At year’s end it is customary to cast an eye back towards the past 12 months and try to discern some meaning or story that can stand for the messy, complicated whole. As a citizen of this planet, this is a daunting task. In a global sense, this hasn’t been a year to remember, beset by horror and war, moral outrage and political cowardice. I’m lucky that I can limit myself here to the personal sphere and force myself to think in terms of my family; milestones reached and peaks summited. It is, to put it mildly, the only positive spin on 2023 I could imagine.
My son has soared in the realm of reading and maths, evincing a savant-like ability for adding and subtracting that is only occasionally wearisome, and an aptitude for language that has only recently devolved into regrettable profanity. For the record, and with thanks to the many, many people who stepped forward to offer their own tales of swearing children, I have decided to take this as an indictment of my own potty mouth; a theory best proven by the swear jar we’ve introduced, which has thus far counted only myself among its donors.
I can always hold on to the memory of my daughter’s first forays into walking, since few milestones were more long-awaited. Indeed, ambulation came to her so slowly that I didn’t even write a piece in celebration, since I’d already written two pieces about her halting, early steps, and thought it churlish to write a third, months later. Progress, like my daughter herself, moves at its own pace.
The main story of her year has been the gradual breaking of her resistance to sleep, and the correlating uptick in our collective mental health. I can describe the pummelling effects of 3am and 4am starts until I’m blue in the face, but they’re best measured by a glance at the notes app on my phone, which saw frequent use in those small hours.
For years, I’ve been in the habit of jotting down ideas for things I’m writing, ostensibly to capture those flashes of inspiration that might otherwise be wasted. Seized by an end-of-year urge to survey these notes this week, I noticed how badly this system collapsed for those seven months of the year in which I was tired to the point of insanity, resulting in gems like: ‘man who wants to stand inside every building in Derry’ or ‘a horse who eats nothing but hard-boiled eggs’; dozens, hundreds, of ideas I clearly considered so spellbinding that they had to be preserved forever.
When I scan 2023 for positives, I look not at photo albums or birthday cards, but at these innumerable lines of cryptic nonsense, blearily transcribed in the dark while feeding a screaming child, and their slow climb back to readability around the time she discovered sleep.
Reading them now reminds me that, for all this year’s sham and drudgery, things can get better. Things do get better. It may do us all good to remember that.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on X @shockproofbeats
