Megan Nolan: It’s fascinating for me to see my parents together, both so amazing, both so laughably mismatched

We like to think we’re sophisticated creatures, unknowably complex and layered and fine. The human being is different from the animal, we insist, marked out by awareness and complicated neural activity. Then, all too often, some little thing happens which reveals in an instant how primitive, indeed how primate-like, our reactions really are.

I experienced this in my 20s when discussing cohabitation with a boyfriend I had been dating for some time. We were both a little reticent in our different ways, and I reasoned that it didn’t have to be such a big deal, we could always just move out again when we broke up. Why would we break up, he asked, bewildered. I was taken aback and didn’t know how to approach such a question. We would break up, I said, because that’s what people did.

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“My parents met when they were our age, and they’re still together,” he replied, and it was suddenly so clear and so ridiculous how simple the difference between us was, which was that he had never seen his parents break up and I had never seen my parents stay together. Both of us knew that the other thing was possible, but on some cellular level did not really believe it.

I thought about these early impartations last month, standing in a sweep of dense summer drizzle in Fota Wildlife Park in Cork. This was a place I had come to as a small child with my mam and dad and my brothers, sometimes a cousin or two and grandparents. I barely remembered the details, except enchantment at lemurs roaming loose and one moment of perfect comic timing when I was walking hand in hand with my father and asked him why birds were afraid of people, and he replied “That’s why,” and indicated yonder where my cousin was stampeding toward a flock, scattering them, laughing maniacally all the while.

‘I have not had contact with my siblings for many decades, nor did I attend my parents’ funerals’

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My mother suggested earlier in the summer that when I returned for an August visit that we take my nephew – the first and so far only baby belonging to us siblings – to Fota. By “we” she meant us lot, my brother’s partner, herself, my stepfather, and my own father. To clarify, my dad is not the father of my brothers, though he did spend years living with them and they have all remained very fond of one another in the intervening years. I know, I’m giving myself a headache sorting through it all. Lots to complain about in old-school Catholic Ireland, sure, but say what you will, at least there was an economy to family demographics which could be simply put: ma, da, and a rake of kids. But we are a happy whirl of halves and steps and other familial approximations which have no real words.

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I was moved and a little surprised when my mother suggested inviting my dad, because although they have always maintained a good and friendly relationship, they’re also not intimately close buddies. It was a sweet, generous inclination, to put us all back together again so many years later. It was a gift for us kids for whom I think there is always a certain fascination in recreating the familiar formats or aesthetics of childhood and marvelling at how they fit or don’t in all our obtrusive adulthood. And it was a gift too to my father who has, understandably, never lost interest in or curiosity about these two boys he once lived with and had some hand in raising (much family lore about he, long-suffering, ferrying us around and the boys pelting him with “You’re Not My Fathers”, he trying to restrain himself – or did he, in the end? – from replying, thank Christ for that).

It’s always a bit fascinating for me to see my parents together, both so amazing and clever and kind, both so laughably mismatched as a pairing, both now married to others for 20 years or more. Wow, I think, looking at them, as temperamentally mismatched as it gets, would you know each other still if it wasn’t for the chance of having had me together? It doesn’t matter, in the end, because they did. That’s part of what made the day beautiful and absurd, how unlikely it all was that we should be there together. All of us fixated on the baby, who is fizzing with fresh language and greeting everything he sees. “Hi, cheetah,” he says, and then when me and my brother indicate the long grass, he says, with no less enthusiasm: “Hi, grass!”

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Someone took a picture of us on our way out of the park as it began to pour, all of us caught in different moments. Baby crying, me and the lads laughing, my mother screaming something, stepdad out of shot, wryly regarding the circus. There we all are, only some of us are family in the most technical of senses and yet we’re all still here together, family in some other formless but unending way.

I didn’t move in with that boyfriend. We did break up. Yet I still know him. I saw him last week. I try to remember that neither fatalism nor optimism are either usually completely the truth.

Megan Nolan’s novel Ordinary Human Failings is published by Jonathan Cape