The first Christmas in any new stage of life is always going to be one to remember – with joy or sorrow . . .
FIRST CHRISTMAS . . . AS PARENTS
A BABY’S first Christmas is a special milestone and it is one that new parents Michelle (30) and Michael (32) Russell will be celebrating three times over this year.
They are looking forward to giving their triplets, Ruth, Conor and Cillian, who arrived on May 16th, their first taste of turkey and ham this Saturday.
“We are staying at home in our own kitchen and having our first family dinner – just the five of us,” says Michelle. “We have enough entertaining with the three of them.”
This time last year she and her husband, who live in Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary, were anticipating enjoying Christmas 2010 as a family of four. But when Michelle went for a scan in January, they found out it was twins plus one.
The babies arrived at 27 weeks and three days. The two boys weighed in at 1.16kg (2lb9oz) and their sister 28.3g (1oz) lighter. After three months in Cork University Maternity Hospital, Ruth and Conor went home first, followed by Cillian a few weeks later.
Michelle is not fazed by having so many charges. “I don’t know what it would be like to raise one,” she says. “So I have nothing to compare it to. You just get on with it.”
Their families have organised a rota so that somebody drops in for two or three hours a day during the week to help Michelle, while Michael, an electrician, attends the Waterford Institute of Technology, where he is studying electronic engineering.
At mealtimes it is like a “conveyor belt” now the triplets are on solids, she explains. It can take up to two hours to feed the three of them. And that has to be repeated every four to five hours.
The three rarely all sleep at the same time during the day, but they are settling into a night-time routine. “They go down at 11.30pm and the first one might wake at 6am – although saying that, one of them was waking at half three the last two nights,” says Michelle.
After they have had their Christmas dinner, Michael and Michelle will pack the three babies into the car and visit both sets of grandparents, who live nearby. Up to now the couple, who have been married four and a half years, alternated between visiting his and her parents for dinner on Christmas Day.
This year they are keen to establish their own family traditions. “That is why I want to start them in their own house,” says Michelle. “We have been waiting long enough for this to happen.”
FIRST CHRISTMAS . . . AS A WIDOW
THE SUDDEN death of her husband Charlie after a horse-riding accident left Laura Flattery with five children, ranging in age from 18 months to 11 years, to raise on her own and a family pub to run. It is not a situation for the faint-hearted, she says wryly, “but you don’t have any choice”.
One thing that was clear in her mind in those early weeks of intense grief in the summer of 2008 was that she could not bear to spend their first Christmas without him at home in Broadfield, Co Meath.
So she phoned her bank asking for a loan so they could get away. “Look, I can’t do Christmas,” she explained to the bank manager – and then booked five nights in a log cabin in Lapland in northern Finland for herself and the children.
Now she says: “If I were to look back at all the things I have done in the last two and a half years, it was the best I have ever done.
“It was a form of hiding, to get away from it all, but it worked. My children had a magical Christmas. They couldn’t have had a magical Christmas here. I needed Christmas to be completely different.”
It had always been a particularly special time for the Flatterys as Christmas was one of only two days in the year when their pub in Enfield was shut and the five children had their daddy to themselves for the whole day.
Laura (38) is determined to keep memories of Charlie, who was 46 when he died, central to their family life. “I want my children to be able to talk about their dad,” she says, rather than being expected to put his loss behind them.
“People have different ways of dealing with bereavement, but for me I think it is very important to talk about him – especially for the two smaller ones. They don’t have much memory of the adoration he had for them. They really have been robbed of a fabulous father.”
Last year, the six of them stayed at home and went through their “first Christmas really”, she says.
“I think the benefit was that we had a year to adjust before we went through it. We got decorations with ‘Best Dad’ for the Christmas tree and things for the grave. He is very much still part of our Christmas and very much part of our Christmas tree.”
Making contact with other young parents who have lost a partner has been a “phenomenal” help to Laura, allowing her to chat to people who truly understand how it feels and to realise she is not alone.
Widowed Young in Ireland (WYI) originated as an off-shoot of an English group but set up as an independent Irish organisation in March 2009.
“Initially I thought I was like an alien on the wrong planet,” she says. “My social life was gone. Nobody knows how to react to you. Nobody knows what is right to say.”
WYI organises nights out for adults as well as family days, where the children can meet others whose mother or father has died.
“The pain does not go away, you just get used to it. You find a way to adapt and I think that is all you can do – adapt to this new way of life,” she says.
