Notes Of An Uninteresting Event

My husband sent me an Instagram Reel of someone sharing a conversation with their mother. They said, “We never worried about you. You always knew how to take care of yourself.”

The person continued, “What sounds like pride also feels like loneliness. It means no one ever really looked closely or wondered if the strong one was tired. I learned to carry the weight so well that no one thought to help me set it down. Maybe that’s the silent cost of being capable: you stop being seen as someone who also needs softness. You become the safe place for everyone, but never quite have one of your own. In that moment, I realised strength had been my survival, but it had also been my isolation.”

This hit me because lately I’ve being feeling like I’m being forgotten when others in my family, especially, aren’t because I can take care of myself.

For the past couple of years, we’ve had an annual tradition of visiting our married friend’s house for New Year’s. Before the clock strikes twelve, we’d play a few games on Jackbox.tv. It was a lovely tradition where we’d all draw on our phones, depending on the game. The hilarious results of trying to decipher each other’s really bad renditions of what the game asked us to depict were priceless. I’d often fail miserably at illustrating a phrase, person, or place, but that was the fun of the game. I say it was a lovey tradition because, sadly, our friends are no longer together. My husband and I thought our duo would be forever, but they’re in the process of parting ways. On a recent trip to England, we talked about it, and we were both sad, but also that we were losing close friends we’d cherished for so long. I guess time will tell how their journey ahead pans out, but I’ll miss playing those silly games together and then going up the nearest hill to see all the New Years fireworks ignite across the city they lived in.

Last evening, as I sat in my car waiting for the light to change on the way to my parents’ house, I caught sight of a familiar movement in the sky. Blackbirds, hundreds of them, flying over the German’s house. It’s something I grew up with, a late-summer ritual when school had just started back, the evenings light fading stirring that colony in the woods. The sky would be full of them over my parent’s house.

The German’s house was always a landmark, though I don’t think any of us really knew much about it. An old house tucked into the small woods, bounded by housing estates, a petrol station, and the L&N Supermarket (its name growing up and now a SuperValu). We called it the German’s house because, or so I was told, a German family once lived there or still do.

Even now, with so much changed, that sight feels like stepping back into the rhythm of my childhood.

With our city house going ‘Sale Agreed’, the lead up to today meant the past few weeks have been incredibly hectic! The house underwent a thorough cleaning, decluttering, and was painted, fixed, and more. On top of all that, we faced a roof leak just before the estate agents photographer was scheduled to take photos of the house for advertising. We also had to replace the rusted, beyond repair gas boiler. Amidst all these renovations and financial outpouring, we celebrated two significant birthdays for our dads: one at 70 and the other at 60. The latter necessitated a quick trip to England to celebrate. My husband, who’s just started learning to drive, needed to find his own car before we moved to the country house. So, in addition to our regular trips to the hardware store, we visited car dealerships and explored secondhand car websites to find the right car for him. After some disagreements, he finally bought the car he wanted and picked it up last Saturday. At least that ordeal won’t need to be repeated for a few years (^_^).

In the meantime, we’ve settled into our country house, but we’ll officially move down this weekend. We’ll move the rest of our belongings when we hire a moving van to transport the remaining furniture from our city house. While we wait for the sale of our city house to complete, we’ll start finishing that new house, which needs a lot of work, but at least we’re living there now. It’s so beautiful there! And I haven’t even mentioned how we’re progressing with our surrogacy journey, which we’ve also been quietly working on in the background. There’s some hope that it might soon come to fruition. Amidst all these changes, last week, we received devastating news from a close friend. Her sister, who was around my age, married with three young children, had been battling cancer for over a year, coinciding with my mother’s health struggles. Tragically, she passed away. The news came as a shock to my husband and me after the hectic few weeks we had endured. I held on for a bit longer when I hugged our devastated friend at her sister’s funeral. Since then, I can’t help but think about my mom every day, hoping that she’ll recover from her latest cancer diagnosis and pull through.

We haven’t officially declared it a victory yet, but after weeks of meticulous cleaning, decluttering, moving, painting, fixing, and more, we received a promising offer for our city house last Friday. We accepted it, and today, it was officially marked as ‘Sale Agreed.’ This was always part of our plan: to sell the city house once we’ve renovated our country house. With the looming trade war and other factors, I’m hopeful that the sale will proceed swiftly. I purchased the city house fourteen years ago, and my now-husband lived there for ten of those years with me. As one chapter closes, we embark on a new adventure in the countryside, in a house four times the size to accommodate hopefully new members to our family. Fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly with the sale. Exciting times ahead!

