As soon as my column failed to appear in The Irish Times Magazine last weekend, I started to get messages. What happened to your column? Were you fired? Some skipped the questions and went for assumptions: what did you do?
Given that some of these messages came from people related to me, I was slightly unsettled by what this seemed to say about how I’m regarded. Or what this seemed to say about how I am.
Happily, I was able to stuff down those worries deep into my psyche, where they will never trouble me again, and direct everyone to the words beside Séamas O’Reilly’s left foot announcing this column’s move to Wednesdays.
Some didn’t reply to this. Some said “Oh!” Some persisted with wanting to know what I had done, but most indulged in low-level grumbling about change.
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A lot of people aren’t fans of change, and often with good reason. It can be inconvenient. It can be destructive. But a lot of the time, change is just change. It doesn’t have any inherent quality other than how we react to it. That can be the difficult bit.
In our house, the usual complement of residents is myself, Herself and the last remaining child to use her age as an excuse not to move out and get a job. Daughter Number Four is 10 and claims she wants to concentrate on her studies. We’ll see about that.
But, as has happened before, we’re experiencing a change in house dynamics due to an influx of people. Daughter Number One is back from France for a couple of months, along with Granddaughter Number One, who can now refuse to go to bed in two languages. (I’ve tried using a few phrases in French on her, but she sneers at my poor pronunciation). Within the next fortnight, future son-in-law will be joining them.
They have stayed with us before: as part of the now traditional Irish family rite of looking for a place to live in the middle of a housing crisis. I’m legally obliged to describe this period of time as one during which everyone got on famously. There was no getting in each other’s way, no rows and no tension whatsoever. Families across the country will, no doubt, report exactly the same experience.
And, to complete the party, Son Number One will be arriving from Bolivia at the end of the month for his biannual visit home. There will be a lot of tiptoing and squeezing past each other. The bathroom will be permanently occupied and I’m planning to remortgage the house to pay for the food bill.
Change can surprise you: not always because it’s new, but because you’ve done exactly the same thing before
They are returning for various reasons. For Son Number One, it’s to see family and friends, but also to attend a wedding that most of us are going to. For Daughter Number One, she’s here to give birth. Despite the many good things you can say about the French health system, it turned out to be more practical to have the baby in Ireland.
One of those practical elements was that Granddaughter Number One’s old baby clothes had been stashed in our house. I retrieved them from a sealed plastic crate in the shed, while Herself laundered everything with a special detergent made from the breath of angels.
[ Seán Moncrieff: Visiting from France, my daughter found Ireland hard to loveOpens in new window ]
The result was a mountain of ironing: which is my job. Daughter Number One says ironing baby clothes is a bit boujee, but I don’t want my new grandchild to think we’re riff-raff. And anyway, I found myself enjoying it. I found a curious circularity to the process, and a tenderness. Because I had ironed these clothes before, after Granddaughter Number One had arrived, and I have done it for all my children, stretching back decades – every time marvelling that a human being could be so small. Change can surprise you: not always because it’s new, but because you’ve done exactly the same thing before.
