a sham devised by the rulers who wanted to make sure they would be on the throne during the much-anticipated year 1000 A.D.

According to historians, the theory is medieval fake news—more conspiracy than scholarship.

But the idea that we could rewrite the records—if we don’t like how they went down in history—is captivating.

***

My memories of our Missing Years cause grief to bloom in my chest. 

I was a weary single parent, wondering if I should drop out of university, struggling to make it through each day. Anna was bravely battling a mental health condition, tired of hanging on to life by a thread, and wondering if she should just let go. Both of us felt misheard and misunderstood and abandoned. Neither of us was unjustified. We made many stabs at clearing the air and clambering for clarity, only to end up going around in circles, never making it out of the rabbit hole. In the end, there was no end. No ghosting or final bust-up. The light in our friendship wasn’t snuffed out in one fatal blow but rather faded slowly to an ember. We kept in touch, but no longer every day. We were just friends, no longer sisters. It was distant and different. Over the span of three-ish years, I watched from the sidelines as she met and married the love of her life. And she watched from the sidelines as others made spaghetti bolognese for my little boy.

We didn’t give up, but sometimes it felt like we’d missed too much. Would our friendship ever rise from the ashes?

***

Anna and I sit curled up, shoulder to shoulder, on my teal velvet sofa while our Lockdown Babies shuffle around on the playmat. Today they co-exist peacefully, and we’re only needed when they get tangled up, their legs pretzeled together. We guzzle coffee and conversation like we’re gasping for air, and we’re already several wrong turns too far when we realize where our chat is going. We’re too curious to do a U-turn now.

At first, we tip-toe. Usually, we don’t—can’t—go here. The Missing Years are not up for discussion. 

But we fought for this. When it would have been easier to run for the hills, we plodded through the valley. Healing was slow and steady, like a seed sprouting. But when your heart has been truly broken, you learn of the deepest reserves it can carry. 

So, on this day, we don’t brush over the loss. We sit in the ache. We share a tight squeeze. We acknowledge how young we were, how co-dependent our friendships were—how we fell hard and fast like all teenage girls when they find a fairytale friend. We imprinted on one another like the Twilight wolves of our youth. But ultimately, we didn’t have the maturity to work through real, genuine, earth-shattering circumstances—despite our best efforts. 

With a pit in my stomach, I share my biggest regret—that I wasn’t there for her when she needed me most. In return, she confesses she didn’t, couldn’t, fully understand everything I was carrying as a mother. Perhaps we are here now, side by side, because we are older and wiser. Because she moved near me or I asked her to be my bridesmaid. Because she is no longer sick, and I am no longer a single parent. Because our husbands play pickleball or because we got pregnant at the same time. 

But I think it’s more. 

In motherhood, the sweetness of a fought-for friendship buoys us. In the swell of shifting routines and needs, it holds us up—every version of us that has come and gone before. Motherhood has taken from me, yes, but it has returned a missing friendship. And thank goodness, because it’s not possible to do this blood-and-guts, beautiful and broken calling without it. Without her. 

Later, Anna texts, I feel icky for bringing up the missing years—don’t let it take up precious space in your brain.

My thumbs move quickly to assure her, You were missing and very much missed. 

We’re back together and better than ever, she replies. 

We know we can’t rewrite the history of our friendship or delete the missing years, but let the records show we can redeem them—one sofa squeeze at a time. 

Better than ever, I repeat.

I knew this and I did not care. I needed him to share in this with me.

Thankfully his response was an often used gesture of communication in our marriage: the yes ma’am emoji.

Today I’m here to report he did, indeed, make it happen. The big Friday night premiere arrived with bookings for both a cinema and a babysitter—our first foray into the freeing world of casual paid babysitting i.e. not a favour courtesy of family or close friends, also i.e. the most lucrative job of every teenage girl’s youth.

I’m also here to report it was perfect perfect PERFECT. I could write a whole essay on the story itself–an anthem for anyone who has ever felt misunderstood, found themselves on the edge, ostracised, othered, or had to wear a mask their whole lives. A reminder that everyone is made up of a million little stories, that we contain multitudes, and what you see isn’t always the whole picture. But for now I’ll just say the movie visuals, the choreography, the vocals, the writing, the metaphor, the nuance! Just, perfect.

