WE HAD FRIENDS visiting one weekend recently and I had what I can only describe as an out-of-body experience. One moment I was a normal, present and loving parent, and the next, I was watching myself from above as I did something I had always sworn I would never do.

I was telling a story. A hilarious story. A real crowd-pleaser. It involved my younger daughter, and how she accidentally wrote an entire essay in Art on Leonardo Di Caprio instead of Leonardo Da Vinci. She had submitted it, and made her way home from school before realizing, and then immediately burst into flames from the embarrassment of it all. As I finished the story, everybody laughed, including me, and then I turned and made direct eye contact with her.

I hadn’t heard her entering the room and she had a look of utter betrayal on her face. This was her embarrassing story, and I had just sold her out for a cheap laugh.

But even worse than that was the sudden, sinking realization that I had become my parents.

I grew up in a typical Irish household where my parents approached all family visits in what I imagine is the same way as a college fraternity approaches hazing, i.e. with the clear intention of stripping away all dignity from those present. I used to beg my parents before we would visit anyone: ‘please, please don’t tell any stories about me’.

Of course, they’d tut and sigh, say that I was being over sensitive, or dramatic, and then I’d have to sit through another roasting session where the main topic was me, or my cousins, and the more embarrassing or emotional the story, the better.

Cringing as a child

It wasn’t just limited to family visitors. Parent teacher meetings, the guy behind the till in Xtra-Vision, chance encounters with the local pharmacist. I swear, there were entire years where they didn’t speak about anything else.

After my first break up I can still remember coming downstairs one morning, puffy eyed but desperately trying to hold it together, only to overhear them laughing, actually laughing, about my misery.

My dad was giving a full TED talk to the neighbours, even going so far as to reenact the sound of my sniffles.

Even now, as an adult, he will still find a way to weave all of my embarrassing stories into the first 10 minutes of any conversation with anyone I introduce him to. It’s like he has weaponised my worst moments into small talk. “She was a very nervous child… didn’t speak until she was 12…” I am always careful to not give him any new material.

Where other cultures try to shield their children from embarrassment, Irish households use it as a rite of passage. “Remember the time you waved back at someone who wasn’t waving at you.” 

I resolved to be different. I would respect my children and their privacy. I would not trade their dignity for a laugh. After all, I am a modern parent, a cycle breaker.

But when I decided to be this type of parent, I was severely underestimating how deeply rooted this behaviour was in my DNA. 

Circle of life

In the end, all it took was a momentary lull in conversation and a room full of people ready to laugh. My values disappeared fairly quickly.

And really, who am I to fight it? Who am I to stand against my ancestors, who were clearly a long line of trauma distributors, gossip merchants and emotional town criers?

If you really think about it, you could perhaps argue that my daughter started this game-with-no-winners herself when she was three and asked a stranger in Boots why he had hair growing out of his ears. She also once told our next door neighbour that I made her sleep in the back garden, she told our parish priest that I hadn’t put on pants that morning (I had, for the record) and she went through an awful phase of flinging open changing room curtains and public bathroom doors with all the theatrical flair of someone making a West End debut, thereby revealing me in various states of undress and vulnerability.

And it’s not that I’m seeking revenge. No, that wouldn’t be right. I can’t hold a toddler accountable, and the very notion of ‘revenge’ implies forethought, and intention. That isn’t what this is. This is simply the part of me that once (multiple times) wished the ground would open and swallow her whole, finally seeing an opportunity and seizing it.

So years later, when a visitor knocks to the house and I decide to make them a cup of tea and absolutely rinse one of my children, maybe there is an internal scale that tips back to a more level setting. But not in a mean way. No, it connects us. Not just to each other, but to our very ancestry and lineage. If they are going to emotionally destroy me in Tesco, surely I get a handful of anecdotes to sprinkle on their lives in return. That feels fair.

Plus, if I break all of the cycles then I am in very real danger of setting an entirely unobtainable standard for parenting, and is that really what we want? No, of course I need to leave room for her to improve with her own family.

Or maybe she will follow in my footsteps. After all, if Leonardo DiCaprio has taught us anything, it’s that history loves a rerun.

Margaret Lynch is a mother of two and a parenting columnist with The Journal.