My father used to remark wryly to his friends that he knew no peace, because his house was infested with girl children. There were only four of us, but we were a fairly rambunctious lot. If we weren’t fighting with each other, we were fighting with our mother, who liked to pay tribute to her Italian heritage with a screaming match every now and again. During these skirmishes, my father would retire to his garage, where he would sit in the car and read his paper until the white flag was waved, and he could return to what Englishmen like to believe is their castle.
That said, in reality he was very much the king of this particular castle. His word was law and we were far more afraid of his disapproval than my mother’s rages. He never lifted a hand to any of us; instead we got the silent treatment, which was far worse. I remember my youngest sister muttering once that she wished he would just hit us and get it over with, rather than leave us trying to work out what the hell we’d done wrong this time.
Of the four of us, my youngest sister was obviously his favourite. The tomboy of the family, she shared his fondness for shooting and fishing. Every Sunday, from the time she was about ten years of age, they and a couple of gun dogs would head out to their game preserves in the Dublin Mountains, along with a rackety gang of gunmen who made up my father’s “game association” aka shooting and drinking club. After a few hours and, with luck, a couple of pheasants, they’d all retire to a pub called the Blue Gardenia, and get plastered, with the exception of my sister, at least for the first few years.
One night they returned home from one of these expeditions, both highly amused. My sister, who was about 13 by this time, had been pestering Dad to order her a glass of Guinness, instead of her usual orangeade. As he refused her for the third time, one of the gunmen remarked “You should let him have it, Jack, or you’ll make a sissy of the boy.” My mother, as I recall, was not at all amused, while Dad thought it was a hoot, and my sister was proud as Punch that someone who’d been shooting with her for two years thought she was a boy.
As to the rest of us: I have the feeling that my father was endlessly amused by the shenanigans of my older sister, the She Devil, as she moved into her teenaged, boy-magnet years. And he remarked to me once, in a letter, that he could sit in a room with my other sister, the Redhead, for hours and wrack his brains to think of something he might say to her. And me? Well I’ve no idea what he thought of me.
He never had any problem finding something to talk about with me; we shared a love of reading, an interest in politics and current affairs and, above all, a quirky sense of humour. (One day, he picked up bath salts I’d received for my birthday, which the label compared to a walk in the woods. “Hmph,” he said. “If any boy tries burying his nuts, I hope you’ll give him a root in the arse.” I was 13, but I got the joke. As he knew I would.)
But there was always the sense that I disappointed him in some way. And he was terribly unforgiving anytime I erred. When we were children, his punishment of choice was to cut off our pocket-money and I got used to poverty from an early age. If I back-chatted my mother, my pocket money was stopped. If I yelled at one of my younger sisters or even looked sideways at them, it was stopped. It seemed to me that I could do nothing right, even when I was trying very hard to be a model daughter. Which, in hindsight, was not all that often.
I left home when I was 19, lived in Germany for a year, and then in England for another five years. When I wanted to go back to Ireland, I wrote to my father and asked if I could stay at home, while I looked around for a job and somewhere to live. He wrote back to say that I was welcome, but to remember that they had been getting along just fine without me while I was away. “We likes us as we is,” he wrote. In the end, I stayed there three years, not moving out into an apartment until the relationship between my mother and me reached the stage of open warfare.
When I told him I was pregnant, a few years later, he enquired whether I knew who the father was. For the first time I realised that, for all that he and I rubbed along quite amiably, he really had no clue who I was, or how I lived my life. I felt like Elizabeth Bennett.
Probably the most nakedly emotional thing he ever said to me was on the day I left Ireland for Canada. Most of the family came out to the airport to see me and the boy on our way. Hurried hugs all round as our flight was called, and then I came to my father, who had been hanging back. He hugged the child, then held me by the shoulders and said “I don’t agree with what you’re doing. But I admire your courage.”
Three years later, I had a call from the Redhead to say my father had had a stroke, after a Sunday of shooting (and drinking) with the gunmen. He was in hospital, in a coma, and I should come as soon as I could. My aunt, his sister, met me at Dublin airport and drove me to the hospital. She dropped me at the main door, while she went to park the car, and a nurse told me where his room was. I sat beside him for a minute of two, before leaning forward to kiss him on the forehead. That was when I realised he was dead, and I had arrived too late.
