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Listen to this"Children have more need of models than of
critics"
Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)
Introduction
The BBC correspondent Fergal Keane has written a wonderful book called
Letter to Daniel. In this book he writes about the birth of his
son called Daniel musing, “Since you've arrived, days have melted into
night and back again and we are learning a new grammar, a long sentence
whose punctuation marks are feeding and winding and nappy changing and
these occasional moments of quiet”. So too I find myself writing this
column from Susan's parents farmhouse in County Limerick where a storm
has knocked out the electricity and the house lies in deep slumber
awaiting the crank back to normality. I work by candlelight on my laptop
and baby Conor sleeps peacefully oblivious to the world. So it should
be. And so it should be for all children and youth that have been
entrusted into our care. Historians claim that the world can be divided
into many distinct historical epochs and I remember well my early days
at University studying the feudal era, the industrial era and so on.
From this moment, I choose to think only of the “Conor” factor. That is
to say, life before Conor and life after Conor.
This is my marker for judging the rest of my life.
Preparing Conor for adulthood
As you may have deduced, we had a bonny son on 21.1.02 at 8.07 pm in the
Limerick Maternity hospital in Limerick, Ireland. For those readers who
do not follow Irish and European rugby this may not seem particularly
significant, but for those of us who do, it is deeply significant. Like
any good parent, I want to give my son the best opportunities in life
and being born into the very fine Munster rugby tradition is one of
them! If it is his wish, I hope to see my young man sporting the red and
blue of the province later in his life. Indeed, the week he was born
Munster beat a much fancied French team and have progressed further into
the Heineken League. This weekend, Ireland trounced Wales in Lansdowne
road in Dublin. The omens are good.
Connecting Conor to the wider Child and Youth Care discourse
After penning my last column, I was both surprised and delighted to
receive many comments off-line from people from several countries. One
of the challenges set for me by Thom Garfat was to somehow connect what
I had written more directly with Child and Youth Care and I propose to
do that very briefly in this article by offering a personal perspective
on the birth of our first child. I was considering Thom's challenge to
me (and with Thom, there is usually a challenge there somewhere) and
here’s my thinking.
* * *
Ten hours after admission to hospital the midwife presented us with our own baby and I felt overwhelmed with a sense of humility at the wonder of a birth – not to mention the miracle that is a woman's body. Just 40 minutes after giving birth, Susan was sitting up drinking tea and eating toast. I fear if it was me that had to give birth, I would have been comatosed for at least two weeks followed by a mandatory resting period of some months before I could regain function.
Somehow, I managed to contain myself from fainting and cut the baby’s cord separating him from two worlds – that of the safe womb of his mother to the unknown physical and external world. I immediately wanted to gather up our little baby in fresh blankets and protect him from this world. I want this to last forever. I have been researching and writing about the “darker” side of life viewing areas of “at risk” for marginalized and vulnerable children and youth for a decade now. I am sometimes fearful that my lens of the world may become darkened and distorted by the very real pain and hurt I consistently encounter on my travels around the Child and Youth Care environments of this world. To see, then, pure innocence staring up at me is such a powerful and extraordinary experience it is almost impossible to let you know how I truly feel.
Time: A relative concept
I write as a father of only fourteen days and nights, but have already
learned some things. I now think of time in a completely different way.
Conor obviously feels that the adultcentric understanding of morning,
noon, afternoon, evening and night is to be heartily rejected by one so
young and carefree. Specifically, I have learned two things that those
of us in Child and Youth Care might want to reflect on:
I have given considerable thought to the language we use in Child and Youth Care and it must be an extremely difficult thing for a mother or father to “abandon” a child into care of social services. All involved must feel great emotional pain and we should not be so quick to judge others when referring to families that “cannot cope”.
The confusion and sense of apprehension that Susan and I have been feeling around potential role allocation(s) must be experienced in a very real way by a child coming into care of the social services. Everyone has so much advice to offer and most of it differs from that of the preceding individual. Some, for example, insist that breast is best and that we should regulate our lives around access to Susan's milk supply whilst others suggest that bottle is grand after just a couple of days! What to do? How must a young person, separated from her caregivers, feel about movement away from the home of origin to a residential unit or day agency staffed with strangers, full of unfamiliar noises, smells, people and furniture?
I am only too well aware that readers of this column have known these to be truisms in your daily “shared moments” and “therapeutic interventions”. I only remind us all of our collective vulnerability. Even before Conor was born I could feel the enormous goodwill for him around the world, which really is getting a smaller place by the hour. Our unborn child received e-mails of hope from Canada, the United States of America, South Africa, Scotland and Ireland. We heard from practitioners, students, consultants and academics. Conor is a famous baby on the CYC-Net and I am genuinely touched that one of the regular columnists, Dr Grant Charles, decided to honour our son by titling his piece in this month's CYC-Online “Wee Conor" and that the editors, Brian and Thom, placed Conor on their agenda by wishing us well. For this I thank you all.
So, as I write this article I have that bewildered look so frequently seen on the faces of new dads. I haven’t slept for more than five hours in five nights with an average of two hours on the go. I’m irritable and facing into another few nights relieving my long-suffering wife Susan of some feeding and changing duties. My brother’s e-mail on hearing of the birth has proven to be prophetic “Welcome to the insomniacs club, bro”. Never did he say a more accurate thing to me. But I would not change this new life. Not for all the honours and prizes of this world. It just doesn’t get much better than this.
