how are you kind to yourself

I wrote this time last year about the first week of the school holidays - the relentless boredom and overwhelm of it.

I set off this year, determined to have learned from last year. From the off, I booked the 6 year old into the math camp we’d scrambled to book at the last minute last year and this year she was going for the full day. Dave and I had been chatting about American sleep away camp and how wild it seems to send an 8 year old away for 5 weeks. But the moment the words were out of my mouth, I said “Well, I suppose it depends on the child. I bet our eldest would love it”. On the one block walk to her 6 hour camp the first day, I mentioned the concept of sleep away camp to her and she immediately said she would LOVE a break from her family and keeps asking excitedly when she can go. Her younger sister remains resolutely the opposite in disposition and when I asked her if she wanted to go to the math camp one street over, along with her sister and two of her friends, she said “No thank you, I’ll stay with you”. Aaand she did.

We had a cracking first week. Despite the temperatures being the wrong side of one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, we were more than surviving. The camp got us up and out, then the 5 year old and I would run errands! We went to the bank, the Post Office, UPS. We met Dave for lunch. We went for playdates in the Hippo Playground and the Adventure Playground. We went for coffee and cake in the new cake shop that opened up in the space that for over a year, had nothing but pictures of cake in the window and for over a year, as we passed it every day, the 5 year old would say to me “What cake do you pick today mom?” and we’d pick one of the four cakes in the picture and today we got to eat them in real life!! The cake shop was Lady M at Colombus Circle and the 5 year old kept saying “this place is so romantic” and it was:

I enjoyed the paring back of our schedule which had been chock-full during the school year. It felt like we were on holiday. We’d slowed down enough to have time to do things like wander into the stationery shop the kids always asked to go into but to which I always said “No, we have to get to gymnastics!” or “C’mon, we have to get home for dinner”

The overwhelm crept in though, it did.

Along with minding the 5 year old from the moment she wakes (6:40) till when she goes to sleep (8:30), I’m also trying to pack up an entire apartment, arrange a transatlantic move and buy a house from abroad ahahahaha. The hours in the day, as you can see, are limited. I try to get up early to get stuff done but she gets up early too and climbs into my lap. “I’m up early to do this stuff so I can have all day with you but I do need to do it so can you go watch TV?” I’d say to her in the morning. In theory, I have the evenings too but by that time that rolls round, I’ve already put in a 14 hour shift in a heatwave, so it just never happens.

Moving house is famously one of the most stressful things you can do but it’s also one of those things that makes me wonder: OK, but what is so stressful about it? I’m asking myself this right now, even though I’m right in the thick of it and stressed out of my mind.

So what jobs did I even have to do? Well, first off, write this weekly newsletter to you, my beloved readers. Then: divest ourselves of all of our possessions via local Facebook groups and arrange the delivery and collection of every item like I’m running a small business. Cancel our subscriptions, cancel our memberships, pay the surveyor, arrange a valuer, update the estate agents, chase the solicitor, chase the mortgage broker, send a hamper to the couple that bought our house, search for temporary accommodation in Ireland, book the movers.

Booking the movers was the hardest job because we contacted international movers who had to liaise with their New York movers and then come back to us. We had to line their available dates up with the (very few) available moving slots our building makes you reserve and finally the movers came back to say their only available dates were dates after our lease ended so I had to add begging the landlord to extend our lease as well as changing our flights to the to-do list I was trying to fit into the hour of 6 and 7am. There were too many parties and too many emails and it was all too slow. Call me old fashioned but I just wanted to get everyone on the phone and say “OK can we check our diaries, what works for you?”.

When the moving dates finally aligned, I felt I reclaimed my sanity which had definitely been on leave for a period of 36 to 48 hours.

I swore after we moved from Dublin to New York that I’d learned some lessons which I’d implement on the move home. One, was that I wouldn’t put so much effort into packing. I’d spent months in Dublin decluttering the house but it was a never ending job and once the professional movers arrived, they commented that it was the most organised house they’d ever seen and instead of taking that as a compliment, I felt like a total mug who had done their job for them. I vowed this time I would start clearing and packing only two weeks before and that I wouldn’t pack too much as the movers do it anyway. But when you’re not packing furniture and you’re flat out getting rid of bookshelves and toy storage units, you need somewhere to put the books and the toys in the meantime and a moving box seems as good a place as any, so really, I was packing too.

