The Yes Woman: My unassuming mother saved my brother and me

I’ve always been pretty close to my mother. She’s one of those quietly inspiring people who might not stand out on the street. At my mother’s age, women tend to be somewhat dismissed. They become increasingly invisible, and it’s easy to forget that these women possess beneath their skin the same mass of feeling and experience as everyone else; perhaps more. Each one has lived a varied life, even if only internally.

My mother is a remarkable woman. I didn’t realise this fully until I was in my teens. To this day, she will speak pejoratively of her choices and her life, but she saved us, you see, my brother and me. Although she was raised to have very little self-belief, and she suffocated inside her marriage to my father, she managed to take us away. When I was just seven, despite the fact that she was terrified and had nothing, she took us away from him. She walked away and into a completely uncertain future without any support.

Even after she did, when he was sober, she encouraged us to see my father and she never spoke badly of him to us, as some women might, with understandable resentment. My mother is a small, unassuming person and has committed astounding acts of valour.

Alone and in poverty, she put us both through university. My brother is an architect and a kind, gentle man. We would both have been broken if she hadn’t taken us away, and taught us to know ourselves. I owe my mother my life.

So I’ve always loved her. I’ve always wanted to have her around. But I haven’t always appreciated her. I try to do nice things for my mother when I can. I have the capacity to do these things only because she built me up to the point where I can; she furnished me with it.

A trip to Castlemartyr

When I got the chance to go to the beautiful Castlemartyr resort in Cork recently, I asked my mother to come. It's a fantastically elegant and tasteful place. The old house is set amid fields punctuated by sweet-looking, lashy-eyed horses. Past guests include Bruce Springsteen and Bill Clinton, and now my mother.

I thought we would spend a weekend of sanguine bonding amid the unassumingly resplendent surroundings, consider where we are and where we have come from, and appreciate one another.

We had about four disagreements on the first evening. I had forgotten that we irritate each other with a maniacal fervour that causes waving of hands and reddening of cheeks. I always forget, and so does my mother. I’ve spent seven years training myself not to lose my temper. You will not hear me raise my voice. Unless, that is, I’m talking to my mother.

My worst adolescent self

My mother is largely responsible for having created the best aspects of my character and, like most of us, I regress in her presence to my worst adolescent self. She doesn’t come out of our minor verbal altercations with an entirely unscathed reputation either.

My brother still mentions the time we were on our way out somewhere and my mother asked me – aged 24 at the time – if I needed to “widdle” before leaving as I would be gone for several hours and might not be able to get to a bathroom. I responded that I thought perhaps I’d be able to manage, with the clenched jaw and narrowed eyes of a teenager whose phone has been confiscated.

A mother must – if she loves you – think you simultaneously the best and most stupid person she has ever encountered. Although she’ll respond to achievements by saying, “I always knew you could do it”, she will check if you did that thing that you told her you needed to do several days ago. “Did you call that plumber about the toilet?” “Why no, mother. I thought I’d just defecate adjacent to the broken toilet.” Then you put your face in your hands, because you’ve been snappish and silly again. You’re no better than your teenage self, whom you loathed even as a teenager.

You will be more patient next time, you swear to yourself. And then you’re not. This woman has wiped your bottom. Of course she doesn’t entirely respect you. Of course she feels conflicted about your competence. But I still have my mother, and that makes me luckier than many. We are always in one another’s orbit, trying to avoid collision.

The Yes Woman says yes to . . . appreciating those you love. And no to . . . losing it over broken toilets

Mothers’ Day is on March 15th