Mother

Only the never-ending work of mourning can help us from lapsing into the illusion that we have found the parent we once urgently needed—empathic and open, understanding and understandable, honest and available, helpful and loving, feeling, transparent, clear, without unintelligible contradictions. Such a parent was never ours, for a mother can react empathically only to the extent that she has become free of her own childhood; when she denies the vicissitudes of her early life, she wears invisible chains.
Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Mark Twain

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.
Sigmund Freud

My first memories are tactile and ambrosial; her soft warm skin, the feel of her fur coat in winter, the fragrance of her perfume, and the delicious taste of the food she cooked.

Even very early on, our relationship was challenging. I’m not sure what it was. Perhaps the cause of our initial difficulties lie in those earlies of days, beyond the boundaries of cognizant memory.  One of the first things that stands out in my conscious recollections is her habit of shouting. She seemed to operate like a control tower for her ten children, doing her best to protect and coordinate them, regardless of location in or around our sprawling home, and simply turned up the volume, without altering her position, when the desired response was not forthcoming. I hated this shouting. I can remember lying on my bed with my hands covering my ears in a vain attempt to escape and can clearly recall the feeling of shame for having a mother who behaved in such a manner. The shouting was only one of a set of behaviours which converged to create what I experienced as a high degree of chaos. Always running late, time and effort wasted on tasks, and lots of frustration, passive aggression, and resentment in the mix.

On the other hand, there are memories of her warmth and humour. Baking the daily loaf of bread together, given permission, as a small boy, to shape one of the six accompanying scones as my own; the delight of such moments is still very much alive inside my being today, over half a century later.

It was clear to me that she was engaged in some constant struggle. One obvious difficulty was her workload, and there I could help. I was good at that stuff; hanging out the washing, unloading the dishwasher, peeling potatoes, and, by the age of twelve, even cooking Sunday dinner while the rest of the crew was out at church. The trouble with this approach was that Mother remained just as aloof and discontented whereby I kept getting an even greater workload precisely because of my good performance. There came a tipping point were it all felt like a pointless burden to me. The issue was clearly not only workload; what it really was remained a mystery.

Then came the rebellious teen years. We locked horns. I began to treat her with distain, fully convinced that she was intentionally trying to make life hell for me. My notion was that she was there to brush the kids’ hair and my Dad , who I both idolised and feared somewhat, was the real adult in our house. There were periods of reproachment, but the overall trajectory was clearly downwards. Mine was not the behaviour of a very loving son. When at the end of her tether – a not infrequent state -, she was inclined towards outbursts such as; `Now look what you made me do!´ or `You’ll send me to an early grave´. Such incidents left me angry and resentful.

I decided to escape at the earliest opportunity. This I did, leaving home on the day of my final school examinations. Before that, however, there was the complication of a cruel twist of fate; my father’s illness and untimely death two years earlier.  Needless to say, that was a great challenge for all of us. I cannot remember ever really exploring or sharing my feelings with any family members throughout, not least with Mammy. It was all conjecture, assumptions, and interpretations. In any case, being the eldest at home, it was expected of me to console and support my mother through the first two years of her widowhood. I would steal her cigarettes and we would sit at the fire watching `Dallas´ on TV, a million miles separating us across the hearth. Her sporadic facetious commentaries brought us closer at times. I loved her irreverent sense of humour.

Having escaped, there was no turning back. I put myself beyond her reach by moving to Germany when the only modii of communication were coinbox telephones and air mail. We used some of each, but now I could dictate the frequency and intensity, directed in part by my feelings of guilt. There was certainly no malice on my part; just a degree of vigilance spurred by the fear of becoming trapped again.

Having moved to live in Germany full-time, after an aborted attempt to study Arts at Trinity College, Dublin, I was very busy doing my own thing, and rarely considered her plight; trying to raise a bunch of boys on her own, her heart broken and her own health failing, until shortly before my twenty-first birthday, a package arrived in the post. It contained a present I greatly appreciated, a photo band of old Dublin by Edward Quinn with selected writings from James Joyce’s works. It made a lasting impression on me that she was so tuned into my psyche and my heart, after all.

Unbeknownst to me, she was already gravely ill by this time. At the end of that summer, I began to get ever more desperate communiques from family members on the subject of her decaying state of health. Finally, in mid October, I flew home to see her. Arriving on a Friday afternoon at the house of my aunt, I said I would go and see Mammy the next day. `If I were you, I would go at once´, responded my hostess. Her words, coupled with her demeanour, shocked me into the realisation that my mother was dying.

I made my way swiftly to the hospital. We were both glad to share some time that evening. The atmosphere was jovial and warm. She joked about my very hip stripped baker’s dungarees, asking if they were warm enough for this time of year. Her waning life force was very evident to me. We parted on good terms, me promising to return early the next morning.

The following day turned out to be a long, emotionally taxing vigil at the hospital, with my siblings arriving up from Limerick and many of my mother’s siblings popping in and out. The spectre of death hung in the air and we sat there in the eerie silence, bereft of all vocabulary to explore, digest, and express what was taking place. Mammy had been slipping in and out of consciousness during the course of the day. By evening, everybody seemed exhausted so I offered to stay so the others could get a good night’s sleep. I would keep watch and be with Mammy through the night, as needed.

The staff nurses kindly set up a bet in the adjoining room. I wished Mammy good night and turned in. After what seem hardly an hour of sleep, I was gently woken by one of the nurses with the words: `It is time.´

The next hour was difficult. My mother was engaged in a titanic battle, moving from moments of calm, rising to crescendos of anxiety, only to fall back into a state of calm one more. She fretted about `the dog being fed, the milk bottles out’ and other similar daily household chores. These were punctuated with references to her children; their welfare, their needs and their future. She also addressed her darling husband, my father, who had passed away five years previously. She had a deep longing to be reunited with him after her lonely widowhood. I simply held her hand and reassured her that she was not alone, that she would be fine on this journey.

When she breathed her last, I was both relieved and shocked. It was the first time I witnessed the soul leaving the mortal frame. The nature of this transition left a deep impression and the awareness that, one day, this experience too, would be mine.

The healing of our relationship had begun; yet more healing lay ahead. After the funeral and some time spent in my home town, I returned to Nuremberg to resume my familiar life. Not long afterwards I began to engage in various forms of depth psychology techniques, including psychotherapy and body work. Over time, I realised that my interpretation of `Mammy intentionally making my life as difficult as possible´ was not only erroneous; it became clear that she had done the best she could with what she had. Then the internal lie that `I had never loved her anyway´ was exposed. This was the most difficult part of the process; the realisation that I both loved her and had needed her, only to find that she wasn’t there. She had often been emotionally unavailable. I began to see that this had more to do with her than with me, and to develop empathy and compassion for the human being who happened to be my mother.

Then I began to cherish her strengths. The fact that she brought ten children into the world, always found the strength to keep going despite the difficulties with which her path was strewn, and finally her sense of humour and ability to put a brave face on things for the outside world, while suffering greatly deep inside. This is what prompted me to award her a posthumous Oscar, many years after her passing.

The final act of peace-making took place in a dream. We were in Milan shopping. I had just bought her a fine pair of beautiful black leather shoes, fit for royalty. Her radiance would have eclipsed that of Grace Kelly or Maria Callas, and she knew it. On awakening the next morning, I knew the healing was complete. Since then my love and appreciation of this remarkable woman have continued to grow.