Back to the Beginning – the very beginning….
(Note: Romeo H´s autumnal views of Allensbach that you see here have absoloutly nothing to do with this blog posting, it´s just I felt we needed to have a bit of happy what with all this gloom and doom in the blog bla bla.)
(An aside; as a child, I thought every body struggled in school, I thought that that was simply our lot in life as children. When I left school and did not have to attend daily classes it was such a freeing experience; no matter what happened after that, nothing I did as an adult was ever the same struggle again.)
I was lucky in this respect, I nearly always had a career goal. At the circus when I was about 4, I decided I was going to be a trapeze artist when I grew up. All that sparkle and magic! This dream stayed for some time. I was about ten when the realization dawned, that there was a lot of hard work to make that sparkle and magic happen. I decided I was not prepared to put in the effort. And besides, I might fall. Nope I was going to pass on the trapeze artist career option.
So for about four years my career choices were in ´floundering mode´. Then at 14 after a small accident I needed treatment in the local orthopedic hospital. It was arranged that I would wait in the Occupational Therapy Dept for my mother to collect me. - The head occupational therapist was a friend of my mother´s.
Well within minutes I loved it. All that craft work and encouraging people to re-learn skills, chatting all day long to people; I was hooked. This was what I wanted to do when I grew up. And I pursued this aim with gusto. Every school holiday I went to the O.T. department and volunteered. I even visited the hospital on Christmas Day on occasion. It was wonderful… And it was my life path. I was set.
The Day of my School Leaving Certificate Exam in Irish
The final year of school in 1973 we were all busy planning and following up on next steps in life. I had applied to the only school in Ireland where one trained as an Occupational Therapist.
In school we were all advised to make more than one application to a college for further studies. So in the course of the school year I had also applied to do Montessori teacher training. Not that I was at all interested in teaching… I wanted away from school environments asap. But I applied because like O.T., the Montessori training school did assessments and interviews rather than choose students on their exam grades. (My grades were not going to be strong; I had taken lower level papers for all subjects.)
So back to applying to O.T. training.
I had gone for a day of testing and assessment. We had to sit tests
the like of which I never saw before. (IQ. tests etc, I later
discovered. A bad mark on my school that we students had never being
introduced to IQ. tests before. Even 50 years ago, they were pretty
normal stuff.) I had no idea how I did, because I did not know what
they were looking for. 
The Leaving Certificate exam time and the lead up to it was very stressful; I was not flourishing. Then on the day I was due to sit the Irish exam in the afternoon, I received the response from the O.T. school in the post at lunch time. I was not accepted. That was a hard hard blow – and then to go that afternoon and sit the exam. I chose not to expound on how I felt that day. Thankfully I passed the Irish exam.
And so it went
Attended Montessori School on parents´ advice. And besides I had no other options. - My parents were adamant that their daughters too would get a qualification in life. A credit to them – only for me it was the wrong decision. I struggled just as much as I did at school. And more I was living a lie and I knew it. Just before the exams I had a nervous break down. Did not do exams. Dropped out. A zombie hanging around house at home all summer. Not fun. For anyone.
Went to Cork in September 1974 and eventually got a job working as a cleaner in a hospital there. My parents were not impressed, but for me it was a wonderful experience… I was in among tough women, but kindly women. Many saw I did not have the physical strength for the work and they did my share of the cleaning too. Yes the women were kind hearty souls. I think of them with a smile to this day. I enjoyed Cork very much; I found a nice apartment share, met a nice young man: - ) , and socialized with nice people.
After work when in Cork I volunteered in a drop-in center for pre-teen and teenage boys which had been run by a priest, Father Rock, who came from my home town of Kilkenny. Although I knew young children and or school settings were not for me, I got on well with the boys there. I decided this could work for me. Perhaps I could work in a children´s home with older children. (Over the years it emerged the area I worked best in was working with boys and young men from say 12 – 21. And the ´bolder´ they were, the better we got on!)
And so it was that in Sept. 1975, I started a job in St. Bernard´s Group Homes for older children in Co. Tipperary. The plan was to work there on a very small wage for two years, then apply to a child care training course. After the two year course I would then be a professional child care worker and would earn a good wage. Only I was not accepted in the training course either. I was shocked, so too were the nuns with whom I had worked. I applied once more six months later. Still not accepted.
Some
months earlier I had visited a very advanced thinking boys home in
England, the Cotswold Community, about which I had read much. At
the time they said if I ever wanted to work there, I would have a
job. So knowing the Cotswold Community was held in very high esteem
by the child care training course that I wanted to attend in Ireland,
I thought I would surely be accepted for training after working in
the Cotswold Community. So I went for 18 months. Hard work but a
very unique experience; I was working with some of the most respected
people in the field of child care in Europe.
Came back to Ireland in early summer 1979; assuming I would be called to child care training in September that year, I got a job for fun in a trendy touristy shop in Dublin called the Kilkenny Design Shop. - For the few months as I thought.
I was still not called for training, in spite of excellent references, and solid work experience. By now I was old enough to be considered a mature student, so I could now apply a for social work course in Ireland which was geared toward mature students with experience in the field. I applied twice. Refused. Twice.
My few months stint in the Kilkenny Design Shop in Dublin turned into seven years.
A
stint in the Kilkenny Design Shop for even up to two years would have
been a delight; I learned much about Irish crafts and design. I even
won a prize from the Dublin Chamber of Commerce as one of the best
sales assistant in Dublin. (I was presented with the prize by John
Hume RIP. Even back then the future Noble Peace Laureate was a man
who was held in great esteem. I was most honoured to have met the
man in person.) But prizes do not pay the rent! My wages were low,
no prospects of promotion in the small new company with lots of
trained marking and designers already there.
In those seven years working in the Kilkenny Shop, I applied for all sorts of jobs and courses. I did a two year marking course at night; it took me three years! (Don´t ask about the results!)
Apart from my own struggles, the economy in Ireland in the 1980s was not good. So in desperation to make something of my life and to find a job with purpose and where I could earn a living wage, in January 1987 aged 31, I left for America. Undocumented.
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... Dear readers, that is about enough drama and dreary for today... I will continue with:
My story for Nancy - A life searching for purpose - not found.
Sob sob Blog Posting Part III soon. But take heart, things do begin to look up; the heading of sob sob blog posting III piece starts....
...No job with passion, but life started looking up.
Hausfrau Rósín.
A life searching for purpose - not found. Part II.
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