We are well used to hearing about long commutes, but this recession has seen more people travelling to other countries to find work, while trying to maintain a family life at home in Ireland. How do families cope?
EVERY FEW days, Anne-Marie Griffin thinks, “Oh God I can’t do this any more”, and wants to ring her husband Oliver and tell him to come home.
Then she reminds herself how much worse it was when he was unemployed, when he was in “her space” at home during her days off and they had money issues.
Last May, a year and a half after being let go from his job as a chartered surveyor in Cork, Oliver reluctantly joined the swelling numbers of Irish people boarding a flight to London early every Monday morning to work in a city where the construction industry is still hiring.
Anne-Marie is left behind to juggle her part-time job with caring for their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter all week. “It has had a huge effect on all of us,” she says.
Oliver was “devastated” not to be around to see their son starting school earlier this month. “It was heart-breaking. He just has to live for the weekends,” says Anne-Marie, who sees how his absence affects the children, particularly their three-year-old daughter who spent a lot of time with her father when he was unemployed.
“She is misbehaving an awful lot since he left and is taking it out on me. She can’t say, ‘I miss Daddy’, but she’s feeling it. It has been very tough on her.”
Their son also gets upset from time to time, asking why Daddy can’t be there. “I just explain that bills have to be paid.”
Although a very independent person, she feels isolated in the evenings and the nights are hard. “I have not slept properly since he has gone.” While it was not unusual for her daughter to be coming into her bed, her son, who used to be a “fantastic sleeper”, wakes now as well.
Another issue for Anne-Marie is how to get to visit her mother, who lives alone in the midlands, as at weekends the four of them just want to make the most of their time together in Cork.
It is lonely for Oliver too, in a house-share in London, but he is enjoying the job, is getting great experience and hopes he will work back in Cork eventually.
“On balance it is a better situation – not probably for family life, but for both our sanities,” says Anne-Marie. “I am just happy he is working; it’s a pity he is in London.” It annoys her that the Government’s focus has been on young people emigrating and nothing is said about those with families who have to go abroad to find work.
It is not only job-seekers who are being forced to expand their horizons for the chance of employment. The economic downturn means many people in existing jobs find themselves travelling more frequently and further as companies need to extend their reach to generate business.
People seeking jobs have had to become a lot more flexible, says Frank Farrelly, a director with Sigmar Recruitment. Often it is a gradual process, as they lower their expectations over months of job-searching.
It depends on the person, he explains. They might take a hit on salary and benefits first, then career level before they would settle for a distant location.
“People are doing what they can to ride out the recession. It has been an awfully painful process for a lot of people who have been made redundant.”
The managing director of the Berkley Recruitment Group, Fergal Brosnan, advises clients who have been made redundant to widen their scope as much as they can immediately.
“Get the job in London, get the job in Dublin, whatever you need, and then concentrate on getting a job closer to home. Rather than spending six months trying to get a job close to home and then saying, ‘Ah shag it, I have to go away’.”
The impact on home life can be profound, particularly for young families who never envisaged such a situation.
While children are very adaptable, couples struggle with issues such as the guilt of the absent parent, resentment felt by the one who is left to hold the fort and how the family functions when it is apart – and when it is reunited.
Children can cope with most things as long as they know what is happening, says clinical psychologist Michael Mullally. “It is very important that it does not come as a surprise to them or that Daddy or Mummy is away all week and nobody says why.”
The sense that the family is all pulling for each other is probably the most important thing for children, he suggests. Couples should realise that if one parent has to be away a lot, “it may not be optimal, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the children’s emotional needs can’t be met or that it will be detrimental to them in some way”.
Deirdre and Paddy, who live in Kinvara, Co Galway, had one-year-old twin daughters, as well as two older girls aged four and six, when his IT job brought him to Dublin last year for a prolonged period.
“The twins were just learning to walk,” says Deirdre, who found being alone with the four children all week very difficult physically. “I had to carry two of them upstairs to the cot, both of them down; I spent my time picking up a child.” Her exhaustion was compounded by the twins routinely waking up twice a night.
Paddy felt the twins were too young not to see him from Sunday to Friday nights, so he often drove home on a Wednesday evening, arriving in time for half-an-hour’s play with the children before helping to put them to bed. “Then he would pretty much collapse in bed as he had to be up and going again by 5am.”
Weekends together were precious “so everybody else got dropped. The extended family was put on the back burner to maintain our own family.”
Deirdre, who works three and a half days a week in the medical devices sector, says she is not normally an organised person, but has to be when Paddy is away. After she comes home from work, it will normally be 10pm before she gets a chance to sit down.
“I would have everything on the breakfast table ready to go and the place clean and tidy – tidier than when he is around. I need to know where the hairbrushes are in the morning, we can’t wait.”
There is no tolerance of strops by the children. “I am probably stricter than we would prefer. There are times when you are wrecked; you have had a bad day, they have had a bad day and everyone is shouting.”
There is no chance to go into another room and say to your partner, “You deal with it for 10 minutes”, she points out. “So the children do get the brunt of it from time to time.”
