I Found My Tribe

by Ruth Fitzmaurice

  Don’t worry, Jack, please don’t worry. Today I cried for Jack. For his worry about becoming his dad’s nurse. For the people who casually championed that seed in his head. For the hug of relief he wrapped around me. Embrace the stars, Jack. Worriers can become warriors. The moon and the stars come gift-wrapped in darkness. Embrace them all. Run with all your heart and everything will be OK.

  Lost Things

  Lost shoes are a permanent problem in our home. ‘It’s gone! It’s just GONE!’ wails Raife, running around the house. He limps into the kitchen with a single secure foot and one sorry-looking exposed sock. My children are wildly dramatic about missing footwear. Shoes are not misplaced. They are gone for ever. Most mornings find us engaging our detective brains in the greatest hunt of all time. The incredible mystery of the missing shoe.

  I am sitting in my car in an underground shopping centre, feeling very out of control. I’m not sure what caused this feeling. There are at least ten, which means, minus exaggeration, five reasons why I am having some kind of breakdown. I’m not sure if it is a breakdown, but I can’t breathe right, eat right, my hands are numb and waves of nauseating panic ripple like a tide through my day.

  On good days, Simon creates treasure hunts on his computer. Our kids love a good mystery. We print off his rhyming clues and giddy nurses hide them around the house. The final prize of books, comics or chocolate bars could be hidden in the garden shed or buried in a flower pot. I draw the line at hiding prizes up the chimney.

  This is fun.

  This is the place you put your bum.

  On the fish.

  So make a wish.

  Don’t do a poo.

  And see if you can find the clue.

  Write it down, Ruth; tease it out and write it down. I am hoping if I eloquently articulate my breakdown, it will cease to be one. I won’t give in to this uncontrollable urge to throw my phone out the window, drive to the Midlands, book into a hotel and hide, sleep, cry under a duvet until someone finds me there and politely asks me to leave. All I can find to write with in this messy car is a blunt fat child’s pencil which means that at least I can rub out the words.

  We place imaginary Sherlock deerstalkers on our heads each morning in the hunt for lost shoes. ‘A prize for whoever finds the shoe!’ I yell, in a screaming mother holler because I am lacking an actual referee whistle. Five eager Watsons scramble under beds and lift couch cushions with the prospect of prize jelly babies before school.

  Basil, rosemary and chives.

  Momma grows these

  to make dinners come alive.

  Out with the butterflies and birds.

  The treasure is in the herbs!

  This may seem far-fetched, but parked in the shiny underground car park, I crawled into the back of the car and covered myself in the dog’s blanket. I would have slept too, only a coldness was seeping into my bones, particularly at the gap between my jeans and an inadequately warm T-shirt top.

  Raife of the lost shoe stands bereft with his hands in the air. It’s time to sweeten his soul and quell disaster. ‘Let’s think,’ I soothe. We retrace his rubber-soled steps before they became bedraggled socks. ‘It’s GONE,’ he insists, like a mighty death has occurred.

  ‘Counting up my demons,’ sings Chris Martin on the car radio and I couldn’t agree more. Write the demons down and they cease to have power. Five reasons for a breakdown stack snuggly one on top of the other. Simon can’t move. That’s OK. Twenty-four hour nurses alternate efficiency, kindness, mess, insanity, privacy theft, bin savagery, toilet hogging, night footsteps, chatty voices and they’re EVERYWHERE. Easy peasy. The carers join them drinking lots of tea. Fine. Five beautiful children love, scream, laugh and plead with me every single day. Lovely. A basset hound of increasingly bad attitude growls with a sore skin condition, lives slave to his nose, steals food from tables and snaps when I try and move him. I can handle it.

  None of these things are causing my breakdown. These things are easy compared to one impossible thing. My dad has cancer and is losing his hair. It’s white now and stubbly where once it was dark and full. He is a snow-white fox with bone marrow cancer. If he loses those big eyebrows framing his handsome face, I will die. This is it. This is the one thing that has broken me.

  I make it out of the car and walk to a bright, busy coffee shop. I sit alone and contemplate lost things. Suddenly the bustle of this place has a swirly, surreal timbre like underwater sounds. I am drowning underwater, swimming breathless with a shoal of colourful fish. Outwardly I am a woman sitting alone mechanically lifting her coffee cup. My face must look a bit freaky, I consider, but nobody glancing has recoiled in horror yet.