The people in our screening mostly sat in a hushed reverence the whole way through, except for the guy to my left munching on popcorn like it was an Olympic sport. But by the end of the final song Defying Gravity (at the 2 hour 41 minute mark no less), I clapped harder than I’ve ever clapped in my life. I couldn’t stop myself. It was like a reflex. Only when I heard Paddy’s laugh beside me I realised what I, and thankfully a few others near us, had done. These are my people, I thought. (Except popcorn guy, he is not my people.)

“Well?” asked Paddy.

“Perfect. It was perfect.”

And then he pulled me in for a tight hug that said your delight is my delight.

On the way back to the car we wandered through the frosty cobbled Cathedral Quarter on the iciest evening of the year and I kept my eyes lasered to the ground, focussing on putting one foot in front of the other, only looking up to laugh at a trio of tipsy men singing their hearts out.

On another night we might have stopped for a drink, but this time we didn’t feel the need to slurp up every last slither of free time. We felt content to head home, something that isn’t always true. Escaping into another world for a couple of hours with my favourite person in tow had been everything I needed, and I wondered when this kind of small ordinary joy became accessible again. When it became possible to leave all three boys and their individual–and not always typical–needs in the hands of someone else and pop out to pick up my own needs? Like all of these milestone shifts in life, they usually pass me by, but when did it stop being such a big deal to go, and barely look back? When did it all become a little less delicate?

It was only a month or two ago I had a girls' weekend in Donegal booked and paid for and right up until the last second was 90% sure I wouldn’t go. I knew my mind and body needed to go, but anytime I thought about it in the months before, my heart felt twisted and torn and anxiety swarmed my body. Not to mention, in the days before, there were multiple traumatic situations in our home and family.

So, I almost didn’t go. I almost didn’t go because it felt easier to stay, to hide away. I almost didn’t go, because usually I follow my peace wherever she leads me, but this time her voice was muffled. I almost didn’t go, because I was afraid of feeling like the fringe friend–forever on the edge. I almost didn’t go, because I didn’t have a working breast pump anymore–because working breast pumps belong to people who go. I almost didn’t go, because even when my mum noticed that I quite clearly needed to go and offered to look after one of the boys, I still felt like my marriage needed me more. I almost didn’t go, because when I originally said yes I thought my baby would look less like a baby by the time the trip rolled round. I almost didn’t go, because our little thatch cottage was far from civilisation, and further still, from my crying babies if he needed me.

But then that Friday morning came. I woke up and I lifted some weights and churned some brownie batter and went to Tesco for road trip snacks. I bought a breast pump on Gumtree because Facebook Marketplace doesn’t like ‘medical equipment’ and my mum took one of the boys (on her birthday weekend *cries*) and Paddy arrived home from work and borderline pushed me out the door.

And without thinking too much I got in my car and drove. I drove and drove and drove and drove and didn’t look back until I stopped for diet coke on the Glenshane Pass and distracted myself by listening to a podcast interview with Kelly Corrigan on vulnerability. The motorway turned to winding roads and twisty turns like the ones in my heart and when I arrived at the cottage I realised I’d been holding my breath. I slept hard and snuggled my friend and let homemade pancakes heal a little bit of my famished heart. I drank in the wild, untouched coastline and let God’s roaring ocean waves swallow me whole and spit me out into the surf–more whole than ever. I rotted in bed during daylight hours and slept through the tractor at the window and read several uninterrupted chapters–except for the welcome voice of a friend saying sorry, can I tell one more story? Then we chased 10,000 steps and took it in turns to catch one another up on life, just putting one foot in front of another–because that’s all any of us are ever trying to do.

I drove home from Donegal and finally made the first move with a friend of a friend and asked if she’d be willing to get to know us. I told her my hopes, that she’d consider eventually becoming the babysitter we called on—but mostly I wanted her to become an extension of our family. I don’t know why this felt like a whole thing. I don’t know why it felt so brave.

