Rory Fitzgerald
I spent last Tuesday at work in the rarefied environs of the Supreme Court in London. Just for contrast, I spent the next day knocking down a wall with a sledgehammer. I was working at a rapid pace, as I had to have the rubble cleared in time to pick the kids up from school. Such is the variety of life at the moment.
Since moving to the Isle of Wight, we lived in five different rented houses before at last buying our own place a few months ago. It needs a bit of remodeling and renovation to make it suitable for family living. I’m doing most of the building work, in between Andrea’s nightshifts and exams, the kids’ homework and Beaver projects, my legal work and whatever else life throws at us. To say we are busy is an understatement, but making a house a home for your family is cheerful work. In contrast to office work, you get the satisfaction of seeing something real and tangible that you made at the end of the day.
The kids are fascinated to come back from school to see a new hole in the wall, a new doorframe up, or a new light hanging from the ceiling. Seán in particular could watch me work for hours, and is a helpful assistant, readily running to get a spirit level or a box of screws when I need them.
There is a sense of creating something lasting about building. A well-built house will stand largely unchanged for 100 years, or perhaps for centuries. Some of what I am building now will be used daily by future generations living in our house.
I get the very same feeling about building a family and raising children. I feel that we are setting something in motion that will, God willing, ultimately resonate through the centuries. We parents, in how we raise our children, are helping to shape their values and how they will treat others, and so how they will raise their own children in decades to come.
At this frantically busy time of our lives, I feel all of our varied work worthwhile, including the very mundane stuff, like waking to comfort our toddler at 3am, or dealing with messy potty training accidents, or taking time to sit and read with the older children, or cooking nutritious food.
There is no glamour in any of these tasks. Nor is there much glamour in mixing cement. Yet in both cases, such routine work is part of a bigger creative process that involves building a better future for our family, and for many other people, long into the future.
Research
I’ve been researching our family tree, and it’s fascinating to look back through time at particular great grandparents, say a couple born in late 19th-Century Cork. You can see their descendants fan out below them, numbering well over 100 people, all now living and thriving in the US, Britain and Ireland. Each of those people carries genetically and culturally something of their great grandparents, often in unknown ways.
One day our descendants will look back at us from future centuries in the same way. Even the littlest things we do to nurture our own children can change the future, for the better.
