I’ve turned into an Irish Mammy... and I never even saw it coming!
In her typically poignant (and of course hilarious) words, our writer reveals how it feels to see her beloved children finally start to leave the nest...
SHE had managed to open the overhead bin, but now, as the yawning passengers shuffled off this Aer Lingus flight at JFK, the diminutive, elderly woman was staring at her bag helplessly.
Then a large pair of hairy arms reached over her head and effortlessly retrieved her bag. ‘If you hadn’t filled the bloody thing with Superquinn sausages and Barry’s tea bags,’ her adult son admonished her, laughing, ‘you could have carried it yourself’.
In the row behind them, I was waiting for the crowd to move. And I found this little scene suddenly poignant, as I realised that this woman was a mother, visiting her adult child who had abandoned her for the bright lights of New York.
And it was only as I lifted my own bag with its own supply of Barry’s tea bags down that it suddenly hit me like a sledgehammer: My God, that is me.
You’re not allowed to leave the room when you first have kids. Do you remember that? For a long time, I found it suffocating. I was the kind of person who didn’t think twice about taking foreign holidays on my own.
I went to three Féiles without ever once booking – or even thinking about – accommodation. I cannot account for my movements for most of my twenties.
Then one morning, not long after my eldest child was born, I ran out of milk. And even though the shop was less than 100 metres away at the top of our road, I had to lift my sleeping baby from her Moses basket, put her protesting body into her coat and hat, strap her into her buggy, fill the emergency bag with nappies, sacks and wipes – because God only knew what might happen in those 100 metres – put the covers on the buggy and manoeuvre it through two sets of doors and down a flight of steps, just to be pointing in the right direction. And I can remember thinking, I will never be free again.
THEN one day they leave you for the other side of the world. And they don’t even have the good grace to strap you in for the ride.
That it happens by degrees doesn’t really help. Soon, you can leave the room. You make sure there’s nothing perilous within their reach, leave the television in charge and make a dash for the loo.
Then one day, you manage to have the quickest shower in history without their quizzical eyes staring in through the glass door at you. Eventually, you will have the run of your whole house. Shine sweet freedom.
Then something happens. The eldest covering her whole body in Sudocreme while I was hoovering the bedrooms ahead of a visit from my mother-in- law was just a minor setback. Much later, when I got blasé about my room to roam, the four-year-old and two-year-old dropped a coin into the new baby’s mouth as she lay on her mat on the floor in the next room.
She choked, they mercifully ran for me, and I miraculously remembered the emergency first aid I’d been taught in the neo-natal unit.
And that put an end to my wander-into-the-other-room lust for a long time. For other mothers, it was the car. The first time they flew into the shops for milk without unstrapping the child from their seat, and how they only heard afterwards all the calls into The Gerry Ryan Show or Liveline about cars going on fire, or bad bogeymen stealing cars with children in the back.
And then, finally, the day they’re just about old enough for you to leave them at home snuffling while you dash out for a bottle of Calpol, praying the whole short way that you won’t run into a neighbour who’ll want to speak to you or a pharmacist demanding the perfunctory conversation about the weather.
Let’s briefly remember babysitters. I know for a fact that our first three forays into the world of babysitters ended in abandoned meals and early returns.
After that, we had more or less a 50:50 success rate, insofar as we only had to make emergency dashes for home half the time. On all those other nights, though, we had a perfectly successful, miserable time.
It’s a perfect Catch 22. You spend huge amounts of time planning on leaving them – ‘at
what age can you leave your child home alone’ is one of the questions parents (well, mothers) most frequently ask each other – then you’re racked with guilt and nightmarish (and highly unlikely) scenarios when you actually do.
But you still never really countenance or even improbably imagine the almost certainty that one day they will skip away from you, and they won’t even pause to consider if you’re old enough for them to go.
And I just wish now that we hadn’t all devoted quite so much time to planning our own escape routes, when all the time we were ignoring the fact that it was our children who’d already started tunnelling for freedom.
It actually wasn’t so bad leaving her to the airport.
She had been planning the J1 adventure for the best part of a year, and it had been a fraught, complicated and shockingly expensive process.
