{"id":416653,"date":"2026-04-25T09:12:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T09:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/416653\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T09:12:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T09:12:13","slug":"getting-a-tattoo-was-my-friends-idea-im-calling-it-my-mild-life-crisis-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/416653\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting a tattoo was my friend\u2019s idea. I\u2019m calling it my \u2018mild-life\u2019 crisis \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first met Lisa in a room on Holles Street<\/a> at a group antenatal meeting. I was only half listening to all the hypotheticals about labour and water births and how far in advance to pack your hospital bag. <\/p>\n

Pregnant<\/a> with twins at the time, I knew I was going to be having a scheduled Caesarean section. Medically, I have always been a person who operates on a need to know basis and I knew I didn\u2019t need to know a lot of the stuff that was being relayed to us in the room. So I did what I used to do at school when something felt irrelevant to me: I zoned out and made it my business to distract the person next to me. It\u2019s one of the greatest gifts of my life that the person sitting next to me was Lisa.<\/p>\n

From our whispered chat, I gleaned that we had the same doctor looking after us. Our medical insurance didn\u2019t stretch to a fancy consultant but, being \u201cgeriatric\u201d mothers of twins in our mid- to late-30s, we required more monitoring of our pregnancies, so we\u2019d been appointed one. <\/p>\n

To my horror, I had developed what you might call \u201cfeelings\u201d for this consultant. I learned later that these feelings were not unusual but at the time, I was appalled by them. Kind, witty and smart, Lisa seemed like a person who might understand my predicament so I took a chance asking what she thought about our consultant. Mortified, she admitted to similar feelings. We giggled about this vaguely sordid secret, our partners Phil and Jonny sitting either side of us, and then we went our separate ways. <\/p>\n

Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I went home and wrote a column about this encounter. Some of you might even remember reading it. But I never told you what happened next. I started to bump into Lisa at various scan appointments. The second time I saw her, I told her I had written a column about our shared experience. She didn\u2019t understand what I meant. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou wrote a what?\u201d she asked, incredulous in the Holles Street waiting room. (Shockingly, Lisa was not an Irish Times reader.) So I told her that part of my job involved writing about my life in The Irish Times which, when you say it out loud to a near-stranger, sounds odd. <\/p>\n

Then at one of the subsequent appointments, we discovered the scan man had scheduled both of us to have our twins on the same day in April. And that\u2019s how we both ended up in the same hospital, on the same day, giving birth to two sets of twin girls. On April 21st, 2009, cheered on by the cherry blossoms outside, Lisa had Maisy and Georgia, and later that day I had Joya and Priya. <\/p>\n

We\u2019ve all been in each other\u2019s lives in important, beautiful ways ever since. On the wild adventure of parenting twins, Lisa and I have always had each other\u2019s back. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0I\u2019m missing some teeth but I can\u2019t stop laughing or grinningOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

When they were babies, I bought a copy of Gina Ford\u2019s Contented House With Twins. I distilled that whole book into a one page document which I shared with Lisa. We synced the girls\u2019 sleeping and eating schedules, a strict routine which, while controversial to some, was a godsend for us. That was just the beginning. We\u2019ve been on holiday together, celebrated milestones together and enjoyed countless rainy picnics in parks. <\/p>\n

Our husbands get along great, apart from the fact that Jonny supports Liverpool and Phil supports Manchester United. Lisa is an avid Irish Times reader now. And together we\u2019ve watched our daughters grow into kind, funny, smart young women. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Bumping into Brad Pitt at Fallon & Byrne will be a big moment in my lifeOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

When I got married a couple of years ago, the four girls were bridesmaids. Lisa, who knows about trends and is as keen on shopping as I am allergic to it, helped them pick out the dresses and the Adidas Spezials they wore with them.<\/p>\n

This week the girls turned 17. Getting a tattoo to celebrate them was Lisa\u2019s idea, I merely jumped on her bandwagon. We decided on the outline of two small black hearts on the inside of our arms. It\u2019s the first, probably last, tattoo either of us will ever get. The hearts represent our daughters. The hearts represent friendship and a shared motherhood experience. The hearts may also represent some class of a midlife crisis. It\u2019s a mild one. A mild life crisis. Or maybe it\u2019s a dose of midlife clarity as we near our mid-50s.<\/p>\n

As I steeled myself for the experience, walking into the appropriately named Heartbreak Social Club tattoo parlour, I was struck by the duality of my mindset. I was in two minds about the tattoo but I did it anyway: It\u2019s no big deal, only a bit of ink on skin, but also it\u2019s permanent, so it\u2019s sort of a big deal. <\/p>\n

People might judge us when they spot them but also it doesn\u2019t matter what anybody else thinks. We will all be dust someday but also we are here right now. A couple of tiny hearts on our arms are a small reminder of that. And of a friendship so serendipitous it still feels like a miracle to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I first met Lisa in a room on Holles Street at a group antenatal meeting. I was only…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":416654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,709,1786,9386,45578],"class_list":{"0":"post-416653","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-magazine","12":"tag-parenting","13":"tag-pregnancy","14":"tag-roisin-ingle"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}