‘My first Christmas was rough. I had siblings nearby but I missed home’

No matter the reasons for emigrating from Ireland, and there are many, every person will continue to feel the pull back to what was and the life that continues at home. I left Ireland in June 1987, eager to get away and spread my wings. I planned to spend the summer trying out my new country, the United States, and if I was missing the “old country” by summer’s end I might rethink the plan and return home.

Initially I welcomed the new experience. Trying to settle, I searched out the familiar, in Irish groups, classes, and a Catholic church. I wanted anything that would remind me of home. The courage found in the familiar gave me the freedom to wander beyond the safe Irish circle.

It seems strange to look back now and see the person I was then, and ponder the changes that have taken place, consciously and unconsciously over the past 20-plus years. I feel a profound empathy for my younger self, torn between the old and the new.

My first Christmas was rough. I had other siblings nearby but I missed home - home as in sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, with her standing at the cooker with an Irish breakfast well under way, asking “do you want another rasher”?

I get asked here “what’s a rasher”, and I have learned to call it “Irish bacon” instead. Food plays a huge role in the life of an emigrant. Irish import stores supply, especially during what Americans call “the holiday season” and the Irish call “Christmas”, all the “necessities” from home.

This time of year we all clamour to get our hands on a tin of Afternoon Tea biscuits, a bag of Tayto or, oh my God! Is that a bottle of club orange?

During my first year here I met my husband, moved to a rural part of the United States, had a child, and then the real business of being Irish in America began. How would I ever find a school for my child that echoed my own Irish experience? I found a school but of course it’s not the same.

That’s the emigrant mantra… I found an alternative, but really “it’s not the same”. I travelled many times across the Atlantic and over the years I noticed the grass seemed to get greener every time the plane landed in my homeland. Was I turning into an American? Was I a deserter? Turning my back on the Mother country?

But really, it’s not quite as drastic as that. I am simply an emigrant, pulled between the Irish and American parts of my life. Ireland has and always will have a hold on my heart strings; the simplest definition of what it is to be Irish and an emigrant.

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