THE woman on Liveline was bleating on a bout the Extended Family.
"You see Marian, that's what's really, wrong with Ireland at the moment. I mean, nobody really cares any more, not like they used to care in the old days. You know Marian, it's the whole concept of the extended family is missing."
Not for the first time Jo thought that Marian Finucane should be canonised. How did she keep her temper with some of them, dig something interesting out of what they were rambling on and on about on her radio programme? Did she never want to tell them to shut the hell up, tear off her headphones and start running out of that studio until someone stopped her?
That's what Jo would have done with that woman and her extended families. What kind of a world did she live in, for God's sake? The country was coming down with extended families. Children nowadays had two sets of homes to go to and four sets of grandparents. That was in any ordinary sort of home where the parents had separated and made other arrangements. How much more extended could a family get?
Take her own case. Jo poured herself another cup of tea, and marvelled at how Marian had manoeuvred the woman into a less fractious frame of mind. There were three children - 15, 14 and 10 - and they had Jo as their mother, and they had Sean as their father. But Sean was married to . . . well, sort of married to Nancy, and they had two children who were three and two. And Jo herself had a friend, Kevin, who was very, very kind and good, and not even a sort-of husband because he didn't live there at all, he just came to visit. And Kevin had one son who was 20 and lived with his mother, and Kevin lived in a bedsitter by himself, and painted pictures of people's houses and then went and offered them to the house owners for sale.
Jo thought that was extended enough for the old bat on the radio. Her children had a whole rake of people who wanted them on Christmas Day. Sean their father wanted them: he had said several times that Jo had them last year and now it was his turn. And Nancy said she wanted them because she wanted to please Sean and secretly she hoped they might help her mind the babies. And Jo's mother, who was a widow, wanted them in her house because they were her grandchildren and she loved them, and her other grandchildren were in Brussels. Sean's mother and father wanted them because they were their grandchildren, and also they had this huge big house which was simply crying out for children at Christmas. And Nancy's mother had wanted everyone to come to her for Christmas because she was going to have a hip operation in the New Year and she needed company, even if it was the family of this man that her beautiful daughter Nancy had taken up with and had given birth to two children with, as bold as brass.
Kevin wanted to be with them playing games, taking them out to fly a kite the way no one else could. He asked if he could have them for a few - ours on Christmas morning. But it wouldn't be suitable, of course, if they were at their father's. It wouldn't be right somehow, if their mother's fancy man came and borrowed them for an outing.
And Jo herself wanted them with a terrible ache to make sense of the whole damn thing, like how on earth she had allowed Sean to walk out of her tile and into Nancy's. "Bring back the nuclear family,", Jo thought, where there was one Mummy, one Daddy and children, and that was the little cell.
And yet she really didn't believe that. She and Sean had been having too many rows, thought differently about far too many things. They were not the same people that they had been when they met and fell in love and married 20 years ago.
It would have been idiotic to remain tied to each other, pretending that nothing had changed. She was far easier with a slow, gentle man like Kevin, not a go-getter like Sean.
Sean, on the other hand, needed the enthusiasm and ready co-operation of a Nancy in his business deals and his networking; and for most of the time it worked fine. The children had adjusted remarkably well: they knew that they were welcome in both homes. The boys would sometimes laugh at Nancy's nonsense, and tell Jo things they knew would please her, like Nancy having rules that you had to take off your shoes when the new carpet arrived, and you had to wash all the dishes properly before you put them in the dishwasher.
But Janie, her 10-year-old, never told funny stories after her visits to her father. She just looked a little thoughtful, maybe even wistful, and Jo never questioned her about it. If there was anything to say Janie would say it in her own good time.
She said it just before Christmas.
"Why can't we all be together? You know, everyone, all the grannies and grandpa and Kevin and Nancy and the babies too. And you and Dad at the centre of it?"
Jo thought she had done quite a good job explaining why it wouldn't work. Everyone liked to build up their own tradition. The main thing that Janie must realise was that everyone loved her, and she was wanted and needed everywhere.
"Oh, I know that," Janie said airily. "It's just that it would be warmer if we were all together. There would be no gaps; no one missing."
Jo was always great at advising other people what to do. She told Kevin he should put little cheap frames on his drawings of houses so that they would look more finished. She told her friend Maureen to cut her ridiculous long hair, and how to wear a blusher so that it didn't look as if she had two red consumptive spots on her face. She told her next door neighbour to tie the lid of her dustbin to the handle and then she wouldn't have to run after it every bin-day. Why couldn't she tell herself what to do in the face of a child's longing?
There had to be a simple solution.
