But I don’t have to muse on the space-time continuum every day. I do, however, have to work with time every single day. There are things to be done every single day, there are places I need to be every single day. There are things I need to do with, and for, my kids every single day. Very often I feel overwhelmed by time and feel the lack of it. I am anxious because there isn’t enough. Being late stresses me more than anything else…..and yet, I often find myself running late. 

Discussing it with a friend of mine – Richard –  during the week, I traced my feelings of unease with time back to my teens. I hung around with a guy who called time ‘the enemy’. 

‘How is the enemy?’ he asked once. I looked perplexed. 

‘TIME is the enemy!’ he pronounced, and ever after, when he asked how the enemy was, I would look at my watch and tell him the time.

I understood. Time was that thing that works against us – conspiring to suck all the joy out of our days because there is never enough of it. It disappears too quickly, leaving us breathless in its wake. It rubs its hands in glee as we run to escape from it. Except there is no escape. Time wins every….well, time.  

So for twenty years, I have understood that time is my enemy. It is evil and it wants me to fail. We are constantly pitted against each other and I can never win. Part of me, despite my every experience with it, expects Time to expand to accommodate me. And then I get upset and frustrated when it doesn’t. 

This week, I had an enormous shift. (No, that’s not a confession that I kissed a fella!) I just turned my perception of time on it’s head. Talking with Richard, the words

‘Time is my best friend’ tumbled out of my mouth. A huge smile spread across my face as I realised the truth of what I’d just said. I felt as if a large, ickky, tar-like mass had moved inside me and exited my body.

‘Time is the thing that exists to allow me to get things done, it’s not something that conspires against me to prevent me getting things done,’ I continued, as the realisation flooded through me. 

Changing my view of Time has completely changed my attitude towards, and relationship with, Time. It is no longer my enemy. It is my best friend. It is there to help me, to work with me and to make sure that I get done the things I want and need to get done in my life. 

I treat a friend very differently to how I treat an enemy, as well. I now treat time with respect, I welcome it with joy and I understand that it wants what’s best for me. 

I feel lighter, happier, and know that what I want to get done, I can do – because Time is on my side. Literally. 

What is there in your life that changing your attitude towards would result in changing your life? 

There has been a bit of grumbling in the Irish media recently about private schools that are also in receipt of tax-payer’s money.  Some people contend that if a parent wants to send their child/ren to a fee-paying school, then they should foot the bill for all the associated costs.

I disagree. According to our constitution, all children are entitled to an education. Article 42.2 states:

The State shall provide for free primary education and shall endeavour to supplement and give reasonable aid to private and corporate educational initiative,

(In the Sinnott case, the Supreme Court decided that the right to free primary education ends at age 18).

The State has a duty to provide a minimum standard of education, but if a parent desires more for their child and they are willing to find the money to pay for it, then I think fair play to them.  All they are doing is ‘topping up’ the amount provided by the state in order to ensure that their children are educated to a higher than ‘minimum’ standard.  The children of the fee-paying schools are entitled to the minimum standard at the tax-payer’s expense, just the same as the children who attend non-fee-paying schools are entitled to that minimum.

As I have written before the standard of Irish education is not very high. If you have 30 children in a room there isn’t much you can hope to teach any of them.  In many fee-paying schools, the fees go to provide extra teachers to bring down the pupil:teacher ratio. This gives the children in these classes a better chance of reaching their potential. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is what education’s all about.

Today, however, when Alison posted her first small stone of 2012, I decided to jump into the river with her.

Here’s my first small stone:

When the sky turns this colour
I always think of you
And your first floor-length gown
Of a deep midnight blue
Nervously sophisticated
You stood by the door
And you waited

Most years, I make an effort and either have people in or go somewhere. This year, however, New Year’s Eve in our household will hardly be noticed. I have no desire to do anything but treat tonight as just another night. The girls and I contemplated going into Dublin for the NYE Party, but then my youngest voiced her concern that there might be drunk people there and she doesn’t want to be around drunk people. Fair enough. 

