A Day of Our Life

Memories are stored as snapshots, flashes in the cortices.

Nine months after we married, we had our first wonderful child, and two years later, our second. We were delighted with our children, and devoted to them, but in retrospect it is clear to me that we missed having a honeymoon period. After the secret relationship, with all its problems, we plunged directly into parenthood with all its challenges. We were good enough parents, and the children turned out well, but life was sometimes stormy. I held down a full-time job that I didn’t really want for some of the time, a part-time job for all of it. Bo was full time and then retired. Both of us were committed to writing. There was a constant struggle to find time to fit in everything. For instance, when I went on maternity leave – just three months, in 1983, and officially the first month was supposed to be taken before the child was born – I immediately started writing a novel. When the baby napped, I sat at my typewriter and wrote. Bo too was always anxious to work at his transcriptions, editorial work and articles. This was a desperate need for both of us, and it caused tension and friction. There were ongoing arguments about housework and childcare – I was obsessed by feminism, and aware that it was outrageous that women still did most of the housework. Retrospectively, I know I was right in theory but in practice we would have had a much more pleasant life if I had let those theories go, or if I had relaxed them a little. Quarrelling is such a waste of time.

Could it have been otherwise? Possibly, if I had felt secure enough to give up my job, stay at home, and combine writing and looking after the children. But I didn’t feel secure enough. I was always worried about money, even though we always had enough. I was worried about the future. If I gave up my job I might never get another, was my view: Ireland was like that, in the seventies and eighties. There was no flexibility, there was massive unemployment. Apart from all its other downsides, that limits people’s freedom. Anyone who has a job stays in it, for fear of never getting another one. Economic paralysis ensues.

I had reason to be careful. Bo, worn down by stress and smoking, had a heart operation just as our first baby was being born – he was in hospital, getting a triple bypass, when I was in hospital giving birth.

From that time I felt afraid that Bo would die.

That he lived for another thirty years was a blessing. But almost every day I was aware that life was precarious – his life. My own I never considered at risk. I was going to live for ever. And actually I had no health problems.

Nor did Bo, after the bypass, until the day in September 2011 when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

It’s possible to have a career and be a parent, and handle everything efficiently and smoothly. But it is doubtful if it’s possible to have two careers and be a parent with ease. That’s what I tried to do.

Although I always knew I was in love with Bo, I was not completely happy with our life together until the children were grown up, had left home, and until I had left my job in the National Library and had enough time to write. This happened in 2007, the year my mother died. We had six years of perfect happiness together.

That’s lucky.