Like all parents in her position, being stuck in the home in the evening is one of the hardest things. “You can’t move. You can’t even have a glass of wine with four children that young; you just can’t take the risk.”
In Paddy’s absence, bedtime is always a challenge. The two older children “miss out a lot” because it is their father who reads them bedtime stories, while she does it for the twins – but she can’t read for all four when he is away.
“You can’t reason with two year olds and there are two two year olds. They like routine and that is what works.”
Life is a bit easier now that the children are a year older and Paddy’s time away is more sporadic and shorter.
“I can’t imagine what it is like to live that way all the time,” says Deirdre. “I was always terrified that one of the kids would have an accident or get really sick during the night.”
There were some “it’s all right for you” rows, she admits. “He understands that I felt a little bit hard done by. There he was staying in a hotel, meeting up with college friends he had not seen in years and meeting up with his family in Dublin.” But he felt guilty too and missed being at home.
“We weathered the storm,” she adds. “We have been together for 19 years, since first year in college, and I think that had an awful lot to do with it as well. We had a very solid relationship and it had to be. It is not how we intended to be raising our family.”
' I DO ALL THIS ON MY OWN ALL WEEK: HE CAN'T JUST COME IN AND CHANGE IT':
Siobhán Archer is so used to her husband being away during the week that it disrupts her routine when he is working from home in Co Clare.
“It is almost easier for me on a Sunday when I know he is going to be gone Monday to Friday,” she says. “This is an issue that couples who live this way have to come to terms with.”
She and her husband, Eoin Heaney, have three children: Seán (eight), Robin (six) and Fiona (four). He works in telecommunications and was abroad for 36 weeks last year.
She spends so much time solely in charge of the household that it can be hard for her to let him play his part when he is around.
“I almost feel like, ‘How dare he? I do this on my own all week; he can’t just come in and change it’.”
They lived in Tokyo and London but decided to return to Ireland three years ago, settling outside Ennis where there is easy access to Shannon airport, although he flies out of Cork and Dublin too.
“Initially, he had an awful dilemma with the job and travelling. He thought it was going to impact hugely on the children. We had to come to the understanding that it actually didn’t.”
Eoin worried that the children would turn around when they were older and tell him he was not there for them. But Siobhán, who job-shares as a primary school teacher, reassured him: “When you are there, put in the quality time – that is what they will remember.”
For her, the biggest drawback is being stuck at home in the evenings, unable to do a regular class or go out on a whim. “On the upside I have a husband who has a very good job that affords me a lifestyle that we probably would not have if he wasn’t travelling. The employment isn’t here.”
As a couple they had to learn how to readjust to each other at the weekends. But now she feels they have fallen into a way of life that works for them and acknowledges they are lucky, having seen how some couples in similar circumstances grow apart. “That is what you have to be careful of.”
'THE MOST FANTASTIC THING ABOUT MY HUSBAND HAS BEEN THAT I ALWAYS KNOW HE LOOKS AFTER THE CHILDREN WELL':
Jean Cox-Kearns is no stranger to frequent travel abroad with her job, but she thought it would get easier as her two children got older. The opposite has been the case.
“The more aware they become of your travels, the harder it gets. The more your kids will tell you, ‘You realise you are missing this . . .’”
Ironically, she joined her current employer nearly 13 years ago because she decided she needed a job where she didn’t travel.
With her previous job she was travelling within Ireland nearly every week and Lucy, who is now aged 16, and Ivan (14), were very small at the time.
“I went to work with Dell and managed not to travel for the first two years.” But for the past decade, she has been abroad for at least some of nearly every week.
When she and her husband, Dermot, decided to have children, he wanted to get away from his sales job which had him on the road five days a week. He moved into the stay-at-home role, keeping his hand in business.
“I don’t really have a lot of control over my agenda,” explains Jean, who is senior take back and recycling manager with Dell. “My travel can change fairly quickly and regularly, so you have to assume that he is the one ready to down tools at a moment’s notice.
“One of the sacrifices he has had to make is that while he is a business person at heart, he is so restricted in what he can do. So my job has to be enough for all of us and his business is an added bonus.
“As a man at home,” she comments, “he has to be happy to have a certain amount of success through me rather than his own. He has been very good at doing that; he is such a strong advocate of my career.”
She thinks it is harder for mothers, rather than fathers, who travel for work. “I don’t want to discriminate against men but because I am going away every week, I spend my weekends in the slurry of washing, ironing and sorting the house and getting everything ready.
“The most fantastic thing about my husband has been that I always know he looks after the children well.
“I don’t care if he doesn’t look after the house well. It would be an extra bonus – but I know it is never going to happen.”
Jean is based in Dell’s Cherrywood office in south Dublin, but between trips tries to work from home in Ashford, Co Wicklow, if possible. Despite the time she spends away from Lucy and Ivan, she is proud of her close bond with them.
“I have managed to maintain that relationship. I feel they are open with me. They have been incredibly supportive.”
swayman@irishtimes.com
