Wednesday, January 3rd, 2001 - Clontarf (16 years old)
Where do I start? At the beginning, I suppose. My alarm went off at 7.30am and I lay there listening to the radio until 8. I got up (grudgingly) to ring the doctor’s to make an appointment to get “The Pill”. No, not as contraceptive, but for my skin. I have tried absolutely everything and this is a last resort. If this doesn’t work, I’m going to be cursed with acne well into my adult years. It’s so bad. I hate it so much. It makes me look so UGLY. Big red blotches on my face. I can’t even wear makeup because I break out. Anyway, I went to the doctor and got it. I was reading the booklet and there’s so many side effects and stuff you have to watch out for, I hope it will be okay. And I hope to god it clears up this mess I call a face.
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023 - Charlottesville, VA
In June of last year, I came down with the shingles. It took a long time to reveal itself as shingles, presenting at first as a sharp and constant abdominal pain that spread slowly and intensified each day for about a week, so that by the time the telltale rash appeared I’d already been taking Tylenol and Ibuprofen around the clock thinking surely I was suffering from something quite serious, like a burst ovarian cyst or ovarian cancer, each of whose symptoms seem to include among them the same symptoms as every other disease. On day six, I was overcome with relief when the rash appeared and I realized (googled) what it was. In an earlier draft of this entry, I wrote a long and detailed description of the really quite incredible rash that developed around my left side and pelvis after that, tracing its evolution over the following days and weeks, the medications I took, how badly it stung, the shocking neuralgia. But you, too, can google a shingles rash and symptoms if you feel so moved, though I don’t particularly encourage it.
I had just arrived in Ireland with Adam and Elliott for a month-long visit when the rash appeared. I made an appointment with my GP. I would have the shingles for the entire summer, but I didn’t know that yet. My dad dropped me off at the doctor’s for my 4pm appointment, and I hoped I’d be home in time to put a severely jet-lagged Elliott to bed at 6.30, in possession of, if not a cure, then at least some relief from the intense pain.
The doctor’s office is in a pale yellow cottage in Clontarf, where I grew up, one of several identical cottages lined up in a neat row along the right side of Churchgate Avenue, a small lane that leads up to the side gates of the parish church. The lane is a dead-end to traffic, but if the gates are open, pedestrians can walk through the church grounds and out onto the seafront on the other side. The other cottages in the row are residential houses, some with colorful flower boxes on their window sills during the summer. The GPs yellow cottage has had a few different lives - until 2021, it was a credit union, and before that it was a different doctor’s clinic - but now it’s back to what I think of as its original form.
In the early days of 2001, I stepped out of this same cottage with a paper prescription in hand for a contraceptive called Dianette, my “last resort” on a path to being “cursed with acne well into my adult years.”
Something I find curious about this diary entry is that I appear to be speaking to a reader who doesn’t know me, who might mistake me for someone else, such as a young woman who might actually need a contraceptive. Don’t get the wrong impression of me, I seem to be saying, I am actually a loser. And in the same way that I am speaking to a future reader, a stranger, I also appear to be speaking from the vantage point of a much older version of myself. “Cursed with acne well into my adult years” is something one might say in their thirties. In my teenage diary I am placing myself there in my thirties, well into my adult years, describing my awful acne as if it had only recently gone away after plaguing me my whole twenties. I wrote that diary entry when I was 16, and I had been suffering from pretty severe acne for about four years by then, which of course felt like forever.
What I’m trying to say is that diary-keeping has always been half performance for me. See me here, at 16, writing self-consciously as if my diary would one day be excerpted and published, by me, on the internet in the form of a self-referential Substack newsletter.
