In America, our lives had been overwhelmingly focused upon raising the children. But changing adult tangents and diversions had taken hold in Ireland, and sometimes it felt as if the kids were getting short shrift. In Connecticut, we would rise at dawn from October to April to ferry all three to Saturday morning ice-hockey games where every participant's progress was closely admired by their parents, despite the fact that excursions to practice also ate up two evenings a week. After-school skiing and family sledding on our snowy driveway in the woods further enriched the children's life. The spring brought baseball and tennis; the summer, swimming competitions, fishing, and canoeing at the lake two minutes from our door. But Ireland had no ice, no snow, no baseball, and waters so cold bathers jumped out of them screaming "fecking hell!"
Jamie and I had enough to occupy ourselves -- the start of my magazine venture lay as close as locating one believing benefactor with a pot of gold, and Ulster Television's John McCann still seemed close to biting. Jamie, meanwhile, was enamored with the bright challenge of introducing sometimes deprived kids to the magic of live theater. But we had occasional misgivings about our kids' unrelieved city living, where the boys, at least, spent so much of their free time booting balls about the hard pavement of our treeless street. The only sport Christian Brothers offered was rugby, and Harris and Owen were still coming to terms with these Saturday morning contests, which few parents bothered attending, perhaps because they were often drowned in epochal torrents of rain. The contrast between the wholesome, if often over-organized, pastimes that our kids had been offered in the U.S. and the more fend-for-oneself Irish way of rearing sometimes seemed stark.
That last sentence could also describe the difference between the way baby boomers raised their kids and the way they themselves were raised. Which was the better approach? I'm not sure.
But I am reminded of something a wise friend of mine once told me, "Kids should only be allowed to play a sport if their parents can't watch."
1 comment:
indeed, the differences between raising kids in Cornwall, Connecticut and Cork, Ireland are stark...the Irish thinks that the current crop of parents are over-involved...but believe me, they don't know from over-involved!...fair disclosure....from the wife of 'Jaywalking With The Irish' author)
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