I’m now signed up with two different ways of working in the health service and I still haven’t been deployed anywhere. Hurry up and wait seems to be turning the days into a miasma of ennui. Getting out of bed has reverted to being very difficult. It’s rare for me to manage it before 2pm and I don’t see that improving until I have a reason to get up. At 8 months old, Jellyfish is having a sleep regression. Every time he wakes up in the night for milk, he decides to spend an hour playing. Crawling. Making noises. My husband has just put him down for a nap and said it was like trying to tire out the Energizer Bunny. I’d  agree with that.

I planted some pea seeds. They have sprouted. They are in tiny pots.

I’m trying to put an application in for university, to retrain in a proper healthcare job. I want to be a dietitian, or a midwife. I’m going to talk more about that in an upcoming post because I want to get my head on properly before I apply.

Everyone is getting restless. It’s a brilliant sunny day today, and I can hear a cacophony of hedge cutters, lawn mowers and other such things. Staying indoors would be harder if we had anywhere to go.

Apparently, putting a couple of bits of gardening equipment outside the back door was a mistake. Like a dog marking his territory, the landlord and his adult son decided to use my back door (which is all glass) as target practice with a football. I know everyone is going stir crazy but it literally felt like the house was being invaded, like they were trying to say, “you can’t put things in the space around your house. That’s our house and we can do whatever we like with it. You have no garden. Not even that concrete outside your back door.” The ball kept hitting the gardening equipment and my back window as well.

Timmy, our last surviving rabbit, lives just inside the back door, where we have set up his hutch opposite the fridge and the tumble dryer. We leave the hutch door open nearly all the time, and just outside it, he has a little pet pillow and a pile of hay to snuggle in. I got quite hacked off about the fact the football was stressing out my beautiful orange rabbit, although I didn’t know how to go out and say anything without being confrontational so I just stayed indoors and seethed. I’m actually doing an anger management counselling course online at the moment so I’ll be able to help people through their anger soon. One big part of it is it’s okay to be angry sometimes.

So the house is basically an island surrounded by shark-infested water. We can’t go out, except to walk to the car and drive somewhere, which you’re not supposed to do right now.

The sun is an ongoing concern. I read in a reputable newspaper that a giant hole in the ozone layer opened up over winter, and apparently it circles over the northern hemisphere. It will be over us for the next month while it takes time to dissipate. On the map, Ireland looks so small compared to this circling threat of cancer and death.

I haven’t fully looked into the dangers of sun exposure without the ozone layer, but it worries me. There are three types of UV radiation that goes from the sun to Earth; UVA, UVB and UVC. The ozone layer usually protects us from the worst, which can cause skin cancer, blindness, sunburn and cataracts (although the cataracts presumably aren’t going to concern you if you’re already blind).

What I’m not sure on is how this will affect plants and animals. They’re outside all the time, and our ecosystem is already hanging in a delicate balance because of man-made problems like pollution and global warming. If species get irradiated and wiped out, the whole ecosystem could fall apart.

I’m worried. It would be easier not to worry if I had some work to do. I can’t write my books right now, because they just seem so frivolous and self-indulgent, like a complete waste of time, but I don’t have anything else to do because I’m waiting for the phone to ring to know which pharmacy needs my help. And then there’s the feeling, underneath it all, the one from the part of me that hates myself. No one needs you. You have nothing to contribute. Why did you even try and help? Like anyone would need you in a crisis. 

I’m glad I have my little jellyfish. Those sort of thoughts got really bad in the 6 months after his birth but generally, the fact he exists and is so dependent on me means the thoughts pass eventually. Someone needs me. Someone wants me around, even if he doesn’t show it. Someone is sad when I’m not near him.

The thoughts return after a while. They’re like waves. Sometimes the tide is high and I’m drowning, battered by wave after freezing wave of dark thoughts, clinging to a slippery rock, trying not to fall into the sea, wondering why I’m fighting it so hard. Other times, the tide goes out and there’s sunshine and a mile of golden sandy beach between me and the water. The less obvious danger then is when I forget how bad the sea becomes at high tide.

Is there such a thing as an Emotional Support Baby? [there would be a laughing emoji here if I knew how to get one on WordPress]