Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Hair clips and Cheerios

I am struggling to corral my reflections and emotions about going home. This last week has been a long time coming. The questions about when and why we are going back, you must keep in touch, how kids adapt, how we will all readjust, how difficult it will be for Himself commuting, how brave we were for giving it a go. Friday’s final assembly at the kids’ school was a heartbreaker. The Y6ers all saying goodbye to their primary school years, the teachers milking it, giving them a right good send off. I could not look at The Small Man without welling up as his new found friends and he reached an emotional crescendo. They were inconsolable especially our Small Man and his Italian friend who returns to Italy the same day we go back to Galway. I could see him fighting back the tears all day. You just know it with that face they make. We are such cruel parents putting them though this again, just a year after they said goodbye to their Galway friends. The girls just let the floodgates open big time in the school playground, the tears unstoppable as they hugged and embraced their buddies. The teachers and staff of St Joe’s compiled leaving scrapbooks for all three with messages from their classmates and photos from throughout the year. Birdboxes, cricket matches, school plays, sports day, the big trip to Woodlands. I could not bring myself to open it until Sunday night. They are treasures I hope they will value as the years push on. I certainly will. Friday night I went for a drink with the women, the Tay n Tunes crew and the rest of the ladies I have gotten to know, their parting gifts so thoughtful.  Pots of Towersey jam, black bean soup receipe (truly honoured!) poetry books and the rest. We will endeavour to meet up when they come over in August. We arrived in a place, submerged ourselves in the community, we were welcomed with open arms and this makes the leaving all the more difficult. 

The melancholy has abated. Thoughts and emotions of leaving and goodbyes are replaced with excitement about going home. The past few days have been a whirlwind of bubblewrap, paper and boxes. Last year the night before we left I huddled with the kids and  cried my heart out, our house was no longer a home but an empty shell. Last night I sat in the sittingroom of the house here, bare walls, minimum furniture, it was like water off a duck’s back. No connection to this abode whatsoever. Today in the vacant rooms I stood and admired the collection of hair clips and Cheerios left all over the house, before the kids hoovered them up. The black line of our furniture is left on the manky beige carpet, now ready for the next round of tenants who will occupy the house. Good luck to them. I just want to get going, now ready to go home. We will all have to readjust, settle back in, even though we are going back to what we know, where we are from, our own house, where we fit. Our two girls always have each other, to mull over things together; so lucky. It helps. They just want to bring their friends back from England so that the girls at home could meet them all. The Small Man, in that no man’s land between child and adolescent, is tetchy and ego centric be times. He is apprehensive about meeting up with his old friends, will they have changed much; he reckons he has. They are also a year older, I tell him and reassure him that their personalities will be the same, just as his is. He certainly has had experiences this year that they will not have had and vice versa. That’s what makes life interesting, the sharing of stories, the recounting of particulars about those you have met. A line from The Wallflowers song One Headlight springs to mind ‘I aint changed, but I know I aint the same’ and that’s how I feel about my experiences this year. We have all grown, the kids inside and out. I hope for the transition to be as calm as the Irish Sea we now cross on our way ar ais trasna an uisce. 

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