“I need to wee.” A long, awkward pause ensues, in which my four-year-old niece gazes up at me with a patient and trusting expression that is somehow frightening.
I’ve been back from Australia for about three days and we’re out for lunch. Her dad, who she still can’t entirely grasp is my brother, has just gone off to the bathroom. This has created a power vacuum. I feel a little bit like a Russian aristocrat awaking the morning after the revolution.
“I neeeed to peeeee!” she says again, with more urgency.
It becomes clear that she’s telling me this because I am, in fact, the adult in the room. The person who, if you’re four and your dad is gone for a few minutes, you’ll presume qualified to help you when life’s inevitable challenges arise. “You need to help me wipe my bum,” she bellows with strange intensity as I attempt, feeling strangely embarrassed, to guide her discreetly past tables of drinkers and diners in the direction of the bathroom.
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We’re in an old man pub of the type you only get in Ireland. A lot of dark wood and Guinness and bowls of chips. This was the same old man pub when I was a child, only the supply of men who haunt the bar has probably changed shifts over the last 30 years. My brother and I ate lunch here with our family the day he made his Communion, as adults sat smoking indoors. It is a distinctly Irish scenario, this strange intergenerational pub recreation. Families eating a carvery lunch amid the smell of damp hops and a former era, as regulars on bar stools slowly dip nose-first toward their pints the longer they sit. The place looks pretty much as I remember it. There is a photo of me from that day when my brother made his Communion. In it, I’m the same age my niece is now. The place has probably had a couple of fresh coats of paint since, but little beyond that.
We head to the ladies’ room, which definitely hasn’t been redecorated in recent decades and immediately, there are issues. “There’s no lady on the door,” my niece declares, motioning toward the door in question and looking concerned. “It’s not the toilet without the lady” – here she pauses briefly to inhale from the balls of her feet – “on the door. So we’re not allowed in there.” There is a confidence in her voice that could seize control from a shaky regime in a small country. I do see her point but explain that instead of the usual little woman pictured on the bathroom door, this one has a sign that spells the word “ladies”, which really means the same thing.
She insists that she’s much too small to be a lady. I consider the layers under a child’s questions, and how I might explain synonyms, or how words and pictures can represent the same concepts, or what a concept is, or that my guess from looking around was that this bathroom is definitely our best bet because I could confidently imagine the men’s room likely resembles the Somme. We are very much allowed in the ladies’ room, I promise her. It would be frowned upon if either of us did a wee in any other room. “Well I don’t know how to” – here, she gesticulates with great weariness – “read!”
Inside what we’ve confirmed to be the bathroom we’re definitely allowed to enter, she selects her preferred cubicle. “Not that one a spider is in” – inhales – “there and spiders have this many legs”, she tells me, splaying out her little caterpillar fingers and staring at them. “It’s a bit dirty,” she says of the second, and I consider that Irish social progress might be represented by the waning familiarity children under 10 have with hygiene standards in the average pub toilet.
We emerge from the ladies’ room without a lady sign several minutes later, mission accomplished.
I saw my niece last year before leaving for a new life in Australia, when she was a little shorter and less philosophically inclined. “Why?” is now her favourite question – “why can a picture and a word be the same?”, “why does your hair have some white ones in there?”, “why did you go on four planes to get here?”, “why do I live in Limerick?”
That last one I could answer. “Ask your dad.”
This year, she is suddenly a little less of a baby and more of a child. Limbs and hair grown, vocabulary expanded, fondness for ketchup firmly established, ostensibly probing questions positively incessant. When I chose to leave, I was making a choice to pursue what was best for me and for my husband at the time, but emigration comes with knock-on choices. Ripples of choices. One of mine was the choice not to be a regular physical presence in this small person’s life. Or perhaps that is just a consequence of other choices. The outcome is the same, regardless. An absence I have created, or a presence I’ve chosen not to.
The choice to leave home is politically complex. It can leave people you love feeling slightly rejected because they know you have placed something – whether it’s money, work, love, freedom, access to healthcare or whatever else – above your relationship with them.
You’ve chosen something else – a life and a place in which they don’t feature as often as they once did.
When I visit home, I sit in the consequences of that choice to leave. A child who was barely able run in a straight line when I left is suddenly asking me if I’ve ever met a koala and, if so, what his name was. When I help my niece to the bathroom I realise how alien the trust she places in me suddenly feels . . . because I’m not here.
She holds my hand as we head back to the table, and I wonder for a moment which of us is minding the other.
[ Laura Kennedy: ‘I don’t say I’m a feminist anymore’Opens in new window ]
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