Julie Helen: 'My ordinary life is beautiful and I feel very grateful for it'

The end of the year is a time for reflection and looking forward to what comes next. It is also a reminder to me of the first time I wrote this column 22 years ago, a lifetime and a blink at the same time.

If I could talk to that young woman today, I would tell her how special her passion for disability inclusion is and that it will continue to be a thread that runs through the coming years and is probably the greatest guiding force in the path ahead. Then I would also tell her the pursuit of an ordinary life is a lot harder than it looks but it is worth every hard slog.

My ordinary life is beautiful and I feel very grateful for it. I know if I told young Julie that she would get her Leaving Cert, then a degree and a masters, live in Galway, come home to Cork, meet the love of her life, marry and have a glorious boy, Ricky, and build and live in a beautiful home in West Cork, she would scarcely have believed it. All those things are true, with so much more.

Probably the biggest surprise for me in all of it is how much I love being Ricky’s Mom. Even at 18, I definitely wanted to fall in love, marry and have kids just like my parents did. They had already met when they were 18 so I was behind schedule.

David and I met when I was 28 and I knew very quickly I wanted him to be the Dad of my children, he had such love and kindness in his eyes. I always knew I’d love to have kids but wondered if I’d manage. Not only do I manage being a Mom, I flourish in it, it seems to have made me whole in a way I never expected to feel and watching David be Dad to Ricky is a great joy too.

On New Year’s Day, David and I will celebrate being 10 years married. He is celebrating from a hospital bed due to an infection and I feel like part of me is missing.

His absence reminds me of the incredible team we make. The things I struggle with, he steps in and the things he needs a hand with, I step in. Even beyond that, being together, figuring it all out, making plans and bringing them to life together is better than that 18-year-old could ever have dreamed.

We have had our knocks. Even visiting my own husband in hospital takes careful planning and support from others, but it’s part of my ordinary, beautiful life and my role within it of being a wife.

I think my wish for 2026 is that I can take stock of the roles I have in my ordinary, beautiful life and continue to fulfil them, as wife, partner, mother, daughter, sister, friend and colleague. Sometimes, being able to nail those roles can be challenging, especially when there are physical access barriers or other barriers in my way, but I am being deliberate about trying to put processes in place to make ordinary life as smooth as possible.

I’ve a new wheelchair and once I get the hang of, it’ll make a big difference, we have new flat surfaces around our own house and my parents’ house which makes coming and going a bit more straightforward and means I can use my wheelchair more readily.

I think my aim is to keep refining how my ordinary, beautiful life works so that I can make my mark on my own little corner of the world.