He got there in the end

Today my son, Daniel, graduates from school – a happy time but also a surprisingly emotional time. Aisling is feeling a bit peeved that she’s the only school-going person in the house and, frankly, I’m a bit overwhelmed by it all. Considering the tremendous challenges of the last few years I didn’t expect to feel emotional about something like one of my kids finishing school. But it has definitely put an ache in my heart and I’m finding it hard to believe that both my sons are finished with formal school education.

Eight years ago our first encounter with secondary school started when our eldest son, Emmet, went in the big doors of his new school, so brave and so strong. He knew nobody at the school as he had attended a multi-denominational primary school in the city centre and the students from that school went in many directions to lots of different schools throughout Cork. The adjustment to a very formal structured school was difficult. In primary school the boys didn’t wear uniforms – their usual choice of clothing was a Metallica t-shirt and a pair of jeans. They called their teachers by their first names. It was fantastic. So when day one of secondary school arrived I remember feeling an ache in my heart for Emmet. The realisation dawned that , no matter how emotional you feel or how scared your child is, at 13 years old, you cannot run after him down the school corridor hugging him and sobbing “my baby, my baby”. Well you can, but your poor child will collapse from embarrassment.

Two years later Daniel started secondary school and Aisling started primary school. Every day Diarmuid drove all three of them to and from school in Ballincollig. Mornings were chaotic – books were lost, homework was half done, school ties were lost, notes were written about P.E. and fake foot sprains and near-fatal tummy bugs and life was busy but good.

Then in 2012 we lost Diarmuid. Outside of the unimaginable emotional trauma, the kids’ routines changed forever. It might seem like nothing, maybe just a little detail, but those mornings Diarmuid spent in the car with the three kids were a huge part of our lives. No grumpy teenage mood was ever impenetrable when he started with his foul-mouthed ignorant old man routine, pretend f-ing and blinding about modern life, fancy car drivers and newfangled technology. All three kids used to laugh, sometimes uncontrollably, at their Dad’s ‘car humour’.

Today feels like a tremendous loss, a huge emotional change yet again. Aisling is in a new school now, no longer in the school next to her brother’s one. And both boys are done with school. So I guess even though those funny (and sometimes frustrating) trips to school stopped three years ago, well it feels like they’re really gone for good now.

But back to the man of the moment: Daniel. I can hardly believe he’s at the end of 6^th year, about to embark on adult life - no more school uniform, no more so-sick-he’s-practically-got-Ebola notes to teachers. It’s a great time, no doubt about it. I still have nightmares about school and I would never go back there. But sometimes change is hard even when it’s a change for the better.

The important thing, and this is what I’ve been trying to say (!) is that despite all the obstacles, Daniel got there! He made it to the end of school and I am so proud of him.

His world changed forever in 2012 when his Dad died; in 2013 he was diagnosed with depression and in 2014 he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The trials, challenges, tears, illness, crises...... I can’t begin to explain the pain that boy has suffered. When you read about people being depressed, suicidal, hopeless, you might think it’s a bit far-fetched, you might think ‘for christ sake just get your shit together’, you might even think it’s simply a phase.  But I can assure you that’s not the case.

I always think of alcoholism like being possessed by someone else – a nasty evil person overtaking a good person and pushing them to make decisions they would never ordinarily make. Depression isn’t that much different. A good friend, Kerrie, told me I need to separate the depression from the person. Sound advice. The tears, panic, suicidal thoughts are not really coming from the person himself, they’re coming from the interloper, the depression. It’s speaking for them, saying ‘it’s too hard, it hurts too much’. But that real person is still in there, lost, but there. In the last 12 months I honestly thought, on more than one occasion, that I was going to  lose Daniel. Nights when the pain was too much to bear and he felt he just couldn’t go on – he wasn’t choosing to not go on, he was simply taken over by the depression monster and it was telling him there was no hope.

