Did you know John Waters was famous in Italy? Do you care? No. OK.

I’m getting stuck into Edit number 12 of my book; I thought I was finished at the fourth re-write. Having been advised by A.N. Agent that it was too long at 125,000 words, I’m only on page of 80 with the scalpel and 5,000 precious words have been excised already.

So as not to be heartless I’m sending these émigrés to a file marked ‘possible short stories’, I find it hard to ‘kill my darlings’ but go they must.

Aci Trezza, Sicily, Faraglioni

The Italian student has been here in landladyhouse a week, this fact contributes to my zeal with deadlines, now that I have to prepare dinner for 7pm each evening, my day is ruthlessly organised.

We’ll call her Donatella, she arrived in Dublin last Saturday at the inhospitable hour of 11.30pm, at 11.25pm I got the brainwave to tell her to take a taxi from the airport to join me and friends, luckily she jumped at the idea and was immersed in Dublin terrace society in no time. At 44 and from my favourite region of Italy, Sicily, she settled right into the company with a glass of vino and when her mother rang said, ‘Ciao Mama, Si, Fantastico.’ Very pleased with her Irish welcome.

As a novice Bean an Ti, I’ve been very lucky, she is great humoured and the cooking isn’t so bad (having been relieved of regular dinner duty since the cost centres went to college, it’s very hard to get back into).

I was watching Vincent Browne (feat. Tom McGurk) with Donatella during the week (I know, a deadly introduction to Ireland). Next thing, she squealed as John Waters was introduced, ‘Ah, I know heem, he is famuss in Eetaly.’

I was sure she was mistaken.

‘He was a musician, he took drugs,’ she said.

I know he’d tried to get a song in the Eurovision (and complained bitterly about not being picked), but a rocker?

Apparently, he gave a televised ‘testimony’ to Pope Francis recently and avowed that finding faith had transformed and saved him. So there you are, he has a Damascene moment and gets to issue belligerent diatribes via the Irish Times. Good on him, I suppose.

The Dail Dawn Chorus

Could've been in the back garden with a good book

I drove back to Dublin from the midlands on Wednesday thinking I’d never been as hot at mid-day in Italy. Having *filed my copy* to the Indo (so love saying that) I made my way into the Dail for what was to be the night of #lapgate and the #Daildawnchorus. 

When I arrived in Kildare Street the sitting was adjourned for two hours and, damn, I had nobody to meet, it was way too sunny to go inside so I found myself engrossed in watching the protesters from a safe distance. It wasn’t very comfortable to be honest, seeing these two factions being kept in line by the Gardai, shouting Father Ted slogans at each other. This is supposed to be about dignity for women, not a side show. A crowd gathered around my side of the street, the army was mobilising from the well-funded, expensively t-shirted campaign group. It was time to retreat to the dark depths of Buswells and have a *healthy* salad and chips. What on earth was I doing in the city centre on a sunny Wednesday evening alone in Buswells? There is a back garden and a good book as an option, Mad Ted. I realised I was in deep; and deeply committed to changing something if I can. Changing a man-made law that would ease the trauma on women and men of a double tragedy.

The vote on the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Bill was supposed to be decided by 10pm, it was extended until 2am and while I sat in the gallery, I heard a furore from the benches and a bluster from Gerry Adams. The doors opened, all and sundry piled in, most interesting was the press gallery, the narrow overhang filled to the brim, 21 journo’s jammed in a row. The doyenne, Miriam Lord, took her seat, delightful Lise Hand beside her. The silver glint of David McCullagh’s hair flashed in the harsh light. David Davin Power nestled between the smart glossy locked girls from the other papers.

The majority decided to extend the vote until 5am. There was a quick exodus, I checked my Dublin Bus App and went home. I assumed they were all having late committee meetings elsewhere, perhaps a nap on a trolley in the corridor, provided by Minister Reilly. They could hardly be drinking in the bar with such a serious issue going on? Drinking at work?

