Rings

My meaningful object is my claddagh ring. My boyfriend, Paul, bought it for me about 11 years ago in a shop in Athlone. Ehm, he had bought me a Claddagh necklace when we were going out three months and it had a green stone in it. So when we saw the Claddagh ring with the green stone, he bought me that as well. The green stone? He was just attracted to it when he saw the necklace in the jeweller’s. It’s not my birthstone but it’s a colour now that I love. So I had it for 10 years and my daughter used to take it and sleep with it at night if she had night mares and, ehm, or if she’d ask me for my ring so that she could sleep with it and felt closer to me so I let her have it, and because it was too big for her I put it on a necklace, on a chain. So she wore this to school one day and then to crèche and I was in work and I got a phone call from my sister saying the ring had fallen off the chain. It was now a square shape and she, my sister, knew that I would be upset. She didn’t want me to get upset with my daughter because she was very upset as to what had happened to the ring. So I was very upset when I  had heard that it was broken and there was nothing we could do to fix it. But I went back out to the car with a big smile on my face and I didn’t let my daughter see how upset I was because it was an accident that couldn’t have been prevented. She had minded it very, very carefully, it was just the chain had broken. So for our 11th anniversary last August my boyfriend replaced the ring in Galway in the Claddagh Ring in Galway. They only sell Claddagh rings, beautiful shop, so he bought me one of them. It’s a much daintier one to the one that he originally got me. There’s little diamonds now on the side; very, very pretty.

And my daughter really wanted one aswell. And because I didn’t really like to give her my ring, because of what had happened before, I’d only let her wear it at night time. So, ehm, for her 8th birthday last month we decided to get her her own Claddagh ring. So I didn’t tell her I was going to buy her a Claddagh ring but I let her look at Claddagh rings and she chose her favourite colour, which was the ruby ring, again it’s not her birthstone, but it’s a colour that she was attracted to. So we bought her her own Claddagh ring, which is very like the first one I had except her’s is red and mine is green. And she loves it. She wears it on her index figure which is quite unusual, I find, but, eh, the ruby represents, eh, eternal love, which is what her mammy and daddy feel for her. And she loves it and she doesn’t wear it all the time because she’s afraid to lose it, so she takes it off and she puts it on top of our microwave because Mammy and Daddy can keep an eye on it there and she knows where it is so when she comes in from school she’ll take it down from the microwave. And when we go for a swim that’s the only time I take off my ring and I place it on the microwave beside hers. And they are our meaningful objects.