A DAD'S LIFE:Shared experiences help us to build our unique history
DRIVING FROM west Cork to Connemara is not a relaxing precursor to a weekend break. It’s always raining and there’s always a horsebox-towing Land Rover waiting to pull out in front of you the moment the road reverts to one lane after Ennis. It’s the law.
It’s also the law that kids will fight in cars: with each other, with themselves in a sort of gurgling schizophrenic monologue, and with their parents. Mine tend to shoot their bolt early on though. They launch physical attacks before we even pull out of the drive and are usually fatigued by the time we hit a main road.
Noting their predilection for immediate offensives on previous trips, the missus and I had cunningly placed them into the car a good half hour before we knew we’d be ready to leave. By the time we sat in they were burned out, displaying symptoms of the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder like Charlie Sheen at the end of Platoon. “Result”, we whisper to each other with a cautious high-five.
With sighs of deflated loss, they pulled out their bags and began to colour and read. An hour in and they’re clamouring for computer games. We’re not kitted out technologically for the long haul like some families. I see these families float by on the motorway and bare my teeth with envy, their perfect blonde children with their shining, white teeth plugged into personal entertainment systems in the back seats. The wife looks like Kristen Scott-Thomas and the dad, a burly, ex-rugby type kitted out in striped casual shirt, smiles at his great fortune to be surrounded by such beauty.
We are not allowed such devices, the missus insisting that to tune the kids out on long journeys will result in their missing important family bonding moments. If by that she means they’ll miss me foaming and spitting and swearing at other drivers, she’s right. Nintendo DS, some day you will be ours. Her one concession is a sort of educational hand-held kit that both the kids and I eye disdainfully, but know that it’s better than nothing. The game du jour is Scooby Doo. Shaggy’s voice keeps asking where different parts of Scooby’s kit is: “Where are Scooby’s glasses . . . shorts . . . hotdogs?”
This goes on for a while. I notice their silence has an ominous feel. In unison they demand: “Where are Scooby’s testicles?” and fall around the car whooping it up. There’s nothing funnier than testicles to small girls.
On this trip I manage to overtake the horsebox in a piece of not-quite suicidal manoeuvering somewhere before Gort and we arrive at our destination with the feeling that we made good time. Backseat scrapes and bruising have been kept to a minimum, the missus and I are on speaking terms. All in all, we’re quids in.
The destination, well I don’t want to sound like I’m marketing the place but it’s one of the best family getaways in the country. I won’t name it, but it’s in “Connemara” and it’s on the “Coast”. Most importantly, it’s ours.
It’s here, somewhere we’ve come every year around this time for the past seven years, that I’ve become conscious of building our own family history. Everyone looks back at their childhood family holidays and names their own spots with a sense of nostalgia. Whether that nostalgia is merited or designed to gloss over the true horror that family holidays can be, your sepia memories inform the person you grow into.
On this trip, the assistant manager approaches us at breakfast on our second morning. “Welcome back,” she says. “I was off the last two days and when I came in this morning I heard the Brophys were here. It’s great to see ye, those girls are getting big. How are things?”
That’s who we are now, the Brophys. That name doesn’t conjure up pictures of me and my sisters winding our folks up anymore. Slowly, our new family history grows and develops its own archives, its own traditions, habits, likes and dislikes. It incorporates its own places and an ever-growing cast of supporting characters. In time it supersedes the past. You are the driving force in your own remake of an old classic to which you were the only witness. It’s fantastic.
abrophy@irishtimes.com