DSAS. Difficult Second Album Syndrome.
Phew. I’m not lazy or disorganised – I have a real, live, syndrome…
(and a new found sympathy for The Strokes who seem to be the most commonly used example of DSAS on google..)
You’re probably wondering now how you missed my first album, well, there wasnt one, but there was a first child…
My first child was my classic debut. I burst onto the motherhood scene, baby in one hand, weekly newspaper column in the other and I was unstoppable.
The next big thing.
On Fire.
She slept through the night at seven weeks, she crawled at nine months, walked at a year. Textbook.
And then we had Number 2.
And the inspiration vanished. The energy was as if it had never existed. And it all became one big mess.
Child No2 was Use your Illusion to Child No1’s Appetite for Destruction…
Instead of trips to the zoo, we had trips to the Doctor. No more home entertaining as the prime symptom of colic is a child that screams from 5.00pm to 10.00pm every night for three months…. And then came the chest infections, the asthma and finally the hip dysplasia scare.
And the worse it got, the more strident my denial became. I started to showjump again, spending more time crying than staying on. I ploughed ahead with my novel only to find that I could sympathise less and less with its overachieving heroine.
And I walked, and walked, and walked, because on top of all this, there was no way I was getting fat.
So she’s a year old now. And we made it. And I’m taking stock. Partly because when she’s older I never want her to ask ‘Mammy, how come you never wrote anything funny about me when I was small’ – well Darling, where exactly would you like Mammy to start….
Instead I’m going to get her to google The Strokes, and DSAS, and if she’s as smart as I think she is, I wont have to answer at all….