Róisín Ingle: My inner GOW is intent on making her presence felt lately

There’s a sofa in our kitchen dining area. A corduroy sofa. I think my mother gave it to me when she moved in with my sister. Now, I would just like to point something out about sofas or settees or whatever you prefer to call them. This is kind of groundbreaking news, so hold on to your hats: Sofas are for sitting on. That might sound obvious to you but it is not obvious to the people in my house. Everything gets put on the sofa. Laundry baskets. Hoodies. Runners. You never know what you might find. There’s always at least one ginormous flask of water resting on the sofa. I mutter “sofas are for sitting on” and then put the flask on the table so I can sit on the sofa. I grew up drinking a few glasses of water a day. And a fair whack of orange-flavoured Miwadi (not your wadi, my wadi), with some occasional glasses of the blackcurrant variety just to mix things up. It seemed to be enough to keep me hydrated. I didn’t expire from the thirst. I’m still here. My daughters and their friends appear to need litres of water to survive each day and many different receptacles for the water. People called Stanley and Lulu Lemon are coining it with these water flasks. I search “can you drink too much water?” and apparently you can and there is such a thing as “water intoxication” but I don’t say anything. I know what they’d say if I did. They would say: “Calm down, bro. Stop crashing out.”I get called bro a lot. I say: “I’m not your bro,” but it makes no difference. When Love Island was on during the summer, it was “mate”. As in, “What’s for dinner, mate?” My husband embraces this. He calls our daughters “bro” and “mate” right back. He thinks it’s fun to join in the lingo. A natural way to bond with his teenage daughters. When you point out something he agrees with he says “tru dat” and there is something disconcerting about a 50-something-year-old man saying “tru dat” but he doesn’t care about being uncool. Crashing out means freaking out, by the way, like losing the plot and getting riled up about something that really isn’t worth fussing over. There are schoolbags full of technology on the sofa. We paid a small fortune for two of these chrome book things during the summer because apparently schoolbooks are old school now. Schoolbags and bags containing gym gear and instruments and music books and hairbrushes get deposited on the sofa. Every time I clear the sofa of teenager debris, protein bars and hair clips and apples, I turn around and there is something else there. “Sofas are for sitting on,” I say but it’s like nobody can hear me. It appears I am talking to myself. READ MOREIt’s not that I am transitioning into a GOW (Grumpy Old Woman) – she’s always been very much in me – but my inner GOW seems to be really intent on making her presence felt lately. She’s mad as hell and she’s not going to take all this sofa-based clutter any more. These are some of the other things she says ad nauseam. “Can you close the cupboards/fridge/door?” “You left the lights on in your bedroom. Again!” The GOW in me says what she sees; she’s quite basic in that way. “Shoes in hall!” “Sweatshirts on book shelves!” “Apple core!” Nobody listens, which I can’t blame them for. She’s even wrecking my head at this stage.We were watching Modern Family the other day and the wife character, Clare, was busy pulling off some amazing logistically challenging feat. Meanwhile, the husband, Phil, was marvelling at how wonderful she was. It was like he’d forgotten that he’d married this quite brilliant woman. “You fall in love with this extraordinary person and over time they become ordinary,” he reflected. “I think it’s all the nagging.” It hit home. Or it hit different, as my daughters might say. A few years ago, while navigating one of life’s more dramatic curve balls, I decided to start making my bed every day. Some of you scoffed at this but many more of you understood. This simple act was transformative. Making my bed set the tone for my day, a hopeful, productive tone. It said, “life is unpredictable and we don’t really have any control over what happens but you can still make your bed”. ​It helped a lot at the time. And what is even more incredible, considering I am someone who says more than her prayers about many things, is that I am still making my bed nearly three years later. Maybe I can just decide to stop nagging. Maybe I can observe the stuff that accumulates on the sofa, move it to a more appropriate location and say nothing to nobody about any of it. I think about this for a while. This alien scenario feels peaceful. Calm. But if making my bed was the Carrauntoohil of challenges, putting a stop to all the nagging is my Mount Everest. Who would I even be without the nagging? Maybe it’s time to find out, bro.