I’m carrying too many things, and I know I am. This is not a euphemism; this is not a story about how women carry too much, and take on all of the emotional labour, and shoulder everyone’s burdens as well as their own (but it could be, because that’s a story that would be easy to write). This is a story about me, carrying too many things.
I know before I even pick up the last thing – a pile of clothes I’ve selected for my four-year-old to wear to school, clothes he won’t have to be cajoled into today (for change), because I’ve promised him that, once he’s dressed, we’ll go to the pond down the road from our house – that I’m carrying too much, and yet I pile it all on.
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I’m carrying my son, who’s four, because every morning he reaches his arms up to me and he says, in his most babyish of baby voices, “mama ca-wwy?” and I think to myself, he knows what he’s doing with that baby voice. But my cynicism doesn’t take me any further than that.
I’m haunted by those social media posts where women write about their children growing up. You won’t know it when it happens, they write, but one day you’ll pick up your baby and it’ll be the last time they ever ask to be picked up.
I’m not someone, in general, who laments the reality of her children growing up. While I accept the objective truth that newborns are cute and contact naps are cute and first teeth are cute and crawling is cute, I think I would happily skip the 0-to-2-year period. Sure, there are things I’d be sad to miss out on, but it’s very hard to spend a full 24 months doing everything for somebody else, getting no appreciation, and all the while worrying that they’re going to cause themselves grievous bodily harm by sticking a finger in a plug socket, or reaching a soft, chubby hand out to touch something that’s just come out of the oven.
But there are aspects of this time – baby time, toddler time – that I treasure, and the moments where he holds on to me like a baby koala are very high on that list.
And so, I carry him. I carry him, and his clothes for the day, and that’s not all; I carry a bottle of water (not a Stanley, but close enough, and better, in fact, I think, because it’s less likely to spill and the one I have comes in a great colourway) and a pair of runners and, gripped between my ring and little fingers, my phone, because heaven forbid I should be parted from it for long.
My mum would call this the lazy man’s load. I’ve just realised this is not a phrase she coined; I also thought she’d come up with the acronym NNTR, until my sister and I discussed it on our podcast, and hundreds of people told me that their parents use it, too.
But one thing you should know about me is that I hate to make unnecessary journeys, especially up or down the stairs. If I’m down, I’m down; if I’m up, I’m up. Heaven forbid I should go upstairs for the night, and realise I’ve forgotten my phone, or need to go back downstairs to find the painkillers.
Were I ever to build my dream home, I’d put in a dumbwaiter, not for clean or dirty plates, or even for washing, but for the bits I forgot to bring upstairs, or down. I’d happily stand and wait for 10 minutes, if it meant I wouldn’t have to take 30 seconds to go down the stairs myself.
Did you know that carrying too many things is actually a female superpower, according to the New York Times?
“A popular theory around the origins of the claw grip,” writes NYT reporter Alisha Haridasani Gupta, who covers style and pop culture for the newspaper, “is that it is a reaction to Big Fashion’s refusal to provide women with the functional pockets that are standard in men’s clothing.”
Anyway, today I’m carrying too many things. And before I begin to ascend the stairs, I have this very clear thought: I should probably put some of these things down. But I ignore it, because there are some thoughts I feel able to ignore, and others, like, wouldn’t it be a great idea to get takeaway for dinner, that I am entirely powerless against. What can I say? I don’t make the rules.
We’re almost at the bottom of the stairs – one step away, in fact – when I see my sister-in-law, Stasia, in the living room and I say, “morning!” in a sing-song voice and it’s right as I finish the word, on the “ng” of the “ing”, that I miss the very last step. My foot, which should have landed on that very step, instead, meets the air beneath it, and then lands on the floor below.
In that split second, in the shock of those missing seven-odd inches, my foot twists, my ankle rolls, and I land, instead of on the sole of my foot, on the outside edge of my ankle.
I hear myself scream, and I’m embarrassed. That was an embarrassing scream, I think, and wish I could somehow take it back. It doesn’t occur to me, in my instinctual wishing, to instead wish I could take the fall itself back. Only the scream. Priorities.
I sit on the ground for a few minutes and try to take deep breaths. My heart rate starts to spike. I’m weirdly aware of my heart rate lately, ever since going on medication for ADHD. If I get the timing of my meds wrong, my heart rate becomes very noticeable; one day last week, I take my morning dosage and drink two americanos within about 10 minutes, then begin to worry I’m having a heart attack before realising it’s just the potent combination of caffeine and amphetamines.