When I got to my parents’ house, my youngest sister came out to meet me. “I never knew if he loved me,” she cried. That night, as I lay in my old bedroom, above his, I thought about what she had said. It saddened me to think how much he had missed, and I cherished the fact that my son would never say those words about me. That much I had learned from my father.
He came for a visit when our son was two and a half. The last time they’d met, the boy was ten months old. It was also the first time they’d met, and we’d gone there to visit him.
On this visit, we’d agreed to settle where we would go from here. We both knew things could not continue as they were – three thousand miles between us, and a relationship based on late night telephone conversations, with me woken from sleep and him staying late in his office, both of us tired after long days at work.
The boy behaved badly throughout his stay. Normally a sweet-natured, talkative child, he alternated between sulking and demanding my attention, referring to his father as “him,” refusing to address him directly and pushing between us at every opportunity. Months before, his father had sent us a talking camera and the boy believed it was his voice telling us we needed more light and to check distance. He enjoyed talking to the Dad in the camera, but the reality was too much for him.
During the two weeks he was with us, the future was never mentioned, until the night before he was due to fly back home, when I pressed him to make a decision. He told me he had tried very hard to convince himself he didn’t love his wife, but he did, and now he needed to go home and make things work between them.
We drove him to the airport the next morning. My instinct was to drop him off at Departures and drive away, but I gave in to the need to snatch even one more hour together, and we stayed through check-in, waiting with him for his boarding call. When it came, he kissed us both goodbye and started to walk towards the security gate. I was struggling to find the right words of farewell, when the boy raised his voice and trilled “Bye-bye, Daddy!” He stopped dead and turned back to look at us, with his face working. Then he turned away and walked through the gate, passing from view.
Six months later, on the boy’s birthday, we came home to find a bouquet of red roses waiting on the stairs to our apartment. Even before I read the card, I knew they were from him. “Happy birthday, from Dad. Love to you both” was the message.
I’ve done my grieving and moved on, I told myself. Actions speak louder than roses. And, screw him. But I put the flowers in water anyway, although I wanted to throw them in the bin.
The roses eventually withered and my friends assured me I had done the right thing in ignoring them and him. But still, in the back of my mind, I fought the urge to call him, just to see how he was doing, if he was missing us at all.
Late one night, almost a month later, I called him on his private line at work. He won’t be there at this hour, I told myself. If he is, I’ll put the phone down. I just want to hear his voice. But the phone was picked up on the first ring and his voice said “I’ve been hoping you would call! You got my roses?”
“What if I’d ignored them? What if I’d moved away, left no forwarding number or address? What then?” I retorted. And then “How are you?”
Within minutes, we were back on the old, easy footing that had gotten us into this affair in the first place. Before we rang off, promising to call each other again soon, I asked him how things were now, between him and his wife. He told me they were no better, although, when he’d gone back all those months before, they’d sat down and talked things over. “We shared our dreams,” he said, “agreed we wanted more family and would like to buy a boat.”
“A boat? What the hell has a boat got to do with anything?” I asked.
Fast forward fifteen years. We’re in our boat, during a storm on Lake Ontario. I’m hanging on for dear life, while he beams in delight at the 10ft waves creaming over the bow.
There has been a hot and heavy sex education “debate” taking place in Ontario in recent weeks. I use quotation marks around the word because, although that’s how the media describe it, what’s been going on here doesn’t fit my definition of debate.
The way I learned to debate in school, the parties throw up opposing concepts, they discuss the pros and cons in a civilized manner and then, they either agree to disagree, or one party admits they’ve been convinced by the other’s arguments. Debate over. That was not the case here.
After a year of consultation, beginning in 2007, with educators and representatives of health and parent groups – all individuals who might be expected to know a thing or two about children and curricula – the Ontario government decided it was time to revise the sex education curriculum, which dates back to 1997. Proposed new guidelines for teachers were drafted and underwent another year of public consultation and revisions, receiving more than 3,000 inputs from parents and educators. The final draft, which was to launch in the classroom on September 1 this year, was posted on the government’s website last January, without any fanfare.
Under the new curriculum, Grade 1 students would be taught body parts, including the correct names for genitalia, which experts claim can help prevent sexual abuse. Gr 3 students would learn about sexual orientation; in Gr 6, masturbation; and, in Gr 7, discussion of anal and oral sex were part of the lesson plan. The new curriculum was designed to counter the hideous stew of (mis)information to be found on the Internet, and to help kids who are floundering in our hyper-sexualized society.