During Mental Health Awareness Month, which runs through October, there is a Mindful Minute Challenge run at work that gives €Job& employees a chance to learn about and practice mindfulness meditation using the Happier - Meditation app.

I’ve signed up for the challenge over the last few years and found meditating via the app or using the Mindful app on my Apple Watch to do some breathing exercises to be really helpful. While browsing through the meditations last week, I found one title that was particularly triggering for me. The title of the meditation was “Loneliness and Connection,” and it got me contemplating about how I’ve been feeling over the last few years. The opening paragraph of the meditation, quoted below, contained the phrase that I think I was looking for to help me understand some of my thoughts.

Quote:There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. Solitude is an experience of being alone and feeling connected to oneself. Loneliness is the absence of connection altogether. It’s ironic but sometimes we can feel the loneliest when we’re around others. It’s hard to be around friends or loved ones and miss the connection and belonging we want.

my.happierapp.com/link/cont…

With everything that’s been going on recently—from buying a new house to my job to our journey to begin a family, to a friend and my grandmother passing away a few years ago, and lately my mum’s cancer diagnosis and treatment—I’ve been wanting to talk to somebody, as I recognise that these events have been affecting me a lot. Beginning to concede that my attempts to resolve it on my own might not be working. I have very few friends, so not many with whom I feel connected with which is contributing to my feelings of loneliness, and the phrase from the meditation—“Loneliness is the absence of connection altogether”—really resonated with me.

I hope these realisations will help me take the step to reach out and talk to someone, a professional. My husband is really supportive but I’d really like to connect with friends, both old and new, and open up about what’s on my mind.

(Thanks for your practice)

We got a surprise last week when an article appeared in the local newspaper, the Echo, ‘Cork city factory had its own fire brigade’ mentioning our late grandfather. He had worked at the Harrington’s paint factory on the Commons Road in Blackpool, Cork, as an engineer and a fire officer. With this month marking the 20th anniversary of his passing in 2004, it was a joy for us, his family, to read an article about him in ‘da paper’. The author, Pat Poland, was, according to the feature, 18 years old when he did his first real “summer job” in the factory and was introduced to Jack Manning. He detailed many of the stories we’d heard growing up, like when my grandfather along with the Harrington’s team fought a fire at the old Opera House in Cork on December 12th 1955, which was the night my mother was born and the big Sutton’s fire on the South Mall. The author had interviewed my grandfather weeks before he passed away and noted how indebted to him he was for his insights into the origins and development of the Harrington and Goodlass Wall (HGW) Works Fire Brigade. Those stories helped Pat write a book accounting his time with Harrington’s fire team and later his job at the Cork Fire Brigade.

www.echolive.ie/corklives…

Jack Manning is forth from the right in the white lab coat and dark rimmed glasses

Last week, we called round to some friends house whom we collectively as a group all hadn’t caught up with each other for almost three years, although we would have seen each separately in passing here and there in that time. They’ve been super busy with their growing family, and we’ve been doing our own thing too, so it was great that we finally got to meet after so long. During our long conversation about everything and anything, our friend mentioned he was going to Riyadh in a few weeks, the capital of Saudi Arabia, for two weeks to work. Knowing that I lived in Al Khobar, a city on the eastern coast, over twenty years ago, he asked what I thought of the place. I didn’t have much to say because it’s been so long, and the place is probably unrecognisable from when I was there all those years ago. But it did get me thinking about me sitting in the old terminal at Cork Airport with my family in the very early morning around the end of October back in 2001, waiting to board a flight to Gatwick and on to Dammam International Airport in Al Khobar to begin work experience with an Irish-Saudi engineering company as a junior engineer. It feels like it was a different life, and in some ways it was because it was so long ago.

For context, I had finished my second year in an engineering course at a local college, and my third year required work experience. Through my mum’s friend, who was acquainted with a couple they had met while working in Saudi Arabia, I was introduced to a manager at an Irish engineering company that operated over there. Following an interview in their Irish office, I was offered the placement as part of my work experience abroad in Al Khobar. Then 9/11 happened, and I didn’t hear anything for a few weeks until the middle of October when I received my travel details. So, I, a twenty-year-old, moved from my parents' house to what I described at the time as “it’s like Ireland but the opposite; there’s sand instead of grass, sun instead of rain,” and so on. Thus started my experience and adventure of living far from home in a foreign country.

