Last week I cried on the floor of my office, the ugly abandoned bawling I rarely do since becoming a parent because I can’t summon the time, or the energy, or the privacy to do it.

I was crying because I seemed to have everything a bit wrong and suddenly the panorama was of a life that felt all wrong. I teach in a university and despite reworking my courses, I’d struggled to connect with my undergraduate students. After two weeks of reformer Pilates, my knee was making an alarming cornflakes noise every time I walked upstairs. My husband and I hadn’t shared a Netflix show in weeks, the true mark of marital cohesion. Only that week our nine-year-old had asked us, like some 90s Cosmopolitan quiz sprung to life, how many times a week we did “it” or if we only did “it” the once? and how did we manage to ever do “it” when the dog was always asleep in our bed?

To and from work I listened to podcasts and scrolled social media where women my age spoke with technical precision about deadlifting, or were journaling or attending the music gigs I booked and cancelled at the last minute.

Monday marked one year since my son finished treatment for leukaemia and my husband and I are humming with low-level euphoria. But I wonder if the gradual return from crisis-mode to normal life wasn’t part of my recent meltdown. During a crisis, the bar I set for myself was a bit like the........

© The Irish Times