My Apple Watch has an ECG function, and more than once I’ve switched it on, and watched as it tells me what I already know; my heart rate is spiking. 114BPM, it tells me on the two-americanos-plus-amphetamines day. “Elevated heart rate.” Unsure what to do with this information, I leave the last few sips of coffee in the cup, try to do my box breathing, and take a mouthful of water.
It passes.
Today, I sit on the floor and notice my heart rate and try to do my box breathing (try and fail), and while the shock passes, and my heart rate eventually goes back to normal (I think), the pain stays pretty constant.
My ankle has swollen up like a large apple. I’m both amazed and disgusted at the sight of it.
“Look at my ankle!” I tell Stasia, breathlessly. (Breathe in, count one, two, three, four, hold one, two…)
“Yeah…” she says, sounding less excited than me. “You’re gonna need to…”
“I know,” I tell her. I do know. I’m gonna need to. Go to the walk-in clinic, or the ER, have an X-ray taken, find out if it’s broken. I can put weight on it, and I can wiggle my toes, and flex my ankle, which all makes me think it’s not, but I am famously not a doctor, and there’s also the matter of the swelling, which is not getting any less impressive.
Stasia calls Brandin. “Your wife took a tumble,” she tells him, and I’m brought right back to the last time someone called to tell him this very same thing – four years ago, in my sister’s kitchen, when I rolled my ankle walking across her back patio and ended up with an avulsion fracture, caused by the ligament pulling a fragment off the bone.
I haven’t cried yet, although the pain is, I would say, at about a seven or eight out of 10. Every few seconds, it will intensify to the point that I feel I might pass out, and I’ll remember to focus on my breathing again.
In my sister’s kitchen that time, I lay on the floor and wept while I waited for Brandin to come and get me. Today, a fracture and a sprain and a second C-section later, I think I might just be better able to cope with pain.
Plus, what’s the point in crying? What will that do, except upset Atlas – who’s just got over the fright of the whole thing, and is eating his Pop Tarts while watching A (Real) Bug’s Life, one of his favourite nature documentaries – and make me look like s**t, and probably give me a headache, to go along with the sheer agony of the ankle. No, thank you.
Of course, by the end of the morning – we’re home by 10.30am, in all it’s a quick in ’n‘ out – I’ve cried quite a few times, mostly because I remembered the “end of 2026 bucket list” I’d written for myself on the plane last week. It has four items on it:
* Eat at Borage
* Start a regular yoga / Pilates practice
* Sell everything I don’t love on Vinted
* Take a dance class
I tell Brandin about it while a single tear rolls down my cheek. He’s been a great support, overall, rushing home from work to take me to the walk-in clinic and not once bringing up the frequency with which I’ve hurt these ankles of mine, but at this he starts to laugh, which makes me cry more.
“Why do bad things happen to good people?!?” I wail at him. He laughs again.
After the X-ray, the doctor tells me there’s a visible fracture on the ankle; minutes later, the radiologist will say there isn’t. The doctor says the swelling is making it a bit hard to tell; the fracture could be old, from a previous injury (like I said, not my first). She tells me to go to the orthopedic specialists. They’ll probably do their own X-rays; they might suggest a cast (she gives me a boot for now).
“Go in a few days,” she says, “When the swelling goes down.” She looks doubtfully at my foot, which is now barely visible beneath the large, swollen ball of my ankle.
I send Brandin in to the cafe next door to get me an acai bowl, my current hyper-fixation, for breakfast (I haven’t eaten yet, and am starving). I text photographs of my swollen ankle to my nearest and dearest (all the better to elicit some sympathy).
When I get home, I limp up to my bedroom and get myself set up on the bed – laptop and phone and coffee and water bottle (none of which carried by me) – with ice packs made of applesauce packets filled with water (which I discover when, a little later, I decide to eat one; Stasia has made them up “for micro boo-boos”) and my snuggie, and I fall into a fitful sort of sleep.
I wake up to a text from my mother:
“I think you must have delicate ankles, Rosemary: haven’t you had problems quite a lot over the years? Like myself you need to be aware and take it easy. I know missing a step is unfortunate. Marion F[inucane, one of my mother’s oldest friends] missed 2 steps on her stairs and broke both ankles and was in a wheelchair for 6 months.”
