Life it seems is just one rite of passage after another, from adolescence to death, writes Ailish Connelly
A LIGHT breeze ripples the hair. It's not Mills and Boon, it's way more prosaic than that. It's the collective sigh of exhausted parents as the exam season swings by and summer holidays tantalisingly beckon for the nation's children.
As a rite of passage, State exams loom large in the imagination, for decades ever after, up there with the essential rites of birth, adolescence and death. Countless well-known personalities and bread-and-butter folk have testified to recurring nightmares of "doing the Leaving" or worse, "failing the Leaving".
Such wasted energy, all this angst and bother over an exam.
Yes, it may be huge to you now and will determine where you go to college, but there are several ways to skin a cat. If you want a particular course but don't get the points, you can always go back to college as a mature student or do your course the long way round.
Five years after "doing the Leaving", nobody but nobody asks you your results and if they did, you'd swiftly assist them to a chair and concern yourself with their immediate mental health.
More enjoyable rites of passage for all participants are religious ceremonies such as Communion, Confirmation and Bar Mitzvah. It can seem sometimes as if the whole year, if not one's whole life, is a ritual.
In our family this year, we had a Christening, a Confirmation and a Communion in as many months. The First Communion, especially if it's a girl (aka the mini-wedding), has become big business and a massive organisational feat.
The taste police had obviously been around our neighbourhood for there was not a meringue dress, a fake tan or an acrylic nail in sight. No stretch Hummers or choppers or plumed ponies, we were tripping over ourselves in refinement. Though I did see photographic evidence of a fabulous cream puff of a number, rumoured to have cost a whopping two grand (the Lord's way of telling someone they have too much dosh), and a blingtastic tiara Jordan might have considered for her wedding.
My girl was a model of decorum. She didn't make a holy show of us, she didn't stand at the front door, Mafia-moll style, waiting for money to be pinned on her skirts, she was gracious and took it all in her stride.
The Protestant cousins stood gobsmacked at the glory of the frock and their mother announced she would be into Dunnes for the sales to snap up something similar. They may not have the miracle of transubstantiation but by God, her little ladies would have the dress.
One peculiarly Irish rite is a stay in the Gaeltacht. It has become quite the thing for sixth-class pupils to go with their schools for a week of caint as Gaeilge and ceilís and six bunk-beds to a room.
The tiger babies who will mature into a less economically healthy Ireland have to get their heads around queues for two- minute showers and trekking for miles in the rain and no mollying from Mum for five whole days.
My son had the "best week of my life" and didn't bother to use his phone credit once, while another child kept her mother up to date every hour, starting with a text from Booterstown, five miles down the road, in case her mum was feeling lonely. The list of instructions from the school had included a warning that the parents would possibly find that first separation harder than the kids, a rite of passage for parents if ever there was one.
Another mother told me of a teenager embarking on a bus for the Connemara Gaeltacht who was heard broadcasting, "OMG boggers! I'm not having anything to do with bogger!" I'm sure she'll change her mind when a few good- looking "boggers" catch her eye.
Really, the teenage years are nothing but transformational rituals, starting with the onset of adolescence, the first gig or disco, the first sexual experiences, the first alcoholic drink - the former a bigger deal for the parents than the offspring, the latter hijacked by a cynical drinks industry which peddles alco-pops that taste like liquid candy at impressionable kids.
There's the first big festival, the first trip abroad to a language school (international Gaeltacht with the bank of Mam and Dad footing the bills), passing the driving test, the debs, then at 18 getting the vote, casting that first vote and having the first legal alcoholic drink in a pub.
The gap year is another well- known social step, one that was enforced on the kids of the 1980s and early 1990s as they left these shores in their droves to seek work and further themselves.
The defining events of our lives continue; the job, the house, the life partner, the new career, parenthood, the wedding, in whatever order, then on into the empty-nesters and retirement, a time which can be truly metamorphic for the individual.
So to the elephant in the room of rituals; the grim reaper, death. We Irish do the funeral ritual well, we give a good send-off to our loved ones. There are many who believe it to be the sine qua non of transformational moments in their lives, a rite of passage which will herald a new, better existence.
Strange then, how death is still the great unmentionable, the ritual in which humans of every creed and none will play starring roles, the defining rite of passage.