By John Jalsevac
Read Part I of this series here. And Part II here.
Kids, and lots of ‘em
LAKEFIELD, Ontario, August 16, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Unlike many in the performance industry, the Leahys are not afraid of marriage; or rather they are not afraid of the sort of marriage that includes that troublesome “til death do us part” bit (to differentiate from those in the business who are so enthusiastic about marriage that they try a different one every year or two).
Nor, for that matter, are the Leahys afraid of having children…lots of children. Currently, in fact, there are a total of twenty-two grandchildren between the siblings, with number twenty-three on the way. And at the rate and with the enthusiasm which the eight married Leahys are having children, it is likely that that twenty-two is only a good running start. (“In our family it only takes a month and a half,” says Donnell. “That’s a joke,” he adds after an awkward silence.)
Neither of these facts is surprising when you consider the Leahys’ own positive experience with family, a witness that they are obviously eager to emulate in their own lives and marriages. And yet, while this counter-cultural attitude towards family and children is of itself quite revealing about the philosophy of the Leahys, on the more practical end it does tend to create a number of logistical problems for a family whose vocation, and main source of income, is the business of performing.
It is common, after all, for performers to eschew marriage, and especially children, for the simple reason that spending so many months out of the year on the road makes it nigh impossible to give much attention to a home life. Not to mention the fact that if you’re a woman, and pregnant…
The Leahys, however, have developed novel solutions to these problems. When the Leahys tour, they simply bring their spouses and children on the road with them. And if the Leahy girls happen to be pregnant, they just…keep playing (though the dancing shtick does get sidelined for a while). Case in point, at the show in Walkerton last month, an 8-month pregnant Siobheann rested her bass guitar on her sizeable belly, and enthusiastically jammed away for the hour and a half show. And if one of the girls is a little too pregnant or sick to play then there’s always plenty of family members to step in and fill the gap, especially given that everybody plays all the instruments.
How to do the impossible
All of that might seem a little crazy, or plain impossible. But “impossible” is a word that the Leahys don’t use very often, or give much credence to.
This is an attitude that they received from their parents and from their experience farming, says Maria. “When we were faced with these challenges they were not difficult to overcome, and part of that is the attitude that mom and dad passed on to us.”
Donnell agrees. In farming, he says, “If something had to be done, whether it was possible or not, you got it done. You’ll hear ourselves, and yourself, and you’ll look back and say, ‘I don’t know how we did that.’ No, if you think about it, you just had to do that. With our touring, it’s a matter of, ‘Do you want to tour?’ Yes. ‘Do you have kids?’ Yes. Well, make it work.”
And make it work they have. As the members of the band have married their spouses, and then begun to have children, the band has altered its style of touring accordingly. “More and more,” says Donnell, “touring has become about family. Who goes on tour. The conditions on tour. The length of the tour. All of these things are now totally scripted by what works best for our families.”
Essentially the Leahys have taken the whole business of touring and stood it quite firmly on its head. Touring, after all, does not exactly have a family-friendly reputation (drugs, sex, and rock and roll, and whatnot). “Touring used to be a very negative – not for us, but in the entertainment world – used to be a very vice-laden experience. Well, now it’s really healthy,” says Donnell. “Our families see our touring as a real healthy education system, or tool.”
Donnell relates how the whole atmosphere of touring was “enhanced” when the family brought the first baby on the road with them, during a tour with Shania Twain. “We would have knocks on the door from Shania and her band, saying, ‘Can I take Jacqueline for a walk?’” he says. “There’s a peace that comes with children.”
In, but not of, the music industry
In fact, says Donnell, so different is the band’s approach to touring, and the music business on the whole, that they do not really consider themselves to be a part of the music industry proper. “We do our thing, we kind of exist, sometimes in our own little world,” he says.
But anybody who knows anything about the music industry knows that it is a soul-sucking black-hole that transforms good-intentioned musicians into cookie-cutter, spiritually vacuous automatons, and from which there is no escape, right? So how can these two sit there and nonchalantly declare themselves unaffected by the monstrous thing?
Again, the answer to the question is complicated, and yet, at the same time, perhaps not so complicated as all that.
There are numerous reasons why the band has pulled off this miraculous feat. The early age at which they entered the industry has certainly helped, such that the inner workings of the complex world have long been familiar to the Leahys, and with knowledge comes power. And then, even more deeply, there is the issue discussed in Part II of this series, the protection afforded by the presence of one another (“the protection and strength of each other,” as Maria says). And then, deepest of all, says Donnell, “God and our faith.”
This, again, is not surprising. The fact is, if you dig deeply enough in any discussion with the Leahys, you will always find lurking that ascending hierarchy of values mentioned last time: music, and then family, and then always, at the very root of it all, God and their faith.
When considering the Leahys’ view of themselves as in, but not of, the music industry, you can see this hierarchy of values quietly doing its work, smoothing out the bumps, tearing down obstacles, and giving the Leahys a sort of freedom that very few, if any, in the music industry enjoy.
The point is that the Leahys do not seek their ultimate fulfillment in fame and fortune, that deadly duo that the music industry promises to deliver, like a drug, to its users. If the Leahys seek any fulfillment from the musical aspect of their lives, it is purely from the music as such, and not from the fame and fortune that happens to have accompanied the music for them. And even if music failed them at some point, and they lost their fame, and lost their ability to play music, they would always have one another, their family. And then, if somehow, through some unforeseeable disaster, the family itself fell apart, there, at the very core of their lives would still remain that immovable, eternal, beautiful thing, to which all of their aspirations of fulfillment are oriented – God and faith.
Pro-life as a way of life
It might seem strange to wait until the very end of this series to talk about the Leahys pro-life convictions, when these articles have been written for a publication that is dedicated to pro-life issues. And yet, the truth of the matter is, we didn’t explicitly talk about pro-life issues very much – for a few minutes at most. We didn’t have to. Our entire conversation, everything that we talked about, was about pro-life.
Let me explain.
In the ongoing language wars between the two sides of abortion issue, pro-abortion advocates are keen to call pro-lifers anti-abortionists, so as to put the pro-life movement in the much less favorable light of a negative movement, a movement against something. Whereas pro-lifers prefer to call themselves exactly that – pro-life – to point out that in fact the whole thing is a positive movement, a movement for something. And yet, sometimes the full significance of this war of the nouns is lost, and sometimes those who call themselves pro-life can get a little too caught up in the negative aspect of the culture wars, of the “against” part of it.
For the Leahys, however, pro-life is as positive as breathing. Much more than a political stance, or even a moral stance, pro-life is a way of life. It is expressed in everything they do. The Leahys are pro-life in the same way that you might say about some admirable person, “They’re so…alive!” Everything that the Leahys do is full of energy and zeal, and seems to say, “Life is good; life is beautiful; life is everything.”
Are the Leahys opposed to abortion, and euthanasia, and all the rest? Yes. But they are not against these things because they are against them, if you follow my drift. They are against them only because they are enthusiastically for something infinitely better. And that something better is “life.” While life is perhaps one of the most difficult words in the English language to define, what is most certain is that the Leahys have life in abundance. This life is expressed in their music, which is joyful, and full of vitality, and it is expressed in their family, which is ever growing larger and yet somehow ever closer, and it is expressed in their faith, which is full of depth and which gives their every word and action their purpose and meaning.
Of the Leahys, therefore, more so than most anyone I have met, it can be said, “They are alive.” And it is precisely here where lies the great example of the Leahys, and their legacy.
Read Part I of this series here.
Visit the Leahys website at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A83ILAKjtQQ
The Mission
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqq0Ju3q_SU