You Never Know
Change is bad. I’ve had this lesson drummed into me since childhood, particularly by my dad. His worldview was coloured by the death of his mother when he was twelve. She went into the Coombe hospital to give birth to his baby brother (her eleventh child), and never came home. My dad left school soon after and got a job as a delivery boy to help support the family. Life seemed to teach him that the rug might be pulled from under him at any minute. And yet, he followed his brothers from Ireland to England in search of work and tried his hand at all kinds of manual labour.
When he returned to Ireland, in his late teens, this young man, who could barely read and write to get by, taught himself to play the guitar. He began playing in a band on weekends for extra cash and discovered he could sing. Performing on stage was his great love, but soon married, with a family to feed, he couldn’t risk giving up his job as a factory worker at Jacob’s Biscuits.
When I left school, I got a job in a restaurant kitchen through one of my dad’s connections. Within a year, I was earning £100 a week.
‘Good money,’ Dad said.
By the end of that year, I’d made up my mind that I wanted to go back to school to try for better grades and apply to university. Dad was dead against this plan. It was the mid-1980s and Ireland was weathering a deep recession. Young people were leaving the country in droves. A university degree didn’t come with a guarantee of work when you finished.
‘Why would you give up a decent, well-paying job?'
’Why would you…?’ became our anthem. The statement rolled out every time I was about to take a risk or make an uncertain move.
’Why would you change jobs, sell a perfectly good house, move cities, or countries, then continents?’
Twenty years ago, after my husband and I migrated with our family to Australia, Mum and Dad came to visit. Dad loved it here.
Sitting in the sun on the upstairs balcony of our suburban house in Perth, he said, ‘I can see why you did it. I wish I’d done it myself when I was younger.’
But ten years ago, when my husband changed jobs and we moved to another city, Dad questioned the decision. ‘Why would you….?
Because we can.
’You never know….’
True. And isn’t that the point?
Loved reading about this part of your life. Why wouldn’t you? Love it. My parents were very, ‘why wouldn’t you?’ and yet two out of three of their children are risk adverse. My youngest brother, though had an amazing, adventurous life.
Potent one, as always Bernadette. My prairie boy dad had a similar reaction to my brother moving away to live in the Caribbean. It wasn't until we visited my brother for my dad to get it, and it was best illustrated in a song he wrote shortly after. The lyric was:
"Sometimes a young man can remind an old man that dreams do come true
Sometimes they do
Sometimes they do."
❤️