Séamas O’Reilly: ‘My dad’s capacity for nerves breathed its last during the two years in which six of his seven daughters were teenagers’ - Independent.ie
Séamas O’Reilly: ‘My dad’s capacity for nerves breathed its last during the two years in which six of his seven daughters were teenagers’
After his mother died, Séamas O’Reilly’s father raised 11 children on his own in rural Derry. Ahead of Father’s Day, the author and dad-of-two pays tribute to the unflappable man who raised him
At a book event in Donegal last year, I was surprised to find many of the books I was handed at the signing came already signed, and not by me. No, that signature was the instantly recognisable chicken scratch with which my father signed my permission slips in school, and which he encouraged me to forge when the charms of signing more forms than the tax office began to wane. While I sat, pen in hand, for my adoring public to greet me with their books, a second, longer line had formed to meet my father, once they learned he was in attendance, and the real signing was happening 10 feet away from my lowly author’s desk.
Since the publication of my book last year, my father has become something of a low-key celebrity. Already quite famous to us, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? has suddenly promoted him to others. NPR called him “a hero”, The Irish Times “clever, loving and eccentric”, while Marian Keyes declared her “giant love” for him in the strongest possible terms. My father was so pleased with the latter that he has undertaken to read Keyes’ entire oeuvre, presumably so he can pepper her with questions when they eventually start dating.
I mean, I wrote the book, so I can’t complain, but the offer to write even more about him, and his parenting, for Father’s Day comes with the risk I’ll just be adding more fuel to a rather unseemly fire of praise. It is, however, one I’m willing to take, so long as I can somehow make sure he doesn’t read this.
Growing up, my family were a huggy, loving bunch, no doubt galvanised by my mother’s premature death into appreciating each other a little bit more than other families. Certainly, more so than my friends, who all seemed to be in the early stages of a long, cold war with lovely, caring parents whom they regarded as, basically, evil. This effect was exaggerated by the fact we grew up so rurally that I only really got to see the inside of my friends’ homes when I was old enough to travel into Derry from our rural outpost near the Donegal border, by which time my teenage companions were mostly of the door-slamming, swearing-at-the-kitchen-table variety, their hearts blacked and soured by raging hormones and the indignities of not getting everything they wanted any time they asked.
I have often regarded this disparity — them spitting at their dads; me giving mine a huge hug when he got in from work each evening — as a sign of my deep emotional maturity and, moreover, proof that I’m just a better, more emotionally astute person in general. It gives one a nice, superior feeling to do this. I’d recommend it to anyone. “Of course I didn’t take my dad for granted!” I’ll say to myself, as my imaginary dinner guests swoon and dab tears from their eyes. “See, we had it tough.”
For the first 30 years of my life, I saw the parent-child arrangement exclusively from this child’s point of view, a vague awe that made me seem interesting and kind. The narcissism inherent in planning a memoir of your childhood will, you might be surprised to learn, only emphasise this impulse. And then, shortly before I started writing it, I became a father myself. Four years later, I’m a father of two, and queasily horrified to find I now see the equation from its opposite angle.
My friends often speak of understanding their parents so much more once their own children arrive; of gaining a greater perspective when viewed through their own experiences of parenthood; of finally getting what they were going through. In truth, I can’t claim to have experienced this phenomenon myself, and have long since realised I never will. Becoming a dad hasn’t made me see him as my peer in fatherhood, so much as a greater enigma than he’s ever been.
I have two kids, one nearly four, the other 10 weeks old, and it’s difficult. As in, I can’t imagine it being very much more difficult. To be honest, I feel like every night I’ve kept them alive for one day more, a street party should be held in my honour. Each time I step outside my door, people should stop me in the street and shake my hand to thank me for my good work. There should be music, and dancing, and prizes.
My father, by contrast, had eight children by my age, all living in a house he designed and built from scratch himself. He and my mother had already fostered six children in rural Fermanagh. He would go on to have three more children of his own. (I, the ninth of his brood, would be next). On top of that, I’m just over six years away from being older than my mother ever was, which induces another strange sort of vertigo within me that I can’t process for any longer than it takes to finish this sentence and begin another.
Despite all this, my father doesn’t give much parenting advice. In the four years I’ve been a dad, he’s only doled out minuscule doses of tutelage, and never unsolicited. In a way, it’s one of his most admirable qualities. His take on parenting is that it’s a job of work, and doable by anyone if they commit to it. The corollary of that is he has a low-level loathing of any book, show or media figure who attempts to make parents feel stupid or inferior because they don’t abide by a pre-set dogma of parenting rules. My weekly column on fatherhood has never given a single unit of universal parenting advice in four years for just this reason.
After all his experience, his biggest takeaway is sobering and liberating at once: “You were all different.” This he tells me any time I ask him how best to stop a baby crying, or induce them to eat, or walk, or just about anything other than scream their little lungs off. It’s reassuring, but a little maddening, to discover I must get to know my children since, like all parents, I sometimes lapse into treating them like adorable, smelly little smoke alarms — devices built to order on the one production line, who must be dealt with via the self-same factory settings. He’ll tell me that some of us needed silence to sleep; others a noisy kitchen or moving car. Some of us ate everything that wasn’t nailed down; others were picky to the point of mania. Some walked and talked at nine months; others were stationary and mute closer to two years of age, and all still maintained full powers of ambulation and speech without him getting too worried about it either way.
My father is not a worrier at all. It would seem that whatever capacity he had for anxiety has been burned away by the proving fire of 25 years raising 11 kids and fostering half a dozen more. My own theory is that his capacity for nerves breathed its last sometime during the heart-attack inducing two years of his life in which six of his seven daughters were teenagers at once.
Nowhere is this even-keel approach more apparent than in another of his famous mantras: “Babies bounce.” To be clear, he intends it more as a conciliatory offering than a recommendation; a soothing balm to administer to his tired, wired children any time a trip or fall sends us into apoplexy. The hundreds, if not thousands, of cuts, grazes and moderately severe bone breaks we treated him to in childhood were not exactly gratefully received, but they did give him the perspective to know that the fear a parent feels in moments of such horror and the danger to the child in question are almost always drastically mismatched. That, and the fact that terrified, nervous parents rarely make better problem-solvers when those real problems do emerge.
My dad’s time in the trenches of parenting has given him a view of the craft so broad, and forgiving, that direct instructions rarely apply. I realise, in those moments, that I don’t want equanimity and nuance. I don’t even want wisdom. I want simple, declarative guidelines uttered with the day-glo conviction of Instagram ads declaring ‘one cool trick’ to make your baby happy, healthy, wealthy and wise. But once each crisis is in the rearview, I discover no amount of manic activity on my part really helps in any way. If I can slowly gain that perspective without having six teenage daughters, I’ll consider myself lucky indeed.
In the end, any talk with my father about parenting falls back on the same advice. Worry less, listen more, and for God’s sake be kind to yourself. It would be a tidy conclusion to say that, this done, your children will thank you for it — but, in the end, if you’re doing the job right, they should never need to. It’s a stupid, unfair and cruel truth of parenting that children should be ignorant of their parents’ sacrifices wherever possible, of the pain and the worry, the boredom and the nerves. Sure, I’d like — and very much deserve for — my kids to write a book about how good a dad I am. But, as hard as it is to hear, being taken for granted is probably the greatest tribute I’ll ever have.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is published by Little, Brown