I find it hard to look at my son and imagine what it’s like to be his age. This is primarily due to the insoluble problem of memory. I hold a vaporous grasp on my early childhood, little more than a vague timeline of birthday parties, summer holidays and random interactions in primary school, mostly from eras so indeterminate they could be from any year before I turned 10.
His life is also so different from mine I’m not sure if transposing my own childhood on to his would be much use. At his age, my entire life had been lived with my massive family on Derry’s rural border, a place he only knows as a sort of pleasant agrarian theme park that’s been good enough to let his grandad live on site full-time.
My son, by contrast, is growing up in 2024 London, subsumed within a fully connected online age, sharing his time with one sibling instead of 10. He’s familiar enough with hummus and pomegranate seeds to refer to them by name as he refuses them from his plate, whereas I was 16 before I encountered a curry that was not listed as ‘curry’ on a menu.
When he hears friends chat to their parents in Urdu, Polish and Igbo, I remember that I was considered quite the exotic because mine were from Fermanagh. It is possible he has never tasted, nor even heard the term ‘potato bread’ in his life. It is certain he’s never heard ‘bomb scare’.
The reason this is all coming back to me now is that he’s passed a milestone. It is three weeks before his sixth birthday, which means my son is now exactly the age I was when my mother died in 1991. My memory of that time is, understandably, etched in dark marble and it gives me a dart of pain to place that event in his context.
I look at this small, silly and kind little red-headed person and, though he may be more startled by cows and familiar with quinoa than I ever was, I suddenly see myself all too easily. A boy too young to comprehend the finality and horror of death. A boy so innocent he plays Uno with all his cards face-up, no matter how many times we tell him not to.
His own explorations about the granny he’s never met are infrequent sometimes sympathetic, and often charmingly inept. A few months ago, he posited a theory that all humans died when they turned 100, to which we gently replied that most people died a little earlier than that. ‘Oh yeah, like your mummy!’ he remembered aloud with a breezy smile, invoking my mother’s death as cheerfully as you might shout, ‘Marinus van der Lubbe!’ at a pub quiz.
He couldn’t understand why we laughed so much, and I obviously won’t be mentioning this particular milestone to him either. It’s for me to reflect on, as I console myself that we are all happy and healthy, and the worst of all worlds seems very far away. It is a lovely evening and a game of Uno is on the horizon. I won’t go easy on him – some things he must learn for himself – but I might just make him some potato bread.
after newsletter promotion
Follow Séamas on X @shockproofbeats
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
