There is a heart drawn in ballpoint pen on my wife’s hand, and something similar on my own, just in the crook of my thumb and forefinger. They look like the sort of thing you’d see in a mid-00s rom-com, where a manic pixie dream girl has scrawled on a stuffy old square to get him to live a little. These homemade tattoos were not, however, the idle fancy of young lovers.
When he started back at school, my son had a hard time bedding in. He was suffering from separation anxiety, exacerbated by six weeks of summer holidays in which he got to wear flip-flops and build Lego every day. It now seems clear he’d decided this break was permanent, that he’d finished with school and would spend the rest of his life in idle retirement, engaging in personal interests and foreign travel.
Despite our repeated reminders that school was coming back – not least the uniform and shoe fittings that really should have given the game away – returning to the grind of structured learning was not part of his new life as a retiree, and schooltime homesickness descended. September was hard. He’d bawl and act sheepish at the gates and often had to be carried into the classroom by his kind and patient teachers. I’d withdraw, feeling like I’d just covered my son in tomato sauce and stuffed him into a pizza oven, fielding the sympathetic glances of my fellow parents, whose children were mostly bounding into school with a song in their hearts.
Which brings us to our own hearts. Our friends Sarah and Ben had had a similar issue with their son, and remedied it by drawing small hearts on his hand, one for each of them, which he could look at throughout the day. It seemed an adorable solution, albeit a speculative one. I found it hard to believe some ink hearts would solve my son’s anguish, especially since it had already vaulted the most natural boundary to his being homesick; the fact that his classroom is about 12m away from our front door.
But we gave it a go. My wife went first, drawing a pretty little heart on her own hand, and three on his – one for me, his mum, and his sister. At drop-off, she touched the hearts together and bid him farewell, and to our astonishment, he sniffled mildly and headed indoors.
‘I looked at my hearts today.’ he said when I picked him up, a statement so devastatingly adorable, I’ve thought long and hard about whether I can record it here without making you, dear reader, slightly sick.
‘Where’s yours?’ he asked, at which point the story takes a slightly less mawkish tone. I had not realised that drawing a heart on one’s hand was a skill I hadn’t yet attained, and my own effort was frustratingly misshapen, oddly oblong, and its two rounded peaks giving the unmistakable impression of –
‘It looks like a bum,’ he said to me, laughing.
‘I KNOW IT DOES,’ I said. ‘It’s the thought that counts.’
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