We had had endless conversations about Airbnbs, Irish bars, friends who she didn’t know well enough to live with, friends who she knew well enough to avoid living with, embassy interviews, money, money and money.
SO when we waved goodbye at Dublin Airport and she disappeared through the departure gates chatting excitedly with her preferred friend and new housemate, it was almost a relief that her adventure was finally beginning.
And even if we only saw her on Skype once a week after that, her happy Instagram posts and endless texts about the complexities of her phone bill – I assume I’m not the only J1 parent currently wondering why Dan Brown didn’t base the Da Vinci Code around Vodafone’s labyrinthine tariffs for young Irish people in the States – made it feel like she was still dependent; still our problem to solve.
Plus, there was her bedroom. Given her permission to tear it asunder while she’s away, I spent the first few weeks thoroughly excavating years of hoarded clothes, papers, notes, books, keepsakes, litter, and a whole range of other unmentionables.
I filled two file boxes with her handwritten song lyrics – the only asset I was warned to preserve.
I bathed her baby doll Betty, washed and ironed her clothes (Betty’s, that is) and returned her to her freshly made-up bed.
And the whole time, surrounded by the scrappy evidence of her 21 years, it felt like she hadn’t gone away, you know.
But one night, a few weeks before she’d left, when she’d crawled into bed beside me and sobbed her fears and doubts into my arms, I’d offered to visit her in New York halfway through her stay.
I didn’t want to: much as I love The Big Apple, taking a bite of it in sweltering high season July would be both expensive and uncomfortable – and to be honest, I never expected her to take me up on the offer.
But she had gratefully sobbed acceptance and it was obvious that this was the security blanket she needed to carry with her on her journey. And now here I was, just another Irish mammy carrying Barry’s tea bags through JFK Airport. I don’t know how many have gone before me, but we must be many, many thousands.
And I don’t know why it never occurred to me that I am now part of a very particular club. Maybe it’s because I didn’t particularly want to be a member.
I am not a slippered, aproned, roundy, smiley, benign mammy with sensible hair who turns on the immersion and makes apple tarts when her children are on the way home.
I went to three Féiles without having anywhere to stay, for God’s sake. How have I ended up on this wrong side of the tracks?
SO we sunbathe in Central Park in bikini tops and we go to over-priced rooftop bars and when I get ID’d I almost expire with delight. But when we walk from the subway station towards her Brooklyn apartment I feel a creeping sense of unease at the decrepit state of her surroundings, at the litter-strewn cracked concrete streets, at the unmistakeable smell that signalled years of dope smoking.
She’s always been small, my girl, but suddenly she is the tiniest person in the biggest city, a sparrow in an eagle’s nest, and a palpable nausea rises up from some part of me I never knew existed.
Oh look, it’s fine. We’re only going this way because her usual subway station was closed, and later, when we go out to eat along the route she normally travels, it’s perfectly acceptable.
And her accommodation is fine and the bar where she’s working is okay, and even though she’s exhausted and appears to be surviving on bananas, she’s having the best time.
So I have no idea from what well those tears spring when I say goodbye to her for the second time this summer.
But here they come, huge, shuddering sobs that mean I can’t let her go and, oh God, it feels like she can’t let me go either.
And as I head for the airport, it feels as if somebody has stopped the world and is now shouldering it heavily in the wrong direction.
It is so utterly counter-intuitive to leave her behind that I wish I had never come to this terrible place that I love, that is keeping my child from me. I never expected this.
And yet. This is supposed to happen. I have successfully brought my beautiful child to adulthood. She is in New York, she is happy. The Sudocreme is a distant memory.
No matter how it might feel right now, the world is actually spinning in the right direction. And it’s not like she’s gone forever.
I know there are thousands of parents who would give anything for their emigrant children to be coming home in five weeks. I know how lucky I am.
So I remind myself of that now, as I stand in her spotless, sunny bedroom every morning and wonder if there’s anything else I can do in there. Five weeks. Only one of us is counting the days. Because nobody told me there’d be days like these. Nobody told me that somehow, I would become that mammy.