So I’ve sat down to scribble off a blog post. I am not going to compile a list of my 2011 highlights or lowlights. We all know what happened last year – and in our personal last years, and if we’ve forgotten, then maybe that’s for the best. Nor am I going to detail what I want, hope, aspire and commit to in 2012. For all but me, that would be a rather boring list. 

Instead, I’m sitting here, warm, safe and comfortable, listening to my daughters, in the whole of their health, roaring with laughter as they play together. The dinner is simmering on the stove and I have a glass of bubbly (water) to hand. 

Yes, 2011 brought me challenges, it taught me lessons and it reminded me – God it reminded me! – of how blessed I am. 

Thankful may I ever be for everything that God bestows

Thankful for the joys and sorrows, the blessings and the blows

Thankful for the wisdom gained through hardship and adversity

Thankful for the undertones as well as for the melody

Thankful may I ever be for benefits both great and small

And never fail in gratitude for the most divine gift of all;

The love of family and friends that in times of failure and success

O may the first prayer of the day be ever one of thankfulness

May 2012 be your best year yet. 

L’Chayim! 

There was one last night and, initially, I wasn’t going to go. As many of you already know, I have two young daughters and I am on my own with them – as a result they end up coming most places with me, which often means late nights. I’ve also returned to education and am studying, full-time, for an MA. Going out on a Wednesday night would have meant two late nights on the trot for my girls. As well as a few extra hours away from my books. I decided to be sensible and give it a miss.

Then, I noticed that more and more of my buddies were going. I wanted to hang out! At the last moment, I put all my mis-givings to one side and bought my ticket for the three-hour event with Miriam O’Callaghan. With all due respect to Miriam, I didn’t think that anything she was going to say was going to change my life. I was more interested in seeing, talking to and hanging out with the fabulous women who attend WOA events.

Now that I’d committed, I was all excited and sold it to my daughters as a fab night out for them, too. I even got myself a matching notebook and pencils to take notes on the night.

I left college yesterday at 2.30pm and pelted it home to pick my girls up from the school bus, then made dinner while they did their homework. Afterwards, I bundled my long-suffering pair into the car and we hit the road at 4.40pm to get to the venue for 6pm. I figured we’d be early by about 15 or 20 minutes, but I hadn’t banked on the weather.

From the time I hit the gates of our estate, the rain started. By the time we were half-way there,  my sat-nav was telling me we’d be ten minutes early. We sat in traffic for a while and the sat-nav told me we’d be in the door at 6pm. I gritted my teeth. I hate being late.

By the time we got to Dawson St. (where the event was taking place), I was already 10 minutes late and couldn’t find parking! I drove around, looking for a spot. There was one, but it was too far from where I needed to be. Had I been on my own – rain or no rain – I’d have parked and sprinted. As I had the girls with me, there was no question of my doing so.

Looking at the clock, the weather and the traffic, I decided to swing around one more time. This would make me half an hour late, but I would just nip in at the back and not make a fuss. I’m good at slipping in unnoticed. I’d have missed the beginning of what Miriam had to say, but I’ll still get to see the fabulous Women on Air afterwards.

Doubling back  took a bit longer than I’d hoped. Driving up and down the streets of Dublin, scouring for a parking spot, I realised there was none to be had.

‘Girls,’ I said to my two. ‘I think we’re just going to leave it and head home.’

They said nothing.

‘You could do with being in bed at a reasonable hour,’ I told them. ‘Especially because you’ve got to come to DCU with me tomorrow.’

Admitting defeat, I pointed the car in the direction of home and consoled myself with the thought that I was being ‘sensible’, ‘responsible’ and practical’.  Instead of being disappointed that I’d missed what (I hear today) was a wonderful night, I decided to take a lesson from the experience.

I need to realise that I am one person already doing the work of four. I need to realise that I can’t do everything I might like to. I need to realise that I can’t be everywhere I might like to be. I need to learn I don’t need to accept every invitation I receive.  I need to trust that, sometimes, there are second chances – that I will get to meet up with all the fabulous women I missed meeting last night. I need to learn that I can spread myself too thinly and then I do no one any favours.

It took bad weather, heavy traffic and missing Miriam O’Callaghan  to remind me of that.