  Perhaps, I wonder, if the five other reasons weren’t stacked so high, I could be a brave daughter in the face of my dad’s cancer. I could take it all on and do things. I could speak in a fast voice and walk myself ragged up the solid steps of sickness. I watch my mother do all of this and she is brilliant. I watch her nostalgically like a wise eighty-year-old woman watches the young. Bless ’em.

  I did all of this before. I’ve walked each step already. I am an old woman when I look at my mother. I admire fondly the process she is going through. Where I live now is somewhere outside that process. I miss being that wife. I miss it like breathing right or waking in the morning with the ease of a new day. I sit in my rocking chair, gaze down my bifocals and squint at her with love and envy. I envy her because cancer has a plan of action in a normal land. MND is a medical shoulder-shrug in this batshit crazy town.

  The shoe was found today, wedged under the Millennium Falcon. Arden the Victorious holds the shoe aloft. We cheer. The school run is back on track. A triumphant hand stretches out for jelly babies and four more hands follow suit. My mother always had stashes of jellies and treats hidden away for emergencies and our house is no different. If they’re not hunting for shoes, the kids are happily plotting how to raid my secret stash.

  This is new.

  It holds the food.

  Momma loves it.

  And if she’s in the mood.

  She might give you a cold treat from here.

  It also holds my beer.

  So wear your mittens and be bold.

  This clue is in the cold.

  Is there a point at which humans break? Losing your mind might feel like a child’s lost shoe. ‘It’s just GONE,’ I will wail. I’ve been here before and my breakdown was really the build-up to a good cry. Each time I think, here we go, my sanity is leaving me and what will it feel like? Will I dribble and sit on a hard mattress among white walls? Will I smile at my kids as I float away? Will I walk for miles, barefoot until my feet bleed and will they track me down through credit card transactions?

  On bad days Simon sleeps a lot and struggles to connect. We linger at the bedroom door, listening for signs of life. He is trying his best, but not every day is made of rhyming clues. I wonder if Michelle ever feels like this? Some days my man is mostly lost to me. We are left with the architecture and missing furniture. On bad days I hesitate in empty hallways and wonder if we should wake him.

  The truth is that ease got lost a long time ago. Ease is like the easily misplaced shoe. I can survive without ease and spend mornings searching for it. I can drink too much coffee, keep busy, alternate cold swims and runs with too much red wine and cheesy nachos. If ease can go astray so efficiently, I wonder, where is my breaking point?

  You found me! Well done!

  Are you having fun?

  The next clue is not at all scary,

  it’s in the bed of one of the fat fairies!

  This could be the greatest detective mystery of all time. What happens if the second shoe is sanity and it gets stolen too? What then? It’s bloody lucky that shoes never seem to go missing in pairs. Dear God, give this woman a jelly baby. Are we there yet? Here we go. I leave my empty coffee cup on the counter and head to the newsagent’s to buy a pen.

  Wolf or Panda

  ‘Would you rather be poor and
everyone loves you, or really rich and everybody hates you?’ My boys are full of critical questions. They must be considered carefully and answered instantly. ‘Just answer the question, Momma, quick!’

  ‘Would you rather die by a great white shark or live like a vampire?’

  ‘Dying by a shark would be better because it’s quick,’ reasons Arden sagely. The others grumble their agreement. ‘What do you think, Momma?’

  ‘What, huh?’ I falter, spinning three steaming pots on the stovetop simultaneously.

  ‘Which would you rather be, Momma, a wolf or a panda?’ demands Raife. ‘Pick one!’ I think of a large veggie panda chewing on bamboo all day. ‘Oh a panda, definitely,’ I reply.

  ‘Well, Momma?’ berates Raife with a tongue click, ‘the truth is that being a panda is actually kind of stressful. If a mother panda has more than one baby she has to choose one and leave the other little pink babies to die. Then the father panda leaves every time and she has do everything by herself.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I mutter, ‘and I just thought pandas were cute hippies.’

  ‘Wolves, though,’ continues Raife, ‘will only hurt you if they’re threatened. When a wolf family grows and grows they never break apart, they stay together for ever and ever till they’re dead’.

  ‘You got all this from kids’ National Geographic?’ I marvel. ‘Wow, that’s deep stuff’.

