Laura Kennedy

speaker

254 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Laura Kennedy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Women's Podcast · Best of The Women's Podcast: Grieving an estranged parent · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

It's...

That's a hard question to answer, too.

It should be straightforward.

I remember when I was about 10 kind of saying to my mother, listen, I don't want to see him anymore.

You know, he seems like not a great guy.

I would rather not.

Which obviously, I mean, that must have been such a difficult position for her to be in and so distressing for her to hear.

She kind of carried that and dealt with that.

And I don't know necessarily how she felt about it, but it was...

I suppose I kind of, it sounds maybe a bit pathetic to say it out loud, but I think my brother and I both grew up with a sort of solid understanding, devoid of self-pity, just a kind of evaluation of reality, that our father did not love us.

He didn't feel love for us in the way that you kind of

expect a parent to, or at least I would imagine if you become a parent, you very much expect you will feel for your own child.

And so he would, I think, sometimes have kind of bouts of sobriety and maybe bouts of guilt and a sense of wanting to be a more responsible, maybe better person.

And he would engage then in kind of trying to reconnect with

During those times, but it would always very quickly devolve back to the mayhem and the before and the kind of just general inability that he had to kind of be that guy, play that role.

It wasn't in him.

And I think we figured that out quite young, that it's just...

It is a misplaced expectation to take a person like my father and feel entitled to be parented by him, I suppose, because he was not capable of it.

Yeah, I mean, that was a bizarre experience because I'd seen him on the street a couple of years before and

And I was 18 and I just I just got into Trinity College, which, you know, if you're a kid who grows up in a kind of single parent household in Limerick is like a big deal.

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