IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:The kids are lucky enough to have all four grandparents. So are we, writes ADAM BROPHY
WE’RE IN GALWAY for the weekend. From where I sit on the mezzanine floor of the hotel I have a view clear across the Atlantic to Clare. Apart from Bryan Adams insisting he’ll be there “forever and a day’’ (oh please God, no) over the PA, things are sweet.
Made sweeter by the sight of the missus and kids clambering over rocks at the seashore. Sometimes, and here comes the cheese, catching sight of someone unexpectedly, when they have no idea you’re watching, well, it caps the day.
The year we got married, the old man presented us with a gift of a weekend away to this establishment. We loved it. The elder was still a baby and my clearest memory of that first visit was of walking round a deserted swimming pool at 4am, rocking her back to sleep after she had upchucked her dinner over our bed and my face.
Somehow, as happens in the year of the birth of a first child, that particular vomit has made it into the annals of famous family happening. The protagonist herself now refers to it with pride as her greatest puke ever.
The weekend was such a success even that particular wave of bile invokes nostalgia and a quick check of the hair for pieces of foreign matter. So successful, in fact, that the old man has made a point of repeating his gift every year since.
The hotel is now known as “Grandad’s Hotel”. He likes to think they think he owns the place. They now realise he doesn’t, but don’t want to hurt his feelings by letting him know they know. They play out their charade whenever they meet, the kids under strict instruction not to let the mask slip for fear we may lose our annual excursion, or worse that we might have to start paying for it ourselves.
We arrived late the first night, the trip from West Cork to Connemara proving to break all records in “are we there yets?” The kids tumbled from the car and into the restaurant, the younger mumbling at the table that she just wanted to see Grandad. He arrives and she clambers into his lap (and she is not the kind of kid who dispenses easy hugs) for a quick cuddle before collapsing from fatigue on her mother.
The kids are lucky enough to have all four grandparents. We are lucky enough for them to have all four grandparents, and all four in booming health. Of course, all four have their grizzly oldie niggles but I reckon the strength of the kids’ feelings for them is such that any benevolent spiritual overlord would be afraid to cause any hurt to this particular quartet due to the retribution that would be met out to him or her.
I had a farmer Grandad and a soldier Grandad. One taught me to milk a cow, the other how to polish buttons on a tunic. These skills, while practical, have never been of much day-to-day use but you couldn’t pry their memories from my head.
One smelt of Brylcreem, the other of tobacco. One showed me how to play Hearts, the other demonstrated the joy of a fried egg. Their hands were large and hard and worn. They used Euthymol.
Both died, ten years apart, and, while I did mourn their loss, I mourned more the fading of those memories and the passing of childhood. Because your grandparents in your earliest years are near mythic creatures, more creased versions of your parents without the prickly bits or anxieties.
As you get older, their humanity is revealed, their relationships with your parents becomes apparent, the great big rolling repetition of generation to generation.
You see them for the people they are, not just the warm pillow of security they offer at the start. You recognise that the majority of their stretch was before your time and acknowledge them as your physical link to a shared past, flaws and all. It’s all too easy to attempt to manipulate your kids’ grandparents into being obligatory babysitters with a contract signed in blood to be available when you need to go to the pub.
If only that were possible. Maybe providing them with grandkids releases you both from the parent-child roles you have inhabited since the moment of your first breath.
They can build a relationship with a child without the added burden of imbuing that child with their own hopes and ambitions, and you can start to look at them as regular humans, shaking off any remaining adolescent sense of injustice.
Maybe even see them as real people who occupy the same mortal space as you. Whatever, grannies and granddads rule.