The Road Less Parented

On what might've been, and what happened anyway

It can sometimes feel like one’s life could have turned out very differently if only one choice had been made instead of another. I, myself, often lie awake at night visualising my life as a winding road with a myriad of branching paths down which I could have travelled: different universities I could have gone to, places I could have lived in, people I could have met. A day scarcely goes by without me mentally re-enacting and revisiting it a hundred times over — and a hundred times more for good measure. This is despite the fact that I am largely convinced that everything is as it was always going to be, a niche philosophical point which I am clearly better at arguing for than living by. 

It should perhaps come as no surprise, then, that one particular fork in the road which I have recently made a habit of revisiting is one over which I definitely had no control. Going into my second year of primary school, I developed a fascination with all things scientific, a passion strong enough to motivate me to ask my parents to sign up to the school’s science club. Unfortunately, I was one year too young to join — God forbid the school make an exception. The absolute last thing a school should do, after all, is feed the intellectual curiosity of impressionable young minds; such a thing is known to have pretty severe consequences. 

Although I’m not sure exactly how devastated I was at the time and was certainly not put off by intellectual pursuits altogether; at my time of writing, I am against all better judgement in the second year of a second Master’s and eyeing up another four years of study and a potential lifetime in academia. Still, I’ve come to think of my exclusion from the science club as a turning point in my life. From then on, I scarcely went out of my way to indulge in extracurriculars despite having all sorts of interests and plenty of friends with which to develop them. Perhaps it would’ve been helpful to put a label on what I now know to be crippling anxiety frustratingly matched by an equally staggering extroversion. I could have, at least, learnt how to effortlessly juggle a football. I can only imagine the clubs I would’ve tried out for had I accrued that skill, and the promising, though ultimately short-lived, multi-sport career that would’ve followed.   

My biggest stumbling block when it came to exerting myself ‘extracurricularly’ (other than myself), however, were my parents. I knew many kids that were, let’s just say, ‘strongly encouraged’ to compete in amateur sports, learn an instrument, or, scariest of all, attend a summer camp. I, on the other hand, was ‘raised’ — if one can call it that — by parents who took a distinctly laissez-faire attitude to parenting. That they came to adopt this attitude is not surprising when their own life-paths are brought into view. Besides being quite the busy-bees, they had also had two kids prior to me and, long before I was of age to join the school science club, they had already encountered that all-too-common fork in the parental road where they give in to their children’s protests against mandatory piano lessons. Had I been allowed to join the school science club, I might still have lacked the ‘positive reinforcement’ needed to learn an instrument or try out for a sports team, shocking ‘keepie-uppie’ ability notwithstanding. Whatever the case may be, to this day, I have zero sporting trophies to my name, nor can I play a single instrument.

Alas, I have made some strides in the extra-curricular department since my school days. I can now proudly say that despite having experienced a level of parental non-intervention that would make even a Swede shudder, I have written for many a school publication, presided over a few societies, founded a sporting club — shoutout Saints GAA — and even had the joy of meeting my now-partner at an Irish Society pub quiz, of all places. So, while I am now unquestionably pro-extracurricular and do still wonder how my life would have been had I been allowed into the science club or parented more authoritatively, I am beyond happy with the path I’ve ended up on. 

In the immortal words of the great poet Robert Frost (albeit probably not penned in reference to extracurricular activities): 

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

Illustration by Eve Fishman