That day in June, in the waiting room of the doctor’s office in the yellow cottage in Clontarf, I waited for my 4pm appointment until 5pm, 5.15pm, 5.25pm. After the first 45 minutes, I felt crazed from sitting and looking at my phone, my pain increasing as the painkillers waned. The woman sitting next to me had her young daughter with her, a cute little red-headed toddler with pink eyes and a runny nose. The little girl wobbled in and out of the waiting room door, which stood open to the street outside. Her father stood outside on Churchgate Avenue with an infant in a sling on his chest, along with a small group of other patients who had chosen to wait outside in the warm summer air rather than in a small room full of sick people. I smiled at the little girl, wished for a moment that Elliott was with me, and then almost immediately felt relief that he was not. A 90-minute wait for an appointment with a jet-lagged two-and-a-half year old who hasn’t napped would test me on a good day, but on that day, I felt sure it would have buried me.
I passed the rest of the wait chatting with the little girl’s mother, a remarkably cheerful woman considering she’d been waiting longer than I had, with a toddler, and had given birth to her second child only 7 weeks earlier. She told me that she and her husband had recently returned to live in Ireland from Australia. They’d lived there for ten years, been married there and had their daughter at the beginning of the pandemic. They’d been waiting, she said, to be allowed to leave Australia, where strict lockdowns kept the borders shut. Shortly after the restrictions were lifted and the borders opened up, they packed up their life and moved home. I wanted to ask her about the logistics of all this, whether they shipped their stuff in a container or sold it all. Did they sell their house? Did they quit their jobs, and how long did it take them to find new jobs in Ireland? Did they find a house to rent in Dublin, or was there a family house for them to live in? How much did it all cost? I couldn’t find a way to ask one question without the rest all spilling out at once, so I let the woman tell me instead about how incredible it was to be home and have relatives nearby to help with the children, to be back in the place where she grew up and could easily envision her children growing up, too. The conversation made me nauseous with envy, but I wanted to hear it all. Sometimes I feel great disappointment on Elliott’s behalf that he was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. I’ve spent a lot of time overlaying memories of my childhood with the fantasy of him walking the same streets.
I was called in to see the doctor at 5.30, and by 5.45 I was picking up my prescription antiviral in the pharmacy across the road. It was expensive, and I had to take it five times a day every 3-4 hours which meant waking up at night. That didn’t end up being a problem, since Elliott woke me up every night of our trip at least once, and never slept past 5am. I don’t think I have ever felt more exhausted in my life as I did those weeks in Ireland last summer, and that includes when Elliott was newborn. [Prospective parents and parents of infants look away now] By the time a child is two or three, the night wakings have compounded over time to create such a dearth of good rest that you feel at all times like you could easily have a serious illness and not know it.
Six months on, there is a vague shadow of the shingles rash on the left of my abdomen. The area sometimes stings and prickles suddenly. Other times, it feels numb, like the skin along my c-section scar, with which it intersects. The varicella-zoster virus that causes shingles had been living dormant in my body since I had chickenpox at the age of five. For 33 years I carried it around with me. It’s still there. I might get shingles again. I am no closer to dismantling my life here and moving my family across the ocean. I have deep acne scars on my cheeks and my temples. “The Pill” worked, after a while, and my acne cleared up. I continued taking it as a contraceptive for another 20 years, and it worked until I stopped, and got pregnant with Elliott.
I suppose what I’m getting at is something trite, like ‘The past is not dead. It’s not even past.’ I can’t decide how all this is related - the shingles, the acne, the doctor’s office, my encounter with the woman in the waiting room - except to say that aging and having a child have created, within me, a vertiginous sense of the timeline of my own life. My childhood seems extremely close and accessible to me, and at the same time incredibly distant and almost fictional. Or if not fictional, then a story I tell, over and over until nobody is listening anymore. I imagine my son, a little older, rolling his eyes as I describe to him for the hundredth time the rooms of houses I remember from long ago. And another very basic thing I am trying to express is that I miss my home and my family, which is to say that I miss many things from my past and I would love, more than anything, to go back.
Yours,
Helen.
The part about wanting to show your kids how/where you grew up resonates with me so much, as a Californian raising New York-born-and-bred children. It’s not a different country, but so much of their childhood is completely different from mine and it just feels weird. My family isn’t here, and I have no institutional knowledge of this place, and I am not “of” this place like they are. It’s a strange distance to navigate.