How we went from being an Irish couple to a Canadian family

I became a Canadian father long before I settled in Montreal or realised I was creating a new home. My wife and I, both young, had assumed we would be spending only a few years here. We had only vague ideas about the future then. Though with a young son, the years ahead and the kinds of decisions we would make had, without our knowing it, all suddenly shifted.

Looking back is a luxury for people who are no longer torn by the urgency and anxiety of being unsettled. When you’re in transition it’s hard to know what the turning points – or, indeed, your goals – are. In a life of roads not taken, what determines the road you do take often emerges only after many years.

Instead you’re thinking about where an education is available, or where a job turns up, or where a house is affordable. Perhaps you’re thinking about how much distance you want to put between the past and the future.

There are periods of satisfaction and wellbeing, of accomplishment and confidence, of happiness and freedom. And then there are periods of sadness and loss, of conflict and frustration, of anger, and of a sense of being trapped. But this is the balancing act of life that everyone tries to perform.

In a small country like Ireland, inner migration is hardly life-changing. Sure, it matters whether you are a displaced Clareman or Kilkennyman for a few passionate weeks each summer, but, outside the stadiums, county loyalties blend into a common cultural identity.

In Canada this attachment, whether local or national, is made difficult by the vast distances and large-scale immigration. The distance from coast to coast is far greater than the distance from Dublin to Moscow. So if permanence through many generations cannot give depth to a sense of identity, what does?

A Canadian son might have made me a Canadian father, but then another son came along, and a daughter, too, and we were a Canadian family with children in school, making friends with other Canadian children, and then we had a Canadian house for our Canadian family.

I had a job; my wife had a job – two jobs we couldn’t get in Ireland. We had friends. A road had been taken.

In the first decade my wife and I had assumed we would be returning to Ireland, but gradually the truth dawned. It would be very hard to trade in universal Medicare, and a house we liked, and a cosmopolitan city we liked living in, not to forget the longest-term plan of all: opportunities for our children.

We visited Ireland often, and brought our children, so they would know their Irish family and our friends. But they think of themselves as Canadian, and it is their lives here that have made me as Canadian as I am. I have not only Canadian children but Canadian grandchildren.

But I also spend almost half the year in Ireland, now I am retired. At first I felt the need to answer a question: Why did I leave Ireland and not return permanently? Was it only jobs and house and the business of living? In our travels into the future what compromises do we make, and at what price?

The answer for everyone is different, but I wanted to consider the many roads I took back. The memoir I’ve written about settling and home tries to see my experiences as not just a story of a single road, away; a story of either/or, here or there. I am a migrant in the inclusive sense of belonging in two places.

Finding the way to tell the story is, in some ways, the real story: Was there a beginning to all this? Is there a right moment for taking stock? Where to stop, look around and ask, Where am I now?

Denis Sampson's memoir, A Migrant Heart, is available online and in selected bookshops including Books Upstairs in Dublin.