Day-to-day life was incredibly different from what I was used to back home, and living in an apartment with a roommate who was an alcoholic and recently divorced wasn’t something I was capable of understanding at that time. It was always hot and working in a fast-paced office environment with an Irish ‘expat’ boss who would regularly shout at his multinational staff definitely taught me a lesson on how not to engage with people. The majority of the food, from what I remember, was imported from America due to the presence of a large compound in the city with thousands of Americans working at the major oil company, Saudi Aramco. My food palate wasn’t as developed as it is now, so none of the local food from the region—dates, hummus, falafel, and spicy curries—appealed to me. Looking back, it is my one regret because I’d eat it all now. Big American burgers with fries, Domino’s pizzas, and heavy caloric foods were what I ate, and my twenty-year-old body’s metabolism could only work for so long to keep me skinny.

Having not lived away from home during college and being very sheltered up until that point in my life, the freedom of living on my own was amazing, albeit accompanied by bouts of loneliness. A few journal entries that I’ve kept were about missing home and trying to fit in with the way of life there. Visits to downtown Al Khobar and the Souk helped me better experience the Saudi culture instead of the typical American-style shopping experience at the Al Rashid Mall. As the months went by and into 2002, I became more confident and began enjoying my life there. The company I worked for had moved me into a new compound, where I lived with two guys around my age. I have photos of the many parties where we got to meet other migrants from all across the world who came to Saudi Arabia to work. It was great, but unfortunately it changed for me following the tragic death in a horrific car accident of my friend and roommate. He and the front seat passenger died in a head on collision, and the back seat passenger lived. It was the scariest thing to ever experienced and pushed me to want to go back home. I didn’t want to be there anymore and being back in Ireland for his funeral in his home village so soon after he died, I knew I wasn’t going to stay.

Looking back at my time living as an Irishman in Al Khobar, I know that I wasn’t ready for it. The tragedy of my friend’s death had a lasting effect, and even if it hadn’t happened, I still think I wasn’t ready to live on my own. I was too young, naive, and sheltered. Would I go back now? No. It’s not a place I would ever want to return to, but during my time there, I did have my first experience of freedom within the bubble created for me by the confines of where I lived and who I worked for, so I’m not too regretful about my time there.

I was on a walk with my husband the other night, and we started a conversation about school debs. As we were chatting, it dawned on me that this month marked 25 years since my own secondary school debs back in 1999. Besides the rapid passing of time and saying, “Jesus, that’s not twenty-five years, is it?” when we got home, I rifled through my phone to find any photos and discovered some that I had scanned years ago. Looking through the photos, I can remember bits of the day and night—probably more than others, I’d say—because I didn’t consume alcohol at the time (I was a teetotaller well into my thirties). The vast majority of the people I haven’t seen or heard from to this day; one is a friend I keep in touch with via Instagram, two I see on TV (a news correspondent and a sitting senator), and one woman is the editor-in-chief at a multinational online women’s magazine. I don’t really know much about where the rest of them ended up, except for those few.

Anyway, it was held in the old Jury’s Hotel on the Western Road; the River Lee Hotel and adjacent apartments are in its place today. The whole lead-up to it, days before, was very much like an American high school prom: who you were going to ask, what suit to wear, etc. Being a very closeted gay teen at the time, and with my school, let alone the entire country, not being as progressive as it is these days, I asked my friend, whom I had known since we were four years old, to be my date. She was incredibly awesome to say yes and looked amazing on the day. The suit I rented was from either Morley’s by the Queen’s Old Castle or Black Tie at the other end of Patrick’s Street. I had never worn a three-piece suit in my life, and as a skinny just turned 18-year-old with no shoulders, it fit fine.

It was such an event that all our family, friends, and neighbours gathered to see us off. When we arrived at the venue, there was a photo booth in the reception for couple photos, which I think I still have in a box somewhere. We were then ushered into one of the big ballrooms of the hotel to take our seats, but before any food was served, we had a big group photo taken of around 130 people from our year. I think it was one of the larger years to come through the school at the time, and still, a few people were missing from the debs. Mushroom soup was the starter, I remember that and still cannot understand why it would ever be served as the only option on the evening.

I was telling Harry when we were talking about it that, following the dancing and “Rock the Boat” at the hotel, a group of us went to the Coliseum for some bowling well into the early morning, and then we all grabbed a taxi to the airport to have breakfast in the old terminal. I had forgotten about that last bit, and he said you can’t do that anymore with the restaurant being after security. It’s nice to talk about and look back on that time in my life, wondering where everyone might be and funnily when I told my parents about it yesterday, the first thing my mother said was, “Jesus, that’s not twenty-five years, is it?” ^^