Despite it all, at some point in the midst of his psychiatric appointments, his medicated hazes, his sleepless nights, his pain, GP visits, counselling etc. he decided to take some control back. He had missed so much school after his Dad died and then even more school when he was in a state of hypomania (the ‘up’ side of bipolar) and later when the dip came (the depressive side of bipolar), there was a feeling that it was too late to catch up, too late to re-integrate into school and hang in there. He missed massive chunks of the curriculum. And missed many of the social sides of school too. We discussed him leaving school and other options. Honestly, we weren’t sure what to do. There was panic and there was tears.

But he did take control back. He chose to do his very best to catch up on work, study what he could and make a stab at the Leaving Cert. His exams start in two weeks. On top of that he broke his foot 3 days ago. So he’s now got a physical ailment to contend with. But, it’s a trivial matter compared to his previous challenges. I’m so proud of him and I don’t give a shit about CAO points. He wants college. He wants it badly. He is yearning to study music at third-level, yearning to make music his career and for that reason, I want my boy’s dreams to come true. But whether he gets 400 points or 4 points, he’s already a musician. And more than that, he’s already a phenomenal human being – with so much empathy, kindness, compassion and talent.

So Happy Graduation Day Daniel. You made it! I love you.

Funk Off

Sometimes you get into such a funk you don't even know you're in one.  You're buried so deep inside the funk's core it's like a massive wall of hollow meaningless nothing has enveloped you. Sometimes a new funk starts and this new funk gets stuck inside the original funk so even when you manage to claw your way out of this newer funk - after a lot of effort and positivity - you're greeted with more nothingness. You're disappointed and feeling less inspired than ever before and you think "Huh? All that effort. Is this all there is?". You don't realise there were multi-payers of funky nothingness going on. A Russian Doll of funk, if you will.

From 1998 to 2010/11 I was self-employed as a freelance graphic designer/typesetter. I didn't earn a fortune but I earned enough and I worked damn hard. I never made any big momentous decision to become self employed. It sort of just happened as we were made redundant en masse from a publishing company. I found one client, then another and it grew from there. And I was busy. I worked late nights, weekends, early mornings etc. etc. Whatever had to be done. Then came the recession and it all sort of trickled away at such a slow rate I didn't see it as a big problem. Oh one magazine contract is gone? Well, not to worry, I have plenty more. Too much, in fact, so the loss of one is probably a good thing. Oh, they can't afford to have that newsletter done? Hmmm, alright, I can replace that with something else. And so on until one day I was walking through town, having just had a call from a client to say they could no longer afford  to publish a newsletter they'd had going for years. I finished the call, got a funny feeling over me and suddenly thought "jesus I think I'm unemployed".

I wanted headlines in the newspaper, newsflashes, sympathy, going away parties, a gold watch, tears, hugs, drama! But when you're a freelancing sole trader, well, it's just you, you carry the good and the bad alone. There wasn't a moment where I could ring a friend and say "I have bad news, I just got laid off" or "the company I work for has gone bust". It was too gradual for it to have any serious meaning to anyone else. A rough few months followed of financial chaos. During this time we were also reeling from my brother's sudden death in late '09. So grief, unemployment and financial stress were wrapped into one package of super humongous stinkin' shittiness. Then Diarmuid was laid off again. Oh!! So we start 2011 with an attitude of "well it can't get any worse, we'll cut way way back to the basics and surely in a few months I'll get new contracts and things will pick up". But that's not how it went. Because in a few months Diarmuid was diagnosed with cancer and then he died. So now I had unemployment, financial stress, my brother's death, Diarmuid's cancer diagnosis (nice Christmas gift that was), widowhood and 3 grieving children. Uh, hello? How did I get here?

So you see buried within the single-parenting stress funk is a grief funk and within that is a joblessness funk and within that....... you get my meaning.

Then you wake up one day and you think "hang on, I used to do a job that I was good at, a job I would've resurrected had its loss not been immediately followed by a series of crises. Did I dream it? All those skills and all those years of serious hard work?" No. Today is the day I woke up. I want to work again and use those skills. It's taken 3 years to get around to resurrecting this. But I still have the skills and the need and the ambition. So look out world. I'm back. And I'm ready to um typeset.