What is a family? Are you tired of hearing that question yet? As a country we’ve just spent months debating it.
Is it a married man and woman, with a white picket fence and 2.4 children? Or is it simply a collection of people who love each other and link their lives together?
Where we draw the line isn’t important. What matters are the questions that we ask, why the answers matter to us and — more than anything else — the honesty and humility with which we ask them.
Remember May 23rd? Where you were when Ireland voted for marriage equality? I woke up first thing that morning, turned over and checked the news on the radio. By 9.30 I couldn’t stay inside a moment longer and hightailed it to Cork City Hall to watch the count.
I’ve never cried so many tears of joy and I’ve never hugged so many strangers as I did that day. I had the incredible privilege of hearing the results from the final Cork constituency come in at an Irish wedding party of two wonderful women who had marrried in Britain. Their choice to pledge their lives to each other had just been given a resounding “yes” by their country of birth.
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That was the day that I promised to never, ever again apologise for who I am. To never change the subject when asked about my weekend, who I was with or where I went. To never play an awkward pronoun dance when a hairdresser or taxi driver asks me about my life and to never again choose to look or act a certain way for the sole reason of hiding who I am. Ireland had spoken and it had challenged its people to be free.
We should be proud of who we are now, whoever we are, whoever we love and choose to build lives with. But we can’t let that pride get in the way of facing the consequences of who we were before. Ireland is a freer and more open society than it has ever been. Let’s take joy in that, but let’s also acknowledge the terrible mistakes we made. Let’s not forget the suffering those mistakes caused and continue to cause, and how we can begin to make up for them.
It would be wonderful if we had woken up on the morning of May 24th to a country cured of the pernicious poison of homophobia. Children being born today will be raised in a kinder, more inclusive Ireland than the one you and I knew, but the consequences of the emotional and often physical violence inflicted in past years were never going to go away overnight. Not for those of us who lived through them.
What is a family? It would be wonderful to give an easy answer. Swap “two people” for “a man and a woman” and go back to painting that picket fence white. Sounds nice, but we must realise we are not at this stage just yet.
Right now, in the sunshine of our post-equality Ireland there are thousands who have never been able to open up about who they are. Those who have lived their lives without the chance of sharing them with someone they have fallen in love with. Those who married their best friend knowing they could never truly love them the way that they were loved in return.
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When someone finally come to terms with who they are late in life, their stories are often as heartbreaking as they are heartwarming. There’s something beautiful about them breaking free from the constraints they were brought up with and learning how to be true to themselves.
At the same time, many build lives and families while they’re keeping up that straight façade. Husbands, wives, children — even grandchildren — all of whom are brought together with as much love as any other family, and who are often torn apart because of something that was nobody’s fault, nobody’s choice or a choice between a life spent pretending to be someone else or embracing the truth.
What is a family? There is a certain cruelty to Irish divorce as it forces partners to live separate lives for four out of five years. There is no leniency or acknowledgement that not all marriages that end do so in acrimony. In effect, the law forces one partner to move out, so it involves not just the will to move out of home but the financial ability to do so.
What a terrible thing it is, for us to insist that people who might still consider themselves a family must live apart if they are to end their marriages. How hypocritical it is, to force a parent to leave their children in order to legally recognise the change in relationship with their co-parent.
Earlier this year, Ireland promised that from now on we will cherish all of our children equally. If we are to truly do so, we have to start by never forgetting that this was not always the case. We need open conversations on how best to show kindness and compassion to each other, as hidden selves emerge and we do our imperfect best to begin to heal.
@flyingteacosy