When we had our baby, a lot of our family and friends started asking if we’d return to Ireland. Some skipped the doubting phase altogether and plainly asserted they’d see us back before long, as if the mere sight of his cherubic brow would cause us to quit the misery of England, the packed streets and our little flat. It was alarming to hear this refrain come from so many mouths, but more alarming still was the fact I started considering the question myself.
To some extent, it’s a hangover from the bad old days, when Irish expats had it harder than we do, and the long bound homeward was all they ever wanted. Every Irish person had an uncle who’d moved to England in the 1960s, and ended up living with 20 other lads in an electrical box in Clapham, forced to shave four times a day just to give himself room enough to smoke.
England, we were told, could be fierce cruel, and made it hard on decent young skins who only sought to escape the stresses, depression, and leaping contests which blighted rural Ireland at that time. This was the generation of hardy Irish souls who earned their tuppence cleaning quarries, or folding pylons together with their bare hands. And it was these who pined for home, telling anyone who’d listen how much they missed the old sod, via heart-breaking love letters or long, drunken, 4am phone calls that often broke out into stirring ballads.
It’s fair to say my wife and I have it easier than our forebears, but the question now is less about hardship and more about seeking those comforts of home. To be closer to family would be great, but the pull of home is, to some extent, a pull toward my own childhood.
Imagining my son living on my old road, or going to my old school – and I can’t avoid seeing him doing so with my old school friends, crudely squashed to toddler size in my imagination – is a function of my fear of not being up to the task of fashioning for him a life so different from my own.
As it begins to dawn on me, however slowly, that I will be in charge of this small man for a long time, the mind reels for ways to lighten the load. How reassuring it would be to find a version of parenting in which I always had an existing blueprint to consult, a template over which I could trace his every milestone, each a fuzzy facsimile of my own. Rather than carving a whole new path, I could pop him on those same familiar rails, give a gentle nudge, and retire to a safe distance with a podcast and a cup of tea.
There are many good reasons to consider moving back, this just isn’t one of them. The fuel of nostalgia is the fear that any future you make for yourself can never live up to the past. In truth, wherever you settle, you can build your life anew, even if that means starting small in Hackney. Our home may not be an electrical box, but we can scale up to that eventually.
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