Back home, with the magic of Twitter I discovered the live link to the chamber, much to my amazement I actually watched until 5am. I looked outside, shocked, I haven’t been up ‘til that hour without revellers in my house trying to find the stash of duty free sambuca or whatever remained from the old days, me hoping they wouldn’t wake the sleeping children, who by now were revelling somewhere themselves. Plus ca change.

Well, at least I’d enough to write about for the Irish Times next day and, surprisingly, a radio interview with the lovely Matt Cooper. On Friday evening, I sat in FM104 with an ice bucket of cool beers and baskets of tortilla chips in view, times have changed since I worked in a *real office*. As I waited to go into studio I stuck my tongue in my broken tooth, chipped during the Dail Chorus by a diversionary caramel, for once, I wished I was in a dentist’s waiting room. It’s awful having to recall a very unhappy time, again and again. 

In between Druids and Dail Debates, I'm interviewing new tenants for landladyhouse. Stalwart gentleman lodger #1 is still with me, just trying to find someone to match him.

Lady Bits and Bobs

Friend 2 days after surgery

When I started writing this blog in January, it was at the invitation of writing.ie to contribute something, try a different voice to my fiction and non-fiction writing. I couldn't think of anything to write about, I was beset with worry about financial restructuring, finding a 'proper job', seeing my two sons through third level and trying to figure what the future held, the last few years not being the future that I'd studied and strived for.

The idea of renting out rooms was the last resort, but not the last straw as it turned out. I started writing as if I was sending an email to a friend, which is pretty much my own voice, a familiar one, where all is not despair, in fact we turn despair into harangues with expletives about the sanctimonious cant we get from politicians about austerity, the Troika and making us pay for the émigré tycoons, while squeezing SME credit and hiking our taxes.

So without the expletives and with the imperative to laugh, the posts went up and on and on.

And while having four men in the relatively small house can be a little busy at times (and the washing machine might not endure they're assiduous laundry exertions), they are rarely here all at once. And this weekend they're all missing.

So it was that I found myself with nobody to turn to when I got my first attack on twitter yesterday, and nearly 300 comments on the Irish Times website in response to my article http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/anti-choice-logic-untenable-in-cases-of-fatal-foetal-abnormality-1.1412366

They were mainly supportive, kind and sympathetic. It was the twitter exchange between a pro-lifer and a tolerant French woman living in Dublin that had me aghast.

I desperately wanted to say that protocol is to write to the newspaper or comment on line, but not go direct to the author of a piece about her own life. Anyway I blocked them, the French lady sent me an apology, which shows how decent she was, the other one continued to rant about the headline, which shows what she's made of, I suppose.

Other people's Blogs are about useful things like gardening, cooking, farming, writing even. And I'll start writing about writing whenever I get published but in the meantime I'll do what I can to make women's lives a bit more tolerable when they get the awful news no woman ever wants to get, that your baby is going to die. And that is the end of that for now.

Being well enough to get out this afternoon, I visited my friend who is just out of hospital after a hysterectomy. That was something they used to do to old women, remember? She is far from old and could still have babies, though she has three grown up children, it still takes away the choice and we like choice. But, a bit like Angelina, it was a case of lop it out before the trouble really starts. It's an operation no woman wants to have to face unless she has to. Yikes, men can father children into their eighties.

Cutting out the potential for being a mother again, well, it hits different women in different ways. Some are thrilled, don't feel a thing afterwards, others will definitely feel a line has been crossed and sadly there's no going back. Dear tanned friend showed me her scars; wow I'd say the doctors were dazzled, flat brown tummy, three tiny plasters. She pointed to the one over her belly button SQUEAMISH ALERT. 'This is where they pulled it out.'

Gosh, women are brave and beautiful.

Room to Improve.. Protection of Women and Children

Ireland on the Edge

If I don’t get out of landladyhouse soon, I could become agoraphobic, and I mean agora, in (one of) the Greek sense, fear of going to the supermarket.