Only in Asia – where I spent ten years and over half my adult life – do they manage to get my ‘title’ right, anyway. You see, I ceased to be a ‘Miss’ when I ceased to be a teenager and got married. It makes me grit my teeth when people call me ‘miss’. It’s an ugly word, with horrible connotations. If you don’t quite manage to achieve something, you ‘miss’ it. If you’re away from something or someone you love, you ‘miss’ them. If the bus pulls away two seconds before you reach the bus-stop, you ‘miss’ it. ‘Miss’ is all about loss and ‘not-quiteness’.

‘Ms’ is horrendous. To me, it smacks of the 1980s and man-hating women who thought they were liberated and that that liberation could be communicated by their affected use of ‘Ms’ as a prefix to their names. ‘Ms’ is so not for me.

If I am to have a title, I prefer the one that was conferred on me in the East; ‘Madam’. Madam is a great title. It is used by and for women who marry, but continue to use their pre-marriage surname. For example, if a Miss Woo marries a Mr Wong, she is Mrs Wong, but Madam Woo. I like that. Her marital status is conveyed, but she is ‘allowed’ the use of her original surname. Similarily, women who have been divorced are known as ‘Madam’ and whatever their original surname is. A woman with children is always respectfully addressed as ‘Madam’.

I like the term, I like what it applies and – as it happens – it applies to me. I liked being Madam Larkin far more than I ever liked being Miss Larkin, Ms Larkin, Missus Larkin, Missus Jay, or Missus Sridhar. The only other title I enjoyed nearly as much was that of ‘Mama Ishthara’ – as I was called by the vegetable man, the newspaper man and various other wallahs in India after my eldest daughter was born.

The fact of it is, though, that in this part of the world, very few people will ever deign to address me as ‘Madam Larkin’ rather than ‘Hazel’. Musing over this with a friend yesterday, she hit upon the perfect solution: I’ll just have to finish my doctorate. Then I can insist upon being – and expect to be – called ‘Dr Larkin’.

It might be easier just to re-marry, though.

Like the rest of the world, I remember where I was. I was sitting in our living room in Singapore.

My (then) husband had gone to the pub after work. I was alone – though not quite alone, as my eldest daughter was busy gestating and I was sure I could feel her spirit around me all the time.

I was watching my friend and colleague, Lawrence Chau, as he presented his new game show on telly. Game shows aren’t my thing, but supporting my friends is, so I had the television on. Just after 9pm (Singapore is 12 hours ahead of New York), across the bottom of the screen, a ticker-tape news flash informed me that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers. Further information was on the other channel. I flicked.

I never did get back to watching Lozzy’s game show.

I reached for the phone and dialled my husband’s number. There was something surreal about the pictures I was seeing. I’d been to New York – to the Towers themselves – in July. My husband had scoffed at my tourist’s desire to go inside them, but I had insisted. I was a tourist and – for all his desire to think of himself as a local,  because he’d worked there (illegally) a few years earlier – so was he.

Sridhar didn’t answer his phone on the first ring. Or the second. He didn’t always answer his phone to me when he was out drinking.  It was a case of fifth time lucky. When we spoke, I told Sridhar that a plane had flown into the World Trade Centre. He derided my worried tone.

‘It’s just a light plane, I’m sure. Stop getting so excited.’

‘I think it’s more than that, Sridhar, I’m watching it now, it’s pretty terrible.’

‘Pretty terrible’ turned out to be the understatement of the year. The pictures were horror-filled, the news was soul-wringing and the pain and anguish being suffered by New York and her denizens was soon to become obvious.

In the following days, our inbox filled with messages from friends in New York, detailing where they were and how they were coping. Not well, on the whole. One of Sridhar’s friends worked at the WTC, but had missed his train because he’d spent an extra ten minutes playing with his baby. He had known he’d be late for work, but the giggles of his six-month old son had been too much for him to resist. Thank God they were.

For my part, I worried about the world my baby would be born into. All I’d ever wanted was to be a mother, but now I wondered if it was the right time to be bringing a child into the world. What kind of world would there be for her to inherit? Would there be a world for her to inherit at all? Was my desire to be a mother nothing but selfishness, after all?

