Accident made me slow down
MY frazzled mammy life has hit an all time low. I ran over a fox or a cat... it was dark. I didn’t see him coming, but the event is still traumatising.
I take the same roundabout I always take, I feel a squelch under my tyre, but I keep driving because it’s too dangerous to stop.
Out of nowhere an irate taxi man tells me to pull down my window and roars “Go back, he’s flat to the mat.”
I was always going back, but this reaction adds to the shock!
Had I hit a person on a bike with no lights?
My mind takes over and I immediately catastrophize.
The angry taxi man drives off, I go back to the scene and there’s no animal, no blood and no trace of a cyclist. I ring 999. The emergency guy says: “What makes you think it was a person?”
Bawling crying at this point, I respond: “Well the taxi man said ‘he’.”
The emergency officer tells me he’s sending a car to check the scene.
I’m consumed with guilt because in the car I was mentally checking off my to-dolist for work and home.
My eyes were on the road but I was thinking of other things.
Still in shock, I go to the nearest Garda station to make a full report. The officer happens to be my daughter’s friend’s dad. I’m mortified in case he thinks I’m mad.
“Oh hi Siobhan”, he says, “Is this about running over a cat or a fox?”
I feel silly but fill him in on the course of events. He tells me hundreds of foxes are roaming at any given time... I exhale.
The lesson here is I need to think of one thing at a time.
Mammies’ to-do lists rattle in our minds incessantly and it can overwhelm us.
Very often I’m not in the moment, I’m thinking of school lunches, batch cooking and laundry piles. If I was more in the moment I would have reacted in a calmer fashion instead of arriving in a bawling mess at the police station.
Since ‘foxgate’ I’m intentionally slowing down my inner chatter.
I find by doing one thing at a time, properly, I’m being more productive and can think more clearly.
I look at other mammies and think how unfrazzled they are, but they’re probably just like me.
My grandmother’s phrase is now my mantra: “The more you hurry the less speed.”