All of this is to say, I did go. And I’ve been putting one foot in front of the other ever since. Until one frosty night in November we’re popping out to hold hands and get lost in a good story like it’s no big deal. Until all of those little steps add up, helping us move through the most precious story of all: the one we’ve been commissioned to live.

An Inventory of Loveliness

Another Inventory of Loveliness
or just some things I’ve been meaning to tell you about

The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo—for anyone who loves a looooong slow-burn story about a multigenerational family. Contains hefty themes of female relationships and the many faces of motherhood. At 500 pages it won’t be for everyone but honestly, the plot is just the ordinary real life of another family with stunning writing and that is always going straight in my basket. Major This Is Us vibes.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach—for anyone who loves literary fiction with a sprinkle of romcom, a dash of dark humour and a dollop of gorgeous reflection. Somehow she addresses heavy topics with heart and humour and the characters will suck you right in. I finished it last month and I still miss the two female protagonists.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt—for anyone who wonders what an Octopus might sound like if he could narrate a story. No seriously, I’ve never wondered this either but I was utterly charmed by this tragically endearing and tender novel. I found it so hard to let it go at the end. Another author covering some tricky topics in a beautiful and original way with real complex characters. I’m a few years behind with this one but I think it came to me at just the right time and I love when that happens with a story.

For anyone just trying their best to make it through December before December has even begun.

For anyone who, like me, has hope on their mind—some short words of encouragement here and here.

For anyone who needs a special gift for an extra special person, my beautiful and talented friend Lucy makes everything you could ever need. If nothing else, her page is just a delight to follow. A true feast for the creative.

One Last But Very Important Thing

I don’t mean to be the Advent version of Mariah Carey defrosting every November to shove my devotional in your face buuut… Advent begins tomorrow and this is my annual PSA that you can walk through the season with me.

✨!!! AND in an unexpected turn of events, my eBook is now available as A PROPER HOLD-IN-YOUR-HANDS PRINT BOOK!!!✨

You can get the eBook here and the print book here and would you maybe consider gifting this to a friend? Also, in the past there has been a group chat for people to join if they would like some company walking through the devotional and season together—I’m happy to set that up. Just shoot me a reply to this email. Or shoot me a reply for any reason at all.

I’m aware there are approximately one billion Advent resources out there and honestly, every time I return to this devotional I expect to feel absolutely scundered. I expect the words to feel immature or trite or land in the wrong places. I expect to eye roll at younger me—at her hope, at her faith, at her Jesus.

Yes, there will always be some writing I wish I could burn but actually, every single time I return to this devotional I feel myself collapsing into the arms of Jesus, maybe for the first time in a long time. Awaiting the Rising Sun is the product of an Advent year in my life, a year of waiting on bended knees, and I’m so glad I wrote it. It’s for the doubter and the depressed. The one limping to the end of the year with personal pain in one hand, and the public chaos of the world in the other. It’s for those of us struggling to believe we are really held in the palm of the promise keepers hand.

Let me be real: I want Christmas, not Advent. I want the celebration, not the tension of waiting. But waiting is part of our job description. Maybe we’re waiting on test results, or for our work to be noticed. For an apology, or for grief to sting a little less. For a relationship or for the fog of mental illness to lift. For a doctor to say, you’re going to have a baby or a friend to say, I see you. If we don’t know the ache of an empty womb, then we know the ache of an empty bed, an empty room, an empty mind, or the quiet ache of an empty Saturday evening.

Luke portrays the people of Israel as stranded and wandering in an empty, howling expanse of wilderness. The darkness is thick to touch. Rocks of fear trip their feet and the weight of hopelessness slows them down. A black sky presses down on them. They cannot bear to take one more step. But then, a glint of colour on the horizon. The dawn of hope—the Rising Sun.

As 2024 comes to a close, sometimes my heart is so sore and disillusioned I can’t even bear to look at the light. But I think that’s the beauty of Advent–no one is rushing us to get it together for December 25th. We live in an every day Advent, longing for Jesus to come back and make this bin-fire of a world right again. He has risen, friends. And someday we will rise with Him. But until then, we wait.

Okay, that’s enough from me.

All my love and gutsy hope,

Reb x

Share