In my family exams are a big deal. I had aunts and uncles who were teachers and I think the only way they knew how to relate to my siblings and me was to involve themselves in our exam results. We were brought up in London, and so were able to confuse them about O and A levels, but even so they would make it their business to find out who was doing what. One uncle even went into UCD and found out my brother's exam results before he did. We used to dread their interest. In fact my mother would take it very personally and would hike up our results - we got honours in subjects we didn't even sit.
"They're a crowd of busybodies," she would say, when my father's sister rang to tell us how her tension level was at a premium because my results were due. I was never academic and never put the effort into exams, so I suppose my anxiety about my own results was quite justified. When my first public exam results plopped on the doormat I grabbed them and flew into the bedroom and wouldn't come out.
They were average enough, but it was the pressure from the extended family that gave me the stomach cramps. My mother, true to form, presented them well and I got the usual couple of pounds in the post. You would think this experience would have given me a bit of sensitivity. But no, I seem to have inherited the family "big deal" syndrome; even though we are exam-free in our household this year, I have this compulsion to involve myself in everyone else's tension. I was on the phone on August 18th, the day of the Leaving Cert results, to my brother. "Well, how did she do?" I actually had butterflies in my stomach as I waited for his reply. "Grand, she'll be able to live off me for another three years," he replied.
"Thank God," I said as I felt the tension leaving me, then return. "I am so nervous about Luke's Junior Cert. "
"Well, he certainly isn't. All he can think about is the celebrations." And it's not just family. I am all ready to get in touch with friends and neighbours whose offspring are waiting for Junior Cert results.
"Its the champagne you want to get in on," says my son, who doesn't seem to have inherited the family failing. "Sure nobody fails anything these days anyway," he says. "There's no need for your kind of tension any more."