And then she heard her voice saying to Janie: "You know, you're quite right, there are gaps. Why don't we have a huge big party for everyone here on the Saturday after Christmas. Let's ask everyone to lunch, will we write the invitations now?"
With every envelope Jo wrote she began to wonder was she entirely mad. Inviting Nancy to the home from which she had extricated Sean. Inviting Nancy's daft mother who went on as if she were the only person in Western civilisation to face a hip operation. Asking her own mother who had always said if she were to find herself within 50 metres of that no-good Sean she would not answer for her actions. Open the door to Sean's parents who were so grand, and had never hidden the fact that Sean had married so far beneath him he could not be blamed for having taken up with someone else.
And Kevin'? Dear kind Kevin who never wanted any trouble, how could he be placed in the middle of all this? And would it be appropriate or insane to ask his frail wife and his discontented son as well?
Janie however, being to, had no reservations about any of it. She told her brothers the good news. "We have to face the fact that our mother may be barking," said the elder boy. "Fasten your seat belts," said the younger.
ON Christmas Day Jo delivered the children to their father's house, and waved cheerily from her battered little car. "Don't forget Saturday," she cried, and roared off before she could see Nancy trying to come up with an excuse. Then she took her mother to Christmas lunch in a hotel where they both got extremely drunk and led all the singing that the hotel had not actually known was going to be part of its Christmas programme.
Then there was St Stephen's Day to get over the hangover, and groan through tales of how Nancy had put plastic place mats over the good ones, and how she lost her temper with Daddy when he poured hock into the claret glasses.
And then there was Friday, when the horror of what she had done began to seep in, and then it was Saturday. "Do you want any help with this........ thing?" her boys asked, but she waved them off with Kevin up the hills in the fresh air, while she and Janie went to the supermarket.
Jo had hoped that she might be inspired but she wasn't. The whole thing was ludicrous. It was 10 o'clock in the morning. In three hours people were going to converge on her house, about to guests and her own family. She would have to feed 14 people, most of whom were related to each other in the most complex of ways. Based on infidelity if you came to think of it. Or adultery as her mother would undoubtedly put it had she been asked.
Which she wouldn't be. Nor had she been kept fully in the picture about Kevin and his presence in the scheme of things. "Oh Janie," Jo said piteously to her 10-year-old daughter. "Janie, tell me what are we going to give them to eat."
"I don't suppose they'll mind," Janie said briskly. "They mightn't even notice, I mean they'll all be so glad to be together and everything, that they'll eat anything." The child's face was so enthusiastic, Jo felt like getting into her own shopping trolley, curling up and weeping her heart out.
Instead she asked: "What would you like to eat, Janie?"
And Janie said that everybody always liked sausages and beans and baked potatoes, with ice-cream afterwards, but that Kevin's son was vegetarian, they had better get a couple of green peppers to bake as well.
"But Kevin's son isn't coming surely?" Jo felt faint. "Of course he is, and he's bringing elderflower mead which he makes himself." Janie knew everything.
They pulled back all the furniture to make room for the guests. Like animals coming into an ark, - slightly suspicious but with a gleam of optimism, they arrived. Every single one of them. Nancy's complaining mother making heavy weather of her walking stick, Sean's lofty parents dressed as if for Ascot. Her own mother - eyes like slits - had actually met Sean at the gate and was showing a reasonable amount of interest in one of his babies. A small, beady-eyed woman, who must be Kevin's wife, had brought a chocolate cake. Jo saw her own sons talking animatedly, with altogether too much interest, to a gangling 20-year-old who was explaining the fermenting process of mead and how to make the alcohol content stronger.
They all said that sausages and beans were exactly what they wanted, and they had a slice of Kevin's wife's chocolate cake with the ice-cream. There was a steady hum of conversation, which became a steady roar after the elderflower mead which had come in two gigantic flagons the size of the gas cannisters you'd put into a heater.
There was plenty of time to talk to everyone, no grandmother felt that she had been outranked or ignored. All that pre-Christmas tension had died down, there was no stress - the big day itself was over.
It had been for most of them an inadequate day, and yet they could never have compromised and had this kind of general feast just for the sake of the children. That way nobody would have won but everybody would have lost.
Somehow this was entirely suitable, a ridiculous get-together with sausages and noise and some extraordinary liquor and nobody being totally certain who everyone was. And Jo felt dizzy and confused; as it got dark and they all came and thanked her and said it was wonderful, and Janie sat beaming on the stairs, safe again in a world where everyone loved each other like they used to. And as the extended family left the ark, replete with food and mead they were all saying that it had been better than Christmas Day.
Yes, at some stage every single person there had said to Jo that honestly this Saturday had truly been better than Christmas and that they must have one, again.