She doesn’t, for once, add NNTR – but I’m so enraged I couldn’t respond, even if I wanted to.
I’ve somehow fallen into a very specific Facebook algorithm of people who keep jumping spiders as pets.
Much like the ankle fracture (or sprain, I guess time will tell), this is not the first time this has happened. Last year, I spent a good few months in Instagram’s “young Catholic wives” bracket, which was confusing because I’m neither young nor Catholic (any more, anyway), but I guess I am interested in women and gender roles and, to a lesser extent, pageantry and performance, so it made sense, in a way.
The jumping spiders have really come out of left field, though. Is it because I encourage Atlas to watch Lucas the Spider on Netflix? Has my phone overheard me telling him that spiders are friends; that they’re cute; that we love spiders because they eat all the bugs we don’t love?
I don’t, actually, love spiders – at least, not especially. But I try really hard not to pass down any irrational fears or dislikes to my kids, and so I try to be very neutral about spiders (“wow, that spider has really interesting colours!”) and to point out facts (“they eat other bugs!” “did you know spiders communicate using their webs?”), rather than succumb to my lesser instincts, shouting “eugh!” every time I see a spider in an unwelcome nook or cranny of my home.
My efforts have kind of backfired when it comes to bees and wasps; I’ve never seen a child be as unafraid of them as Atlas is, crouching down and getting almost nose to nose with them to inspect their stripes, or to see if they have any pollen in their little pollen baskets.
I’m not quite sure how to manage this, because on the one hand, I don’t want him to be afraid of bees or wasps, flapping his hands around and screaming bloody murder every time he sees one. But he’s only short of trying to pick them up with his fingers, and I obviously don’t want him to be stung – mostly because, honestly, he’s very dramatic when he gets hurt, and that’s something I’m never in the mood to deal with.
There’s a segment on ‘Catch Up with Louise McSharry’, one of my favourite podcasts, that’s published on the podcast’s Patreon once a month. Called Chronically Online, it consists of Louise and Emer McLysaght, a regular contributor to the pod, discussing what their algorithms are serving them up this week.
It’s especially interesting to me because what they’re seeing is always vastly different to what I’m seeing. They’ve talked about podcasting nuns and heated arguments about whether or not you can bring an iced coffee to an interview and still be taken seriously, and I’ve thought, hmmm, I wonder why my algorithm isn’t showing that to me?!
Like Louise and Emer, I’m a woman in my 40s who spends far too much time on her phone; surely there should be more overlap?
‘Catch Up’ is one of my favourite podcasts because listening to it feels a bit like doing one of my favourite hobbies: eavesdropping. Almost every episode features Louise and another person discussing, depending on the day, news or entertainment, with an interview episode on Friday.
It’s a pretty common podcast format – two people chatting – and yet it’s been difficult for me personally to find one I love, and which I can stick with, long-term.
I have, for a pretty significant chunk of time now – over a year – been a regular and avid listener of The Rest is Entertainment, a chat between journalist Marina Hyde and author and TV person Richard Osman (not to be confused with TV personality, as he’s on the production side, rather than the “personality” side), but today, on an episode of The Guardian’s ‘Today in Focus’ podcast, Marina described renowned anti-trans maniac JK Rowling as “amazing and principled and brave” and I thought, well, I guess that’s the end of my listening to that podcast.
On the topic of Rowling: I guess, objectively speaking, she is principled, although I find it disturbing and ridiculous and worrying, that her one guiding principle in her life as a millionaire seems to be to ruin the lives of trans people in the UK (and, I’m sure, further afield if she could manage it). It’s hard to admire that kind of pathological obsession – for me personally, that is; Marina Hyde seems to have no such qualms.
And look: I’ve long suspected Marina to be a TERF, and a bit of a Tory, and potentially a Zionist, if her disdain for Kneecap and Macklemore and, more generally, artists who boycotted festivals this summer and last over concerns that they were funded by the same big businesses who were providing arms to Israel, is anything to go by. But, if I squinted hard enough, I could still enjoy the podcast; plausible deniability is a helluva drug.
Now, though, that I’ve heard her say with her own mouth that JK Rowling is “amazing and principled and brave”, I can no longer deny the truth of things, plausibly or otherwise.