So far, so good. But then the head of a so-called “family values” group got wind of the revised curriculum, and all hell broke loose. At first, the Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, our self-styled “education Premier,” stood pat and faced down the critics. But then some of the more conservative elements of religious and immigrant groups began to come forward, saying that the proposed guidelines were antithetical to their way of life. At that point, McGuinty caved, because you don’t piss off the various multicultural lobbies in Ontario if you want your party to stay in power. In fact, from what I’ve read, both online and in the newspapers, the new guidelines are copacetic with most of the ethnic communities. But, as always, a few very loud dissidents dominated the headlines and sound bites, and it was game over. Guidelines that had been exhaustively discussed and revised, with input over two years from all the experts in the field and full agreement on the final draft by all the parties, were tossed.
The Toronto Star letters page provides a pretty good sampling of public reaction to the furor, with a number of fairly nuanced responses, on the one hand, balanced by a large helping of “pig-ignorant-and-proud-of-it” on the other.
As an empty nester, I don’t have a dog in this hunt, so I was alternately amused by the uproar and outraged by the media’s handling of it, while not at all surprised by McGuinty’s pusillanimous response. And I have to confess to feeling more than a little smug, reflecting on my own track record as a parent in the area of sex education. I remembered #1 Son coming home from school, when he was about 10 years old, and announcing that they’d had a sex education class that day. When I asked him if he’d learnt anything new, he answered “Not really, although I did discover that Always has wings!”
I was shocked, some years ago, when my cousin confessed that she had never spoken about sex to her then-16 year old daughter. I couldn’t understand how it was possible not to discuss sex, in one way or another, given the amount of it that was being bandied about in the media. I could think of so many times, when something was said on the television news or the radio, #1 Son would ask me what it was about, and we’d have a lengthy discussion on the topic.
One incident that sticks out in my memory was the day, when he was about 7, that he heard the word ‘flagellate’ on the car radio and asked what it meant. Much hilarity ensued, as I told him about flagellation, in all its religious, fetishist and sexual permutations. (On reflection, I may have gone a bit overboard on such occasions. He has since been heard complaining to a pal that it was near-impossible to ask his Mom the time, without getting a swift rundown of the history of the Swiss watch industry from the Middle Ages to the present.)
As a parent, sex education in school was not something that bothered me one way or another. So far as I was concerned, I had already covered all the bases, and I had low to no interest in the topic at the time. But, when I stop to think about it now, I can’t really say, with my hand on my heart, that we ever had the “Talk” about sex. “Where do babies come from?” never came up, for example. Not much point, really. When #1 Son began toddling around and pulling books out of bookcases, his favourite was the Lennart Nilsson book, A Child is Born. I suspect he thought it was his baby album.
He’ll be visiting for Mother’s Day next week. Maybe it’s not too late for me to rectify the situation. I’m sure he’ll be really pleased when I take him aside and give him the long-awaited “Talk.”
I stole this from Bock. I’m hoping he won’t mind. Also, one of Bock’s commenters mentions that the whole debate is available on both YouTube and dailymotion.com.
I found myself in mid-March with a couple of weeks relatively work-free, so I decided to have myself a little staycation. If I were a “real” blogger, I’d have used those two weeks to blog up a storm. But I think we all know by now that I am the merest dabbler in this here art form, so of course I did nothing of the sort.
Instead, The First Husband and I decided to re-decorate a guest-room, of which our empty nest now has four. In the interests of accuracy, I should explain that we did not actually ‘decide’ to take on this job; like Topsy, it just growed. It all began with TFH wanting to repaint a bathroom door, which had been badly painted first time around. While he was at it, I suggested, he should also repaint the closet doors in the guest-room, which were even worse. And, of course, as soon as they were finished, they showed up the all-round crappy paint job on the room itself.
Before
It had been painted by my SIL, as a surprise for me, when I was too busy commuting 90 kilometres a day to and from work and onward to university classes every night to be bothered with it. And when I did have the time to care, I managed to keep it out of sight out of mind, because painting and decorating is one of my least favourite activities, second only to poking myself in the eye with a sharp stick.
My usual MO is to sigh heavily, within earshot of TFH, every time I catch a pained glimpse of whatever room I think needs some work. Eventually, he catches on and, because he’s like the Energizer Bunny, pathologically incapable of sitting still for more than 20 minutes, offers to paint/paper/tile/sand (pick one), if I will pick the colours and let him know what I want him to do.
