Goodbye, Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Last night, a new coworker shat all over my dream of going to Ireland to seek out and acquire a husband.

“They're all so conservative,” she stated and now, knowing her heritage, I could catch the Belfastian lilting drawl. She mentioned how everyone, inevitably, knew of each others families, and she mentioned the pervading and everyday influence of the Church.

I sighed, the sigh one sighs when their dreams are shattered into bits and pieces so small that it’s hard to say if they ever really existed. Of course the Catholic church, or god forbid the Protestant church, is a domineering and suppressive entity in the lives of Irish citizens. Of course that translates into a great deal of social conservatism. Of course that a nation composed of very old, small towns results in a national mentality which somewhat resembles an old, small town. The evidence seemed damning.

And the fact that I didn’t know if I would marry at all seemed perfectly clear, in the way that one experiences gravity, or the eventual implosion of the sun. I was comfortable alone, and made life plans based on the eventuality of always being alone. I would be a single mother, and a single foster mother. I would breed puppies in a country home. I would write novels under a pseudonym which the New York Times would think were charming, insightful, and endlessly witty. And if perchance some blunt and especially stupid soul should wonder at my wizened, contented, perpetual singledom, and ask why I never married, the answer that awaited them would be obvious and ready: Well, my dear, I simply never possessed the inclination.

And sometimes, my dear, that is true. And occasionally I melt under the wistful drawl of a foreigner from the Emerald Isle from which I acquired my redundantly patriotic name. My father’s heritage is that of a proud Irish Catholic, diluted through years of United States since the age of the potato famine. He would proudly tell of beatings by nuns, a formative experience tying him to generations past in the old country, of which my brother and I sadly missed out. My mother’s heritage is one of more recent immigration - never has a woman from my maternal line married a Canadian, as far back as I care to tell. My mother’s father was Scottish, my mother’s mother’s father was Irish Protestant, and though I never met my great grandfather, she speaks of him fondly.

“He was Irish,” She’ll say, in a tone meant to dismiss my father’s so-called Irish heritage, which she sees as sullied by so many generations of habitation in a mere colony. There is also a hint of nostalgia, of distant longing for a man with a moor and an accent.

And when I imagined a husband, in the quiet recesses of imagination where I allowed myself to think of such things, he had an accent, and a rich cultural heritage, and that heritage may or may not have involved potatoes and cabbage. Sometimes, I think he’d ideally be Indian. The reasons for this are mostly genetic, and for the sake of my (inevitably gorgeous) future children, and sometimes the reasons are purely due to hunger - I savor the possibility of a mother-in-law with a tandoori oven where she would bake me naan. Indian men themselves are a somewhat attractive means to such ends, but Irish men, I admit, are an end unto themselves.

So, goodbye, Liam, and goodbye, Connor, and goodbye, strapping but hairy Finn. I will miss you, and your beer belch, and your stereotypical manly ways, and I’ll settle now into a dreamt future where you can’t exist, and maybe never did.