Louise McSharry has yet to disappoint me on this front, so her podcast can stay. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that I align with her, more or less, on most things, except that I am horrified by her willingness and ability to go out and socialise night after night without losing the will to live (I could never).
Maybe this is why the internet thinks I’m interested in the idea of keeping a jumping spider as a pet. People who keep jumping spiders as pets, I suspect, are not big party animals.
Although, now that I think about it, they’d have to be fairly laid back, too.
I couldn’t keep a jumping spider as a pet because, among other reasons, I’d be too scared every time I had to open its enclosure to clean it, or to feed it, or to, I don’t know, take photographs for the grid. (I mean, if you’re not going to photograph your jumping spider, really, what’s the point?) Jumping spiders are tiny and, in case you hadn’t realised this, they jump.
One jump and that would be it; I’d never find it again.
I think the reason this whole jumping spiders thing – and I’ve now accepted my fate, clearly, because now that I’ve written “jumping spiders” 37 times in a row, I’ll never know peace again – is so confusing to me is because, otherwise, the algorithm is quite accurate to my likes and personality.
I see a lot of blackhead-squeezing and face-shaving content, which I enjoy, to a point. Once we get into the realm of cysts and inflamed “pustules”, a word I hope never to have reason to use in my life again, I switch off. It turns out that I enjoy the cleansing nature of all of this stuff, but I can’t really bear the idea of it being at all painful.
I’m served a lot of nail content, probably because, every three weeks, I begin to frantically search for inspiration to show my nail girl; my “discover” page on Instagram is also quite heavy on 3D prints, with the result that I frequently send them to my husband suggesting he print them (usually they’re toys I think they children would like). He ignores me and, instead, prints giant Halloween cat heads to serve candy out of.
Then, of course, there are the dahlias. If you’re into dahlias – and if I lived in Ireland, where you can leave your tubers in the ground throughout the winter, safe in the knowledge that they won’t freeze and then rot, I would have hundreds of dahlias in my garden – there is a plethora of content out there for you to enjoy, from different dahlia varieties to tutorials (how to harvest your tubers, how to separate your tubers, how to cut your dahlia blooms to maximise growing, how to harvest seed heads, the list is endless).
Right now, I’m obsessed with a new variety produced by Triple Wren Farms in Washington, the Sandia Tulip dahlia.
I, of course, immediately signed up to their mailing list in the hopes that I’ll be able to get my hands on a tuber. But be advised: buying dahlia tubers is an expensive hobby; Triple Wren’s tubers start at $12, and go all the way up to $45 – for a single tuber.
I do, of course, have several dahlia plants myself this year: 15 I grew from tubers, and an additional five or six I grew from seed, each of which will have produced an impressive tuber clump. The problem I have is that, no matter how many tutorials I watch, I’ve yet to succeed in overwintering my tubers (they rot or shrivel, shrivel or rot). Maybe this year will be the year?!
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Finally, Taylor Swift has released a new special edition of The Life of a Showgirl, the album which is, arguably (I was going to say objectively, but I just know someone’s going to argue with me about it), her weakest album yet (this Guardian review is very satisfying and uses the word “dogshit” more perfectly than I’d ever have thought possible) – and one of them got its own honestly-quite-hard-to-find music video (it’s not on YouTube, which is annoying), starring none other than Ireland’s own Colin Farrell.
(If you click through to Spotify and then click video you can watch it there… like I said, annoying.)
I would love to know how much Colin (and Dakota Johnson, who co-stars) got paid to star in this video, directed by Taylor Swift herself.
We can add this to the list of things I’d love to (but will never) know, including (but not limited to):
* how exactly did Faye Dinsmore suddenly get on the cover of every Irish magazine as “Ireland’s top blogger” (am I the only one who remembers this?!), and why did she up and walk away from her newfound media fame?
* why is there a Cybertruck parked in the short-term car park at Indianapolis airport since (at least) last November? (It’s parked in the same exact space and covered in dust, in which people have written fun messages like “Swasticar” and, of course, drawn cartoon penises.)
* where is my driver’s license?!
* did Taylor Swift really notinvite her former BFF Blake Lively to her wedding, and was it really all over the Justin Baldoni debacle?! (Tay-Tay apparently had 1,000 wedding guests so it definitely wasn’t a numbers issue…)
* Where is Starlee Kine when I need her?!
