Distraught - this woman doesn't know what to do now she has lost her previously 'normal' husband to the GAA.
A married woman has contacted us concerned about her husband and recent changes in his behaviour.
With no-one else to talk to she was told to contact Talking Balls, her advisor or counsellor or whoever it was told her that we were highly knowledgeable, thoughtful and would give good practical advice laced with common sense.
The woman and her husband had recently moved to a new area for employment reasons. He had never displayed much interest in games gaelic and athletic before.
She, being a bit of a snob and having been brought up by a highly self-opinionated father, who considered the GAA to be the preserve of layabouts, gobshites, mucksavages and fellas who pursued a political agenda masquerading as sport, always found the GAA mildly distasteful.
Her own sense of opprobrium had been fuelled one day when she unwittingly gave a gaggle of GAA youngsters a lift home from school and they trailed muck and ordure into the rear of her spotless 4X4. The mark of studs and those awful blades could be clearly seen on the Camel coloured upholstery and needed more than a good valeting to remove.
Imagine her chagrin then, to learn that her husband had fallen in with a bad lot in his new job. These men were heavily, and she means heavily involved. They talked non-stop about hurling, football and even camogie, that dreadful game where big girls wore very short skirts and ran round a mucky field after a ball. It was the height of unladylike behaviour.
Over a period of months things took further and more turns for the worse. Her husband had started bringing their son to Gaelic and now the daughter had taken up camogie. She came home one day with a hole busted in the knee of her new skinny jeans from competing for a low ball. The boy had already put the knees out of a nice pair of those Canterbury trousers that the rugby boys wear so well.
Her husband had started heading off ‘up to the Pairc’ to watch all sorts of matches, senior football, hurling, underage camogie, seven a side blitzes. Before she knew it he had been co-opted onto the committee and was holding sub committee meetings in their kitchen and telling these big rough fellas with weather beaten faces, rough hands and ill fitting O’Neills gear that the ‘wife will make you a cup in your hand.’
Although rough looking there was something very civil about some of these men, not at al like the coarse creatures she had seen one day when she had followed the husband up to the Pairc to see what all the fuss was about. There they had been bellowing red faced at a young fella refereeing a game in a gusting gale.
The final straw had come when she caught husband sneaking out the door, himself clad in the O’Neills tracksuit and beanie hat. A row had ensued during which in a discussion about his forthcoming birthday and their wedding anniversary he had informed her that he would like a set of training cones for the former and wouldn’t be able to go out for a meal for the latter as it coincided with a championship match.
And her reason for contacting Talking Balls? Well it was to ask whether, as a friend had suggested, she go with the flow and submit to the inevitable or whether she issue her husband with an ultimatum. She realized that the latter would be futile as she might get the answer she didn’t want.
Another widow to the cause. Give her a year and she’ll be coaching fundamentals, making tea and sandwiches and bellowing at referees herself.