  ‘I told you, I have a golden brain,’ he shrugs, snatching the sauce spoon for a lick.

  Sea swimming does wonders for your inhibitions. For the first few weeks I cowered self-consciously on the cove steps. My baby-battered body felt exposed. These days we shed clothes like discarded sweet wrappers. The packaging is incidental. We climb out of the water like mermaid goddesses. Cold water gives us new skin.

  Simon is shooting his film, My Name is Emily. I look at him proudly. He inhabits a magical state of mind. No longer the man in the bed, he is the first film director with MND to ever make a feature film using an eye gaze computer. He draws up deep resources and burns the brightest. Producers carefully construct the schedule around half-days for him, just in case. Nobody could have anticipated the fire in him. He is on set every day from dawn till dusk.

  I sneak a look at Raife’s magazine. Wolves look like loners and yet they are loyal to the death. One of their greatest strengths is strong emotional attachments to others. Raife, I’ve changed my mind. My eyes are increasingly intense and wolflike. I crave meat and my own company. I am living a wolf’s life. Wolves cannot be domesticated. My messy house can vouch for that. MND has cultivated a certain wolfishness. I don’t want to be a stressed-out panda, feeling abandoned, chewing bamboo all day. Forget endangered and tragic, I won’t dangle near extinction. Little Red Riding Hood was such a little idiot. Don’t mess with me. I want to be a wolf.

  Simon is fully charged and lovesick at work. He lives in that creative place many of us crave. Commitment issues prevent most of us from lingering there long enough. Fear and self-consciousness lock us out. Simon’s focus is unshakeable. Find a way in and you are dragged towards this place and nowhere else. It pulls you closer to yourself and the reason you exist at all. He is off making a movie and I am so damn happy for him. I look at his empty bed and am inspired to use this time constructively. I decide to get naked as often as possible.

  ‘In the nip! We’re in the nip!’ my children shout as bare bottoms jiggle in the hallway. I envy them because I detest locked doors. Demure disrobing is demanded of me in my very public house. Simon and nurses leave for the film set every morning in a hub of activity. The house now settles into different sounds. Bathroom doors stay open. Oh, the luxury of a hot shower with doors thrown wide and a knickers & bra trail mapping the floor. I join the naked pack running up and down the hall. ‘Momma’s in the nip too!’ they squeal. Friends call on the phone and they know. ‘You’re naked, aren’t you?’ they sigh. ‘Oh yes,’ I beam. We steer clear of Skype and Facetime.

  Vans, tents and cables collect at Greystones South Beach on a soft Irish morning. It’s one of those wonky days when the rain seems to fall skywards. Drizzle rises under umbrellas and soaks you from the ground up. Simon is shooting his film all around Wicklow and we often play Spot the Catering Van in between school runs. Today is a special day. Simon sits in his director’s tent, wrapped up and full of intent, glaring hungrily at the camera monitor. One hundred extras shuffle around the beach in bathrobes, nervously sipping hot soup. Concealed by misty rain clouds, there’s still no hiding that this is a public beach.

  Michelle tells us stories about past swims with Galen. The Forty Foot is a popular swimming spot in Dublin. One man in his sixties used to star-jump naked before diving in. Understandably, this image has stayed with Michelle. He was very hairy, she says. He would star-jump for a good ten minutes. Brief silence descends on Ladies’ Cove as we all take room to contemplate the idea of this man properly.

  Our nurse, Marian, gives me a strange-looking lamp as a present. It is a large clump of rock with a light inside. ‘It’s a salt lamp,’ she explains. ‘They absorb all the bad energy in your house.’ The salt rock glows bright orange when the light turns on. It has a cosy hearth glow. Bad energy is a baffling mystery, but it’s worth a try. Orange is the colour of home and I love it.

  The wind whispers tales of sweet abandon at the cove. We all listen. An old lady in flowing robes gently deposits an ancient ghetto blaster on the stones. Tin-can tribal music warbles across the rocks. She proceeds to dance around it, arms circling the air in a crazy old lady dance. The children prowl closer. ‘She doesn’t even see us!’ they chuckle. ‘She’s mad as a brush,’ I mutter. I ponder the freedom of hairy naked man and the dancing lady. I could star-jump stark naked in my eighties, boobs and wobbly bits bouncing wildly, happy in my own skin, hoping I don’t have a bad hip. Could I go there? Never say never.

