My Childhood with Caroline Foran: 'I wanted to be around my parents all the time'

caroline_foran_photo_by Evan Doherty

Caroline Foran has always been a homebird. It’s obvious from the way the 38-year-old author and host of Owning It: The Anxiety Podcast describes her childhood growing up in Dublin’s Glasnevin.

“In my memory, I’m outside playing on the green with the other girls on my road, making homemade perfume with flowers from people’s gardens, and all the while, I’m listening out for Mam and Dad to call me in for dinner,” she says.

Caroline Foran in the early 1990s.

She relished spending time with her family. She smiles when recalling their Saturday routine of going swimming and then coming home to watch Blind Date.

She laughs when she shares that her brother Daniel went through a phase of referring to her as “a disease”.

“I’m pretty sure he meant it lovingly,” she says.

“Daniel is six years older than me and all I wanted to do was play with him, and all he wanted to do was be rid of me.”

She recalls how happy she used to be when her mother Aideen would pick her up from school.

“Mam would take a half day from work on Wednesdays and my heart would jump when I’d see her at the school gates,” says Foran. “We’d go to Spar for warm bread rolls. To this day, the smell of warm bread rolls makes me feel safe.”

Nobody realised it at the time, but Foran was struggling with anxiety, which manifested as stomach pain from a young age. She wonders if it might have had anything to do with the girls she played with on her road being older than her.

I followed what they did, but they were ready to grow up before I was. They wanted to push boundaries that I just didn’t feel ready for. I found those feelings hard to vocalise, but I definitely felt them in my body.

Those anxious feelings became more acute in her teenage years. Foran had a solid group of friends in secondary school and says they “basically lived in each other’s pockets. But there were times when I found it difficult to know what was expected of me socially, and gradually, I became more and more unwell.”

She reached a crisis point when she was 16. Foran spent most of that year in and out of hospital, trying to establish what was causing her ongoing stomach problems.

“I missed so much school and remember how horrible it felt to be so out of sync with my friends, for them to be going on trips and spreading their wings while all I wanted to do was stay at home,” she says. “Why was I so fragile? Why did I need so much more support than they did?”

At the time, no link was drawn between Foran’s anxiety and her physical ailments. She says, “There was no real awareness then. My doctors and parents thought I must have an allergy. When they discovered I was lactose intolerant, they thought treating that would make me better. It did, but it was only a small part of the problem.”

Foran was eventually well enough to go back to school, where she had fun with friends, had boyfriends and worked hard at her studies. But she says she “still only ever felt truly safe at home”.

When she finished secondary school, she decided to study communications at DCU. She chose the subject because it gave her options while she figured out a future career path, and the location because it was “close to home. I could go home if ever things got too much for me at college.”

Foran’s parents — Aideen and Tony — were a constant support to her, even if they didn’t always understand what she was going through. “I think I had a different relationship with my parents than my friends had with theirs because I wanted to be around mine all the time,” she says.

However, she doesn’t want to paint too rosy a picture. She says she and her mam are both “fiery” and would often “have it out” with each other. And there have been “door-slamming arguments” with her dad.

Caroline with her father Tony at Lake Garda in 1991

That fieriness continues to this day.

“When we get together, someone will jokingly look at their watch and say: ‘How long before we have a family row?’,” says Foran. “But there’s so much love and affection underneath it all.”

Foran rings her mother every day and calls her “the love of my life”. They got matching tattoos for her mother’s 70th birthday, and the tattoo they chose has significance that dates back to when Foran was 24.

“I’d been doing well and decided to move in with my boyfriend, but I also started a new job at the same time — which, in hindsight, was too much pressure,” she says. “I started getting panic attacks, and suddenly, I realised what was going on. I had anxiety, and I’d had it my whole life.”

She had to move back home, which made her feel “like such a failure”.

There was a moment during that time when Foran was crying, and her mother sang her True Colours by Cyndi Lauper.

“From then on, those lyrics became special to us,” says Foran. “They are what we chose for our tattoo.”

Foran and her husband Barry Doyle are now parents themselves. Their six-year-old son Caelan is autistic, and Foran says “he needs his dad and me a lot”.

Her parenting approach is modelled on her own parents. “I try to follow the template carved out by Mam and Dad,” she says. “I give Caelan as much time and attention as I can.”