4 days ago
My partner wants to ‘do a Cillian Murphy' - have kids abroad but move back before they get foreign accents
People seem to want to
raise their kids
in one of two ways, depending on how they felt their own childhood went. They either swear to raise them completely differently from the way their parents raised them, or they want their sprogs to have the same experiences they did, so they too can know the same smell of a freshly mowed
GAA
pitch on a Sunday morning, the excitement of being brought to
Dublin
for a
Christmas
panto, or the agony and the ecstasy of footing turf on a sunny day. Our
parents
did it – we will do it with our kids. That shared experience, unbroken by generational gaps and the passing of time, tying us to the people who raised us and those who will carry on after we have buggered off.
Nostalgia makes sentimental eejits of us all. It is why we bring children to the seaside amusements we enjoyed when we were young, and wonder why these kids who have the internet at their fingertips are not excited to be going down a big slide on an itchy hessian potato sack.
Usually parents who want to go down the 'shared experience' route of kid-raising find a workable compromise between them. They'll play rugby like you did, but they'll play violin like we did. The problems arise when a mummy and a daddy love each other very much but come from opposite sides of the world. On the running pros and cons list we keep about whether my partner and I should have kids is, 'where would we even raise them?'.
He is strongly in favour of 'doing a
Cillian Murphy
' and having kids abroad but moving them back before they pick up a foreign accent. 'Jesus, what if they sound like
Australians
?!' he asks. 'Whadya bloody moiiinnn? Nufin wrong with me accent,' I reply. Unlike other vulnerable foreign women who have been hoodwinked, I am impervious to the alleged charms of Irish accents. Their siren song does not call to me, they do not turn average-looking men into
Paul Mescal
. In any case my partner comes from rural
Galway
so he doesn't have the high ground in the argument. No one calls a phone sex hotline to hear 'Howya, scan?'.
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His greatest fear is having kids who are 'vulgar Aussies', and mine is producing soft little Europeans who feel comfortable using the word 'vulgar' in casual conversation. Yuck.
He dreams of kids who will know the feeling of numb hands catching a high ball on a GAA pitch, hearing their parents roar. I dread the long parka-clad hours being simultaneously too hot and too cold in the rain and muddy boots. He dreams of making his own little trad band, every child learning a new instrument. I dread the tin whistle.
I dream of kids who are in Nippers (junior surf life saving), who grow up running, swimming and reading the waves like a bedtime story. Tanned little ferals who live outside and keep snakes for pets. My partner hates sand and has the kind of complexion that would pick up a sunburn from standing too close to a microwave.
It would be easier if we were both from the same country, but that's what he gets for shifting a foreigner and not a nice Irish woman. He made his sand-filled bed and now he has to lie in it.
We both want our children to be Irish but it is not financially rational for us, at this point anyway.
[
Emigration to Australia is at its highest level for a decade. We need to ask why
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I envy Irish childhoods. I love the special confidence Irish children seem to have that I credit to feeling safe and knowing their place in a community that is keeping an eye out for them in return. My partner's greatest high jinks as a teenager was drinking warm Bulmers in a field, and a memorable incident when boys from another town 'brought hurls to a teenage disco'. We had to stop going to our local nightclub after a shooting, only swapping back after someone got stabbed on the dance floor at the other 'discotheque'.
By way of government schemes, lending conditions and wages in Australia, it is looking easier for us to buy a home in a city where the average house price is roughly €850,000. After childcare costs, the next barrier to returning to Ireland is the support available to neurodiverse children. There's a possibility they will take after me, and I worry I lack the fortitude that so many Irish parents have shown battling the State to get the bare minimum required for their little ones.
We are not alone. In the expat forums, thousands of couples are weighing up the same problem: wanting their children to be Irish, but worrying about whether the country that they love so much can support them in return.