The other lesson I swore I’d learned coming this way is that I wouldn’t be so hard on myself going back. I’d remember that an international move, buying/selling a house ..all while being full time with kids is hard. It is so hard!!! Go easy on yourself!!!

But it’s so hard to go easy on yourself in the moment!! It’s only weeks or months later when you realise how much you were doing that you wished you’d been kinder to yourself and I completely forgot. I was so hard on myself. I felt, thought and believed at most moments on those busy days, that I was not just a terrible mother but the worst one ever.

I tried to keep all the admin to the almost non existent early morning hours but on the bus to the Hippo playground one day, the 5 year old (because she is of the generation that is not only hyper emotionally aware but also extremely assertive) said to me: “Can you please apologise for being frustrated with me?”. I put my phone down and said “You’re right. I’m sorry, I was frustrated with something on my phone, I’m sorry I was frustrated with you”. What I’d been trying to do was book us accommodation in Dublin and newsflash! accommodation in Dublin of any kind is really hard to come by and also really fecking expensive!! Anyway anyway anyway, I tried not to be hard on myself but on one playground playdate, with a friend I not only really like but also greatly admire, I realised as we were sitting and chatting, that tears had sprung to my eyes because as I looked at her 3 year old daughter, I was thinking how lucky she was to have such a great mom. My eyes were properly starting to water - completely out of the blue - and I stuck my head down my t-shirt and tried to wipe the tears away. I had a story about allergies all ready to go if I was asked.

The not going hard on myself was not going to plan.

I met up with another friend with her kids and thought, she’s so easygoing, patient and loving…not like me. I witnessed another mother give her kid one chocolate blueberry as an after dinner treat (a dinner I’d let my kids eat ice-creams on the way to) and I thought oh she’s such a conscientious mother - where does that leave me? A mother that lets her kids do everything and still loses the rag?

I’ve learned a new lesson for my next international move (never gonna happen): get childcare so you can get the jobs done!! The TV doesn’t cut it as a babysitter. The noise of it drives me crazy. I got a babysitter one morning and tackled all the moving queries like it was a day’s work and, start to finish, it took me 2.5 hours which isn’t that much and included a trip to a printing shop 7 blocks away to pdf the documents. This is everything you need for customs to send your goods across the Atlantic at a cost greater than what they are worth:

• Various customs forms including Form C&E 1076

• Copy of passports

• Proof you lived outside the EU for over a year (lease)

• Additional proof you lived there (utility bills from the last 4 years)

• Proof you disposed of that property (emails to landlord saying we’re not renewing the lease)

• Proof you worked outside the EU for over a year (letter from employer)

• Proof that employment is coming to an end (letter)

• Proof you plan to work in Ireland (letter)

• Proof of new residence in Ireland (forwarding flight details, payment of a booking deposit on a house, confirmations of booking of temporary accommodation)

• Proof we plan to stay in Ireland for at least 12 months with the suggestion of showing utility bills and I’m sorry but how do you show utility bills for a country you don’t even live in? (I forwarded an email showing the kids were enrolled in a school and hoped for the best)

I was happy for the 5 year old going off to have a morning of fun and proper attention with the babysitter but also hard on myself that I hadn’t been able to provide that. What do you do not to be hard on yourself? Or when people say to be “kind to yourself” - what do you actually do? Someone said “be kind to yourselves” in January when we were having a hard time and how I actioned that then was I got taxis without guilt if it was easier and if I wanted to. I don’t have a lot of guilt around taxis but everyone else seems to so when I was having a hard time and had to hoof two kids and all their gear and a stroller across town in subzero temperatures, I occasionally just said to myself: absolutely not, no subway today, I’m being kind to myself. The past month my way of “being kind to myself” was to on two occasions completely outsource the laundry. I looked at the two overflowing baskets and thought: absolutely not, no laundry this week, I’m being kind to myself. So I put it all into two big black bags and dropped them off at a laundry only to be returned two days later, washed and folded. So kind!

What does being kind to yourself mean to you?