When reading about the World Trade Centre, I realised that my own history had, in a very slight way, parallels with the history of the WTC: The towers had opened when my mother was expecting me – her first daughter. They were felled, 28 years later, when I was expecting my first daughter.

Ishthara was born 10 weeks early, ignominiously, in a toilet in India.  Her chances of survival were slim. I was told not to get too attached to the tiny scrap of humanity that was the embodiment of every hope I’d ever hoped. Pointless instruction, I think.

On September 11th, 2002, when my baby was nearly six months old, I was told that she had passed the ‘critical’ stage. I could never expect her to be the same as other children her age, I could expect her to always be smaller than her peers, I could expect her to be developmentally delayed, and to be slightly retarded. But, finally, I could expect her to live.

My Isha has lived. She has thrived. With a mother’s heart, I see that she is not the same as other children her age – but that’s not a bad thing. She’s funny and out-going and vivacious and kind and thoughtful and determined and she amazes me on a daily basis. She is petite and fine-boned, but of ‘average’ height for an Indian girl child her age. Ishthara is far from developmentally delayed, having been assessed as ‘Gifted’ earlier this year and – with every passing day – she brings more joy to me and those with whom she comes in contact.

September 11th has, since 2002, been a special day of celebration in our house. Today is no different. My little girl has requested we go to Carton House for their wedding fair. She wants to look at pretty dresses and jewellery and dressed tables and heaven knows what else. I will remind her that is she made for more than just marriage and smile as she gasps and sketches and touches fabric and offers her own opinions and expresses excitement.

Today, as I do every September 11th, I will offer special prayers; prayers in the memory of those who perished as the victims of murder on this day in 2011 – and their families. I will also offer special prayers of thanks for the blessings I received on September 11th, 2002.

In another parallel with the WTC, I will celebrate much of what Ishthara and New York have in common; resiliance, determination, the ability to astound, the ability to exceed expectations, the ability to come back from disaster.

My youngest worried that the luscious green tops would go to waste. I had heard that they were inedible, but Googled just to check. I was glad I did, because it turns out that these green leaves are bitter, but definitely edible and packed full of all the goodness you’d expect from leafy greens.

Now that I knew we could eat them, I wondered what best to turn them into. I settled on a pesto.  In this photo, you can see that the consistency is more that of a pâté than a pesto, so I added a little water (2-3 tablespoons) later and thinned it out. It tasted good either way.

Time: 15 mins      Serves: 4

Ingredients:

3/4 cup Hazelnuts

Tops of about 14 carrots

12 basil leaves, shredded

3 cloves garlic, minced

Juice of 1 lemon

1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil

30g Mature Cheddar Cheese

Salt and Pepper to season

Method:

Toast the nuts in a dry frying pan until they colour slightly and release their aroma.

Remove the carrot leaves from the stalks. Discard stalks.

Puree nuts, garlic, lemon juice, carrot leaves and basil.

Add cheese and seasoning.

Add oil, a little at a time, and blend.

Note: A small red chilli, chopped and added with the garlic peps this recipe up slightly.

I love that Apple products are so easy to use and so clever.  When I first held an iPhone in 2008, I thought ‘Hmmmm, I gotta get me one of these’. Then, I remembered that I don’t actually like touch screens on phones.

So when the iPad was invented, I thought I’d get one of those, instead. Now, however, I’ve changed my mind.

The big tech news this week is that Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple.  Truly, he has my sympathy. My thoughts and prayers are with him and his family as he continues to battle cancer. My thoughts and prayers are also, however, with the workers and their families at the factory in China where iPads and iPhones are manufactured.

When I first heard about the worker suicides at the Chinese plant that makes Apple products, I was absolutely dismayed. It’s something I can’t ignore. Much and all as I would like an iPad, there’s no way I could live with myself if I funded someone else’s misery. As my seven year old just said, ‘It’s like paying someone to kill themselves.’

So there will be no iPad for me. I’d never be able to wash the blood off.