Lovely loopy lonely Lu. I’ve been trying to write a blog about her from two blogs ago… The last blog was even named for her.. she didn’t quite show up though. Not yet. I feel like I need an endless page for Lulu. I’d write for weeks and still wouldn’t get closer to where I wanted to be. Where do I want to be? Close to her. 

Lucia was born a pink and perfect thing. Until she opened her mouth that is. Then this kid screamed for six weeks. Six whole weeks. It wasn’t her fault I told myself. She was hungry. I was new at the whole mothering thing and didn’t have enough milk for her. If you don’t have enough milk, what do you do? You stay stubborn and refuse to let anyone help. Oh wait, that was just me. 

When she was six weeks old, I had a dream about her. I dreamt I’d lost her. At first I was relieved to be honest. I made my way down a winding high street celebrating my freedom. Terrible, wasn’t I? Suddenly I passed a shop of curios and saw her in the window on display. On sale. At that moment, everything changed. 

‘That’s my baby,’ I said, going inside. ‘You’ve got my baby for sale.’ 

The shopkeeper narrowed his eyes at me. ‘Prove it.’ 

Before that moment, I probably wouldn’t have been sure she was mine, but the moment I saw her, I knew in my bones that this kid was mine. 

‘I know my own baby,’ I yelled at him. 

It was one of a handful of powerful dreams I’ve had in my lifetime. You know the ones. The waking-up-naked-in-a-classroom ones don’t seem to touch them. For example, I had one dream about moving to a marsh-ridden landscape before I actually moved a marsh-ridden landscape. That was weird. Then this dream about little Lu. It was the first moment I think that I really bonded with her. She was a sensitive little thing. Just before Delph was born, she acquired a small handbag and choice items she placed inside the handbag. For the next non-stop waking hours, Lulu would perform inventories on the bag. Everything came out, was accounted for and went back in again. There was even a plastic phone she called her ‘hi’. That ‘hi’ was the cutest thing I’d ever freakin’ seen. Then, after Delphine was born, she developed the knack of covering her sister’s sleeping body in stickers. Yep. It just got better. 

I remember that time. We had a few months where everything seemed like it was going to be ok. It was our moment of golden innocence. Not long afterwards, the realisation of Delphine’s disability hit us all hard. We didn’t get a diagnosis until she was almost a year old. Still, I try not to take it away from belonging to Delphine herself. For her it is and always will be the most difficult thing. We can only imagine how it must feel. But here’s the thing; when I think about Delph’s disability in context to Lulu, that’s somehow the worst thing for me to deal with. I don’t know why this is the case, it puzzles me rotten. I wonder; is it because she’s the one who has to look after her sister when we’re gone? Or because she misses out on a 50/50 kid split of attention? On both counts, probably check check. 

What’s the answer? Hmm. How about taking this kid out of school and sailing her around an ocean or two? She’ll definitely know how much we love her. She’ll get a good, if-somewhat-different education. She’ll never miss us. No, but she’ll miss the craic. No doubt about it. It turns out that Lulu loves the craic. And with this, I’ll have to continue. Another blog.. man!

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