Hosting me, my 10 siblings, and all our partners and kids, is difficult for my father, since he doesn’t live in the Pentagon. Instead, for our summer reunion, we all go to a holiday park in Donegal that has a lovely view of Mulroy Bay, a great play area for the kids, and roughly 80% of Ireland’s domestic wasp population.
Donegal is beautiful, full of tidy little towns, postcard views, and scenery that’s gorgeous without ever being too full of itself. It’s like New Zealand if it stopped showing off for a second; hills and lakes that are lovely but not so vast they’ll induce an existential crisis.
Not that I saw any of this since, in a feat of poor timing that astounded even me, I’d managed to schedule my last two weeks of book writing for the exact duration of our first holiday in a year. While everyone else was enjoying the warm rain of a Donegal summer, I was staring at my own reflection in a laptop screen, desperately trying to finish a book that was already mildly overdue.
All of which pales in comparison to my wife’s horror at realising she would be doing almost all the daytime parenting during the trip. Like some horrible Edwardian novelist, I’d consigned her to every solo parent’s nightmare. I felt 3in tall but, thankfully, we got support.
First, we convinced my wife’s parents to come with us – and they were accepted into my family holiday like a pair of wartime evacuees. In fact, my family liked them so much I got suspicious. Now my siblings inquire into their wellbeing before ours and I suspect some have arranged to meet without us.
Secondly, our son was occupied by his 14 cousins, whose attention he adores above all things. Following a decade in which my collected siblings managed roughly 1.5 kids a year, we somehow sired him at the apex of a procreative lull, meaning he’s on track to be the longest serving ‘baby’ of the O’Reilly clan. This makes him an object of fascination for the clumsy curiosities of his elder cousins, who’ve come to think of him as a chubby little ginger toy they get praised for playing with.
In the end this helped lighten the load, but my wife still put in a heroic effort to fill in while I stewed like a pathetic worm, struggling to come up with funny descriptions of childhood foods and elderly relatives.
For the past year I’ve been writing a memoir about childhood, bereavement and the strengthening bonds of family life. I owe it to my family that I was allowed to finish doing so, while effectively ignoring them in the process. My wife would have been justified in throwing a few passing wasps at my head, but instead displayed an endless store of patience, and our relationship made it through intact. Which is good, since I don’t think my family could cope if we lost her parents in the divorce.
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
