Parents vs parents? 17 12 29 (16) 25 2 16

Now that Christmas is thankfully behind us for another year once more there are just 2 social occasions left in this year and then we can really start to get back to the steady state of everyday life and perhaps i can look forward to writing blogs again..?

So when I awoke this day at 10am it was only with the greatest effort that I didn't start the day by beating myself up but instead started thinking again about my parents and how fortunate I was to have made the right choice in selecting J and A to be mine..?

In my middle years I had this friend who had already made it absolutely clear that marriage and children were not for him, an only child, whose mother B used to joke how "when our K was born I was so ashamed of him I used to cover him up in his pram so no-one could see him he was so ugly!". That is when we took our own two toddlers to visit with his parents B and Jo whilst he was away somewhere either globe-trotting, or living away from home in some dead end job that paid high wages, so that he might plan his next extended trip..?

And before I met my wife to be I had this girl friend for the best part of 5 years who had a pathological fear of bedrooms since her mother had drummed it into her that under no circumstance should she do what she had done and become pregnant before she married, which in a manner of speaking was the opposite to the situation in my own family, when J had got A pregnant in the early winter of the year before my older brother J junior was born in July and when they tied the nuptial knot 5 months earlier on the 28th February...

In naming her first born after our father, A was always very clear about her priorities in life: when I was born 9 months less 2 days after their first wedding anniversary and given the name of her favourite of three brothers it began to become clear who was in the driving seat in such matters..? When A was pregnant with her first born J thought he would volunteer to go to Spain to fight on the side of the Republicans against General Franco’s right-wing Nationalists, A said he was free to go but added “but if you do go, don’t come back..!” Accordingly it would be another 2 years before he decided to volunteer again for war service only this time it was the war against Hitler’s Nazis and I guess she just kept silent. When during the early years he was stationed in Scotland engaged in building U-boat listening posts as a Royal Marine Engineer, together with A we, the three of us, journeyed by train to visit him in the seaside town of Oban, and surprise surprise our family got the addition of a sister whom father would have named A after his wife, only A decided on the name M, that of her favourite of the three sisters comprising the rest of her parents' family, and she got the name M..!

Well if J senior did not make it home before the truce in Japan in August 1945 he did leave a legacy of a greater family now of 32 members if we include spouses of his children and grandchildren, with one or two signs that his grandchildren are now gearing up to add more to this list.

Famously A once remarked about me that E can live anywhere when I was so taken aback that I started looking round the room to try to identify about whom she was talking, but if I have now lived more than half my adult life out of England, with a foreigner for a wife, it was 2 of J senior’s Grandfathers who began the trend away from Nationalism: that moved to England from Ireland, and then in subsequent generations our 2 sons met their "foreign" wives-to-be in still more countries spread out around the world, as did the grandchildren of his daughter who married herself into fresh Irish stock, but whose own children put South Africa and Italy on the family's global map, with the youngest child of his generation living variously with his Italian wife in Vietnam and now Oman: which rather suggests at least in our family J was right to think Nationalism was a force for evil in the late 1930s..? Have a good day everyone, hurrah for J and A becoming my parents..?         

An upbeat blog about some parents but not others..? 17 12 29
Well we don't of course get to chose our parents but this is a light-hearted take on the possibility of its being so...