the radar of chance

K has been suggesting I set up a blog for a number of years now, a sort of Irish Martha Stewart/ how to live blog.

Apart from the obvious lack of meticulous housekeeping, perfect make-up (any make-up for that matter), dinner on the table at 6.00 every evening, groceries always up to date, arts & crafts for every occasion, I could see the similarity. This isn’t that blog.

This is the blog you start writing after your haphazard, but rather lovely life takes a protracted turn off the path of plain sailing and, all of a sudden, life has simultaneously too much and not enough meaning and you have to do something to make sense of it all. Or, if not make sense, just find a way through it all.

This is the blog you write after you win something really cool, after never winning a thing in your life, and you think ‘our ship is in!’ What were the odds of that? But then all this other stuff happens, not so good stuff, pretty awful stuff, and you realise the odds are so improbable that your life couldn’t even be scripted into a soap opera. And that was months before our lives could be neatly divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’. This is the blog you write when you feel like you have got caught in the radar of chance/odds/improbability and you wish you could just get your heads back down again out of the radar and it all would stop.

And then Laura died and ‘after’ began because everything else felt like nothing now.

This is a blog that may have the odd bit of arts and crafts, may acknowledge a keenness for the perfect purchase, will mention motherhood and will wander frequently through the emotional maze that is living life after losing a child.