This time started out no differently, but, in all conscience, I could not let him do it on his own while I blogged or Tweeted, so I guilted myself into working along with him. By the time it was finished, not only had we repainted the whole room, we also replaced the painted trim and skirting boards with oak, which I varnished while TFH rewired the lights, fan and lamps, and I finally got around to stripping and painting white a rather nondescript wooden bookcase that I picked up from a local garage sale a few years ago and filled with books, without bothering to refurbish it as I should have done at the time.
Even if I say so as shouldn’t, I think we did quite a good job.
After
And I finally assuaged my long-standing guilt over never having lifted a finger to help my father, during his countless papering and painting jobs around our family home in Dublin. My younger sister and her family moved into that house to live with my mother, after my father died, and undertook an extensive renovation. When they stripped the flock wallpaper off the old dining room, they found that previous decorators had left their signatures and dates. My father went one further. He left this message:
This room was repainted and papered from ceiling to skirting, between November and December 1970, by JR working after hours. Unlike [the previous owners], I cannot boast of family help. I got and was offered damn’ all. My wife and daughters ignored the whole job as if it was slightly indecent. Here’s hoping that the patsy who does the job in 1990 lives with nicer people or gets paid for it.
In pursuit of my third New Year Resolution, I have been ploughing through books at a rate of knots since January 1st. Although I’ve been picking them at random from the foothills of Mount TBR, the last three have all turned out to be about anti-Semitism, in fact and fiction, in both ancient and relatively recent history.
The Pears novel takes place at three different stages in history: the 5th, 14th and 20th centuries. They are connected by a place, Avignon, and a manuscript, The Dream of Scipio. Written in the dying days of the Roman Empire, by a philosopher bishop, the manuscript is unearthed in the years of the Black Death by a poet, and rediscovered in the 20th century by an academic working in Vichy France. The thread weaving through these three epochs is the place of Jews in each society – despised, scapegoated, slaughtered at will by overlords, conniving clerics and frustrated peasants.
Driving through Germany in 2006, I noticed several plaques referring to Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. It took place on 10th November 1938, when Nazi stormtroopers and Hitler Youth rampaged through Jewish neighbourhoods across Germany, destroying synagogues and plundering Jewish homes and businesses. Wanting to learn more about the events leading up to the destruction, I picked up Martin Gilbert’s book, but it was buried in the pile of books until this week.
It’s a horrific read; chapter after chapter of unspeakable evil, occasionally leavened by the courage and decency of ordinary Germans who tried to help their friends and neighbours, only to be severely punished. The behaviour of most so-called civilised countries, haggling and parsing the number of Jewish refugees they would allow across their borders was disgusting. I cringed with shame when I read about the flat refusal of the Irish Free State to grant refuge to any German Jews, including children. It is worth noting that, after the War ended, hundreds of German refugee children were taken in by Irish families, including mine. My foster-brother, Hans lived with us for four years, before returning to his mother in Germany in 1949. I’m just a few chapters into Matt Cohen’s book, which opens in 15th century Spain, at the beginning of the great era of Jewish persecution. Ironically, given current events, the pogroms follow an era of peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Jews in Moorish Spain. As the Moors are driven out, the Inquisition moves in, and unscrupulous aristocrats and merchant-princes deflect the anger of the peasantry onto their Jewish neighbours.
While the two novels are beautifully written, teeming with colour and drama, Kristallnacht is fairly plodding – a bare recitation of names, dates and facts. But they serve to underline the horrors of life for Jews under Nazi rule, making it by far the most affecting read of the three books. In one particularly disturbing passage, a young Jewish man, during his time in a sub-camp of Dachau, overhears a conversation between a German mother and her six- or seven-year old daughter, as they walked past the camp, a few feet from the perimeter.
The child asked: ‘Mutti, was fur Menschen sind die?’ ‘Mother, what kind of people are they?’ to which the mother replied: ‘Das sind keine Menschen, das sind Juden.’ ‘These are not people, they are Jews.’
Years of unrelenting propaganda by Joseph Goebbels and his like, always referring to Jews as ’scum,’ ‘parasites’ and ‘rodents’ had served to dehumanise an entire race.
Today, I opened my newspaper and read about a Toronto man who has been posting on an Arizona-based website, filthyjewishterrorists.com. In his posts, he calls for “a genocide [to] be perpetrated against the Jewish populations of North America and Europe” and refers to Jews as “diseased and filthy,” and as “scum.”
* The more things change, the more they stay the same.
