Saying ‘I love you’ can be the hardest — and easiest — thing to do

EARLIER this year, in an article in The New Yorker called Shopping In Tokyo, novelist David Sedaris wrote: “I’m not sure how it is in small families, but in large ones relationships tend to shift over time. You might be best friends with one brother or sister, then two years later it might be someone else. Then it’s likely to change again, and again after that.

‘‘It doesn’t mean that you’ve fallen out with the person you used to be closest to but that you’ve merged into someone else’s lane, or had him or her merge into yours. Trios form, then morph into quartets before splitting into teams of two. The beauty of it is that it’s always changing.”

The reason that I bring this up is that I have a younger sister, Marina, and three older siblings, Karen, Jackie and Paul; all of them as wonderful and as complex and creative and lovely as each other. So Sedaris’s words resonated. We are forever merging into someone else’s lane. Like all Irish families.

Last weekend, we all went to Santa’s House Express at Palmerstown House Estate, Co Kildare, where we were transported back to our childhoods together on the Santa Train Experience (with our respective children in tow). As the train slid past the Santas and Elves in the pretend snow and the real cold, we waxed lyrical about old times, good, bad and mad. There were so many of us that we almost had our own train. We Egans of Henley Park, Churchtown, are like our own cult. Like all Irish families.

The weekend before we had all gone to a party in my sister Jackie’s house to celebrate her daughter Eve and Martin Curley’s recent wedding. Karen, Marina and Paul told great stories and entertained us while I sat there like a Trappist Monk. This was not unrelated to the fact that I had referred to Martin’s father Jack in an article in the Sunday Independent as George. It was a running joke at the party that I had been watching too much Peppa Pig with Emilia (George is the name of Peppa’s brother) and it has turned my brain to mush. Which, of course, is not strictly untrue.

Even though five of us grew up in a three-bedroom house in Churchtown we don’t see each other that much any more, or maybe not as we would like to. It is all texts and the odd phone call. I am the worst.

I am just not a very good brother.

I can actually express this to you, a complete stranger, in print easier than I could say it to my own brothers and sisters: “I love you.” It’s not emotional cut-off or estrangement or unprocessed emotional detachment. It’s just the way I am. I love them all dearly but I wouldn’t dream of telling them. Even with drink in me. Mercifully, I am the complete opposite with my child, Emilia. I tell her I love every chance I get. One day she’ll stop me and say: “Dad, I know.” I am a terrifyingly middle-aged 49 while she is not yet two. I am wondering at what point she will look at me as less her daddy and more as this decaying old lad — a permanently ominous rendering of the decline into death.

I am also wondering at what age Emilia will start to plan her life without me. Hopefully not too soon. I plan to be around for at least her 21st birthday party. When I get too old and too doddery — again, hopefully, not too soon — she can sit opposite me and pretend to listen as I tell her my jaded tales from the longgone world of media; each one more humiliating than the last.

More positively, it is wonderful to watch Emilia in the alternative reality she is creating all around her at the moment. I brought her into town in her buggy last Saturday morning. I had only got her on to the slide in the playground in St Stephen’s Green when it started to lash rain.

We tried sheltering under a tree before giving up and going to the Disney Store on Grafton Street. I gave up on that too when Emilia pulled practically every bear off the shelf. We ended up in the restaurant in The Westbury because I didn’t want to bring her into a pub and it was now raining like some flood in the Bible. Emilia threw the bread the manager was kind enough to give her at the lovely couple opposite us.

I projected my diminishing energies into a largely unsuccessful attempt to keep Emilia, if not quiet, at least from throwing stuff from her high chair. When she crumpled up the menu and dispatched that like an Exocet Missile I knew the game was up.

The restaurant, or at least our part of it, went silent, at least until Emilia, who is normally good, started roaring for more stuff to throw. Like Beckett, my Emilia had put “a stain on the silence”. A happy stain from the looks of the diners as Emilia and I slunk out of The Westbury in shame.

The rain had stopped. So I pushed her down Grafton Street in her buggy. She was in another world looking at all the stuff sparkling in shop windows, cooing at the Christmas trees.

She loves Christmas, even though at 22 months old she hasn’t a clue what Christmas is — yet she probably understands more about Christmas than all of us.

Emilia is equally oblivious to the fact that when she goes to her babiesand-toddlers group at St Kevin’s community hall in Portobello next Thursday, Santa will be none other than her father dressed up in a ridic red costume. She won’t know who I am.

There will come a time when I won’t know who I am either. But not too soon.