Hello everyone,
I think it was Mark Twain who once wisely said “write what you know”. And though sometimes when describing the array of stories I have written (WWII fiction, Irish Saga, a book about a community of nuns in the outback) the common thread can seem a little frayed and even unravelling at parts, I have stuck to that motto. Not just in that I was once a tour guide and I studied and taught history, but in that I know, as we all do, the wonderful joys and heartbreaking lows of what it is to be human. And of the wide spectrum of human connections, one of the strongest threads for me is that of parenthood. As you likely know by now I have four children, the youngest of whom is still in primary school and the eldest of whom has recently become a father himself, much to my delight.
A quote that captures the sensation of parenthood for me is Elizabeth Stone’s remark that to have a child “is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body”. I need only cast my mind back to some of my own less well thought out adolescent decisions to feel how absolutely petrifying it is to love a child. I can vividly remember the look on my fathers face one night after coming home from having been out dancing. He had waited up for me and was making a late night snack expecting no doubt for me to come in, to give me a quick grilling and send me off to bed. I however decided that the dead of night would be a great time to introduce my particularly chatty new boyfriend to said father. It wasn’t. In we arrived with our loud chatter to a very startled looking man in his pajamas. Only for said boyfriend to wink at my dad and say “Nice PJs Mister O”. A comment that earned its way into my families most quotable quotes, but also resulted in a relatively abrupt end to the relationship.
And yet, for all the faux pas and worrying decisions along the way, all you can do is raise them in the hope that the lessons they learn under your wing help them to make largely the right ones when they have flown the nest. And that is the exact predicament that Elizabeth, Ariella and Daniel find themselves in with our beloved Liesl in the third book of the Star and the Shamrock series. Liesl has grown into an intelligent and thoughtful young adult, but her singlemindedness leads her into a most precarious situation, one she may not yet be equipped to deal with alone.
I’m glad to report that of my own precarious situations and sometimes dubious courtships, I am now married to a wonderful man who gets on famously with my father. Helped, no doubt, by my husband almost never barging into my fathers house at 1am to discuss pajamas.
Le Grá,
Jean xxx