On Thursday my GP took one look at my throat, squeezed my neck, I screamed, he said ‘yes, glands are doing their job, pharyngitis.’ 

Great, I think, I’m going to get real medicine to get rid of this 4 day affliction. 

‘I don’t think it’s an infection, it looks viral.’

Pleading eyes.

‘But I’ll give you a basic antibiotic; if it gets worse in two days, take them.’

Straight to the chemist, I think.

‘You must be very run down,’ he says. 

I decide I’ll broach the subject not mentioned in eleven years.

‘Yes, maybe I am, have you seen the… papers?’

‘Very brave of you,’ he muses.

I told him how I’d listened to presentations from GP’s at the Oireachtas hearings, and a GP in a ‘Doctors for Choice’ briefing. I said how it was obvious that the GP was the first port of call when a woman thought she was pregnant, crisis or not. We remembered how it was in that very surgery that I sat and got the good news confirmed that I was pregnant with Son 1 and 2.

‘Yes, we are the ones that see the mother first, talk about how she feels, make the obstetrician referrals, amazing how we’re not included in this.’

He meant the list of specialists designated to assess, approve, confirm, when a suicidal pregnant woman presents. Can’t see it working myself.

‘I don’t remember any discussion here at the time about your case,’ he said, perplexed.

In hindsight, it might have been better to have discussed it in the surgery, to have at least garnered some sympathy. But by the time I got the diagnosis, there were three obstetricians unable to help. Having been told by a barrister friend to tell nobody that I decided to travel, I actually feared telling my GP. At that time, I imagined the police being called to restrain me from leaving my house. Where I'm still in bed with nothing to do but write and finish a book review.

In the week that we had the crèche exposé and subsequent handwringing and emergency debating in the Dail, I couldn’t help see the glaring hypocrisy of reactive regulation. Despite the fact HSE people are paid to carry out the function, it failed, multiple times and places. So the government reacted when it hit them in the face, committees will be set up, reports will be commissioned. One creche was given a million euro in State funding last year, it's simple enough make them spend it on actual trained staff and a few Ikea cots wouldn't break the bank. 

The same week Minister of Health Reilly said it was 'extremely difficult' to include FFA (fatal foetal abnormality) a current, live issue, in the legislation, with a Human Rights case to support it.

Instead it is legislating for the X case twenty-one years later because the spotlight fell on Ireland in the wake of the death of a woman in Galway left to die. The legislation clearly has no corollary effect. Her terminally ill baby made her sick, but its heartbeat took precedence over hers. This legislation won’t affect women in her position or mine, or other women like us.

So, I wrote another letter to the paper.

They rang me and said it was too long. ‘I thought so,’ I said sadly.

In the end, they wanted it in Opinion, same page as John Waters. Under Water I was. And they found this old photo of me from an environmental planning article I’d written in the same year all this happened. They said the photo was good; I had to trust them on that. In fact, it was great, it had this long, dark shadow behind me, just as I’d described the stigma of secrecy since 2002.

What I didn’t expect were the comments, shouldn’t have read them last night, some were very, very decent, out of about 220, 95% I’d say were supportive. I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to have people argue with each other about my private decision. But if I put it out there, maybe that’s my fault. No wonder I didn’t go public when I was raw.

There was only one man I wanted to scream at, he said something like ‘She is still suffering from a moral dilemma,’ he has removed his post, so I couldn’t check it today.. hmm.

There is none now nor has there ever been a moral dilemma. Taking care of my two sons in the winter of 2002, getting them to school, watching their matches, doing the homework, mattered. They stood beside me at the burial of their baby brother in a quiet rural cemetery, listening to prayers and holding hands. No dilemma whatsoever.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/anti-choice-logic-untenable-in-cases-of-fatal-foetal-abnormality-1.1412366