Flattery says that she is lucky she has a boyfriend now who is a huge part of her life, though it will never be the same. “My children will never have their daddy back,” she adds.
This Christmas Day she will cook dinner for herself and Cathal (13), Niamh (12), Phil (10), Aislinn (7) and Mairéad (4). She prefers not to have her extended family around.
“Last year I said, ‘Look, I love ye but please do not call over on Christmas Day. It is our day.’ I have got used to steeling myself to face the days.”
A part of her cannot face seeing her siblings in their complete families, she explains. “It is not intended and nobody can make it any different, but it stings so badly.”
She tries to make Christmas different in a special way for the children, but to include Charlie. “We will go to Mass on Christmas Day and his grave is just across from the church. We will talk to him. It is very difficult to not feel lonely at Christmas, to not feel it is so unfair,” she adds.
“It is one of those times where it is very obvious that that person has gone. No matter how much talking to them you do, they never talk back. “
* See Widowed Young in Ireland, widowed young.ie or tel: 085-2483283
FIRST CHRISTMAS . . . AS EMIGRANTS
Jess Griffin will give the hot port a miss this year, since she will be spending Christmas Day on the beach in Western Australia, where the expected temperature will be at least 35 degrees.
It will be cool beers all round as she and her husband, Ian (33), from Co Kerry, celebrate their first Christmas away as emigrants, in the company of three other couples from Cork and Kerry who live near them in the northern suburbs of Perth.
They will miss their families back in Killarney, but won’t have any desire to be back in Ireland – “the economic situation is too depressing; we don’t miss the cold one bit,” says Jess (33).
Their children, Ewan (5) and Hayden (3) have had no problem settling into their new home and Ewan’s kindergarten school is “amazing”.
Having initially applied for Australian visas for lifestyle reasons, the Griffins soon realised such a move was becoming a necessity as the economic situation in Ireland worsened. A carpenter by trade, Ian is doing well in his new job.
A combination of “unemployment, weather and the general state of the country” prompted the Gunning family to leave Rathfarnham in Dublin and move to Australia just over a month ago. For Max (35) it was a case of bringing his Irish family – wife Martine (37) and their two children Ella (7) and Ruby (2) – back to his hometown outside Sydney.
“I wish we didn’t have to move away, but I felt we had no choice,” says Martine. Max had lost his job as a lorry driver last Christmas and could not find work in Ireland. “Our life out here is much easier on a day-to-day basis.”
They will have a Christmas Day breakfast with extended family before heading to the beach, but Martine will be thinking of home. “I won’t miss the cold but I will miss the big hot dinner and the girls spending time with their cousins and grandmother.”
Lifestyle was the big attraction for the Wilsons who left Dublin for New Zealand last May. Barbara (36) and Tim (35) had been thinking about emigrating since going there on holiday in 2005, and now they are doing it on a trial basis with their two children, Ella (4) and Calum (2).
“We were keen to make the move while the children were young enough to adapt,” says Barbara. “We tried to time it so we’d have at least a year or 18 months before Ella would be due to start school, to give us time to decide whether to stay in New Zealand or come back to Ireland.”
They felt the quality of life would be better there. “We remembered it from our holiday as a remarkably friendly and relaxed kind of place where we could have a bit of an adventure and get out of the rut we had found ourselves in.”
While Barbara has taken a career break from her job as head of nutrition at Tesco Diets, the relocation has made little difference to Tim’s work as a programmer with Oracle (formerly Sun Microsystems). His team is based in the US, so he worked mostly from home when they lived in Raheny. He still does so – though his new home is in the suburbs of Wellington, 19,000km south of the first one.
Being a stay-at-home mum is a big change for Barbara, who is originally from Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, but it seems to be the norm in New Zealand for mothers until their youngest child goes to school, she says. “Turns out it is a very positive change that we are all enjoying,” she says.
Well into December, there is not the same Christmassy feel in the air, she reports. “Decorations with snowmen on them look a bit ridiculous when the sun’s shining.”
She does not expect their Christmas Day to be very different. “We’ll see if Santa has visited, open some presents with the kiddies, go to church, drink some wine and have a meal,” she says.
Barbara is expecting to cater for 21 people this year as Tim’s parents and brother and his wife will be over from Ireland, while another brother who had moved to New Zealand before them will also be there, along with his Kiwi wife’s family.
The menu will include smoked salmon, glazed ham with salads and pavlova. “Im keen to squeeze turkey in there somewhere,” adds Barbara. “So were planning a turkey terrine and cranberry sauce.”
* swayman@irishtimes.com