  There are red faces one day as my father-in-law forgets Simon is out on the film set. He uses his key to let himself in. I have just left the shower, towelless and singing loudly. Songs turn to screams and the slap of wet, mortified retreating footsteps. After that, he always knocks first.

  On the My Name Is Emily film shoot, exhibitionists, fellow MND sufferers, fundraisers, local friends and random lunatics have all turned out at South Beach to support Simon. They line up facing the sea and remove their robes. Laughter ripples through the air as men and women, of every shape and size, huddle together bollock naked. Actor Michael Smiley is out front. He’s in the nip with a glint in his eye. A rubber codpiece preserves some modesty. The cameras roll and he yells to the crowd, ‘This is who we are! COME ON!’ His bare bum races towards the water and a blur of one hundred naked bottoms follows. A tribal roar rises up. Every film should have one massive nude sea shot. Safe on the promenade in raingear, we watch and get goosebumps. It’s a bit like a beach-themed Braveheart.

  The cameras roll for just one take and I struggle to take it all in. Like most amazing sights it is unreal and dreamlike. We avert our eyes respectfully, as the naked extras return up the beach. Full frontals swing ferociously as legs clamber back up the sand. Running on dry sand never looked so ungainly. The boys’ tennis coach, a proper lady in her sixties, and a friendly mum from the school gates, both greet me glowingly, once back in their bathrobes. ‘Would Jack like to come on a playdate tomorrow?’ asks the mum politely. The world has gone wonderfully mental I think as I nod yes. I am utterly speechless. Laughing crying tears gather in my eyes. The power of this lot hums louder than the catering generators. They are all high as kites. One hundred naked people on Greystones beach is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

  Marian phones me on one of her nights off. Her voice is filled with urgency. ‘It’s a full moon, Ruth,’ she says briskly. ‘Now listen carefully. The salt lamp I gave you. Get it. You need to wrap the plug in clingfilm and then put it outside. I’m putting mine on the grass to keep it grounded, but your table outside will do fine.’ I shush the kids with an arm wave. ‘Did you hear all of tha
t?’ she demands.

  ‘Salt lamp, clingfilm, table outside,’ I repeat. ‘Dare I ask why?’

  ‘The salt lamp is absorbing all the bad energy in your house. Leaving it overnight under the full moon empties it out again.’

  ‘I’d say it’s pretty full, all right,’ I grin. Marian’s laugh is like a bell. ‘I know you think I’m mad, but in pagan times people used to lie naked under the full moon to absorb its energy. The Harvest Moon especially.’

  ‘Marian, you are completely nuts and I love you. I’ll do it, but only if we make a deal. Let’s lie naked under the next Harvest Moon, because that sounds like a fun night.’

  ‘You could swim naked under the Harvest Moon,’ giggles Marian: ‘that sounds more your type of night.’

  I carefully clingfilm my salt lamp and leave it outside. The moon is massive and cut like a dish. I smile and moongaze for some sweet moments. A naked full moon swim. What a wonderful idea. I want to tell my Tragic Wives, Michelle and Aifric. Let’s moon swim to empty out our souls.

  Endangered lives have a stressed-out panda shape. Full moon swims fall violently out of my head one carelessly horrible day. I get a call from the hospital about a car accident. Marian has crashed and she is broken.

  Sea Glass

  We live our lives in fragments and that’s just the way it is. Clocks circling time have little meaning for me. From days and months to moments, fragments of time swing solely between good and bad. I never dare presume, beyond a hunch, what is coming next.

  Sadie is standing in front of our wedding photograph, sobbing her little heart out. ‘Why didn’t I go to the wedding?’ she weeps. ‘Why can’t Dadda talk or walk? Is he sick? Is Dadda OK? Will he stay with us for ever?’ Oh no and here we go, screams my brain. I had wondered if this day would come. ‘Why can’t he go back to the old Dadda who walked and talked? Was that just the olden days?’ I grab her tiny body in a bear hug. Whispering into wet cheeks, I wish I was more prepared. Words curdle to cheesiness in such moments. ‘He’s still the same Dadda in his heart and he loves you so much,’ I offer. ‘Why can’t the old Dadda come OUT of his heart? she demands, crushing my cartoon words. Toddler logic easily decimates Disney platitudes.