Things I wish my mother had told me

That making dinners is far less fun than it looks.

When I was a child I thought my mother was the luckiest person on earth, because she got to decide what we had for dinner every day.

I used to think that if I was in charge of the menu we would have chips and burgers, or Christmas dinner with all the trimmings every day.  And some days we would just have cake or chocolate.  Maybe I’m a bit psychic.

Not about the Christmas dinners obviously, but about the having cake for dinner sometimes.

I was quite committed to dinner making when His Nibs and I first lived together.  I was always home first and sometimes had his dinner ready and on the table as he walked in the door. 

But then we moved to the country and I got heartily stick of having to cook after my long commute.  So I gave it up.

It’s a very boring carry on.  Even deciding what we’re going to eat gets boring after a while.  There’s only so many times you can ask yourself whether chicken fillets would be nice, or if you should be heart healthy and have fish, before you start hating your own cooker, in my experience.

It all turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, to be honest.

One way or the other, everybody should tell their children that once you leave home, no matter what age you are, no roast dinner will ever taste the same as your Mammy’s.

Pick Your Battles

I wish she’d told me that living with a man sometimes involves knowing how to pick your battles.  I could have saved many shouting sessions, and His Nibs wouldn’t have worn himself out running up and down the stairs of our building with his bags on his back, if I’d known that. 

Every cross word used to end up with one of us shouting that we were fed up of this, and that we should split up.  I couldn’t drive at the time, so I expected him to go.  I’d look a right clown walking around town with my bags hanging off me, wouldn’t I?  At least he could hide our shame in the boot of his car. 

At one stage he gave up unpacking and just wore his clothes straight out of his packed bags until the next fight.  It was dead handy.  No packing, just out the door, twenty minutes sulking time, and home. 

I think my mother is a bit of a secret feminist, and thinks that we should treat our husbands mean, and keep them keen.  Or maybe she doesn’t like her sons in law, and likes to see us giving them hell. 
One way or the other, please inform your daughters, ladies, that sometimes there’s no need to break up with her one true love because he won’t make her coffee every time she demands it or he dares to say the dinner is disgusting, even if that’s true.

We gave up all the running away from home when we bought the house.  I don’t know why.  I suppose neither of us want to go.  But the house brings its own problems, and something else I wish my mother had told me.
 

Owning a house isn’t that much fun either.

My mother was so proud when we bought the house that she forgot to tell me that once you buy a house your work is never done.  In our renting days, we used to moan and whinge if the landlord didn’t deal with our complaints within 24 hours. 

Once we bought the house we found out that it’s never ending.  If it’s not the heating breaking down, it’s the fridge, or the leaky tap that’s driving us mental, or the sofa needs replacing, or the whole place needs re-painting.  In fairness, that last one is pretty much a constant.  Between our cigarettes, our dogs, and our general scruffiness, I’d say if we repainted the whole place today it would need redoing again tomorrow.

Having rented one bedroom flats for years, we were delighted to finally have a bit of space to run around, and avoid each other in.  I even got to change the box room into what my sister would call a sulking room.  We call it the writing room, and it contains a desk, a laptop rest, a fancy leather chair and hundreds of notebooks, all just waiting for me to be struck by inspiration and write the great Irish novel.

I thought we’d never fight again. What was there to fight about, when we could just go to separate floors and avoid each other?  The house had never been lived in, it was brand new, and I was stupid enough to think it wouldn’t start giving trouble for at least ten years.

The first thing to go, if I remember rightly, was drinkable water.  There was so much lime in the water that we had to buy a water softening yoke that lives in the garden.  Too late, though, the lime had already destroyed the washing machine and the electric shower.  That was just the start of it.

You have to stop buying the clothes you want when you leave home

My mother should have given me this information as I walked out her front door, with my binbags full of possessions in my hands.  Although in fairness, the advice she was trying to get through to me at the time was probably more important.

When I lived with my parents, I would buy whatever was in fashion, and what I liked.  There were two reasons for this.  One, I was only a wee slip of a thing at the time, and two, my mother did all my ironing.  These days, I have to check the labels of everything, to check that they’re not dry clean only, and that, preferably, they don’t need to be ironed.  Or that they don’t need much ironing.  One thing I’ve learned over the last fifteen years, is that the hotter the iron needs to be, the less I want to buy the clothes.  Linen is not my friend.
 

High Heels aren’t worth it

It would have saved me years of torment if I’d known this from the time I was about fifteen.  I ended up marrying a man the same height as me.  So the four inch heel is not an option.  If I’d known, I would never have bothered.  Poor His Nibs looks like one of Santy’s elves when I wear heels. 

When I think of all the blisters, the pain, the teetering, the time I fell off my heels and broke my leg, I wonder why I bothered.  These days I wear flats all the time, or at most a pair of wedges.  In my heart I sort of think that every woman should know how to walk in heels, but what’s the point, if you’re never going to wear them?


I suppose the thing about having children is that you're probably never finished trying to tell them things, before they start thinking they know everything and stop listening.
 
I'd imagine that it's hard enough to keep them fed and warm and out of the Garda station without finding time to give them every little piece of advice that they could ever use.

I still wish I'd known this stuff though.