I was sitting in a snug in Belfast’s Crown Bar last weekend, having travelled up from Dublin on the train with some pals to see a play about generational trauma (as you do). The play, concerning four generations of warring northern women, was a fairly intense affair and when the barman set a tray of glasses on the table in that beautiful old hostelry we nearly bit the hand off him.
In response to the piece of theatre we’d seen, the talk turned to motherhood.
“It’s Mother’s Day next Sunday,” I offered.
The table groaned – my provocation was going down like a bucket of cold champ. We’d all of us, it seemed, grown beyond the reach of Hallmark sentimentality. While the handprint nursery cards, shoved into the bottom of the kitchen drawer and yellowing with age, might not have lost their uncomplicated appeal, none wanted to go back to young motherhood, to the exhaustion and euphoria, the love and fear.
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Although about half of us around that table had adult children or stepchildren, it was memories of our own mothers (most of them now gadding about in the great amphitheatre in the sky) that fuelled the conversation. My pal, who’d grown up in Belfast in the late-1960s and early 1970s, recalled her nine-year-old self sitting behind her desk in the Sacred Heart Convent months after her mother’s death and, on the instruction of the nun, colouring in a Mother’s Day card. “The nun knew what had happened, but I had to go through the whole thing of making a card, with no one to give it to.”
She recalled, too, the unwanted celebrity of being the child of a dead mother, an untethered thing, peculiar, afloat.
Another of our group described being in her mid-20s and sorting out her mother’s belongings after her premature death. There was half a plastic bottle of body wash, she told us, which she kept, using it every day until she couldn’t scrape any more out of the bottle, until it was utterly and entirely empty and she was met, finally and devastatingly, with loss.
I remembered then talking to my own mother’s corpse in her bedroom in the care home where she’d spent her last months. Opening her cupboard, I asked her what she wanted to wear to her funeral, reassured her that I wouldn’t forget to send her eyebrow pencil (from which she was never separated) to the mortician. Mothers, it seems, are altogether too human: they live, they make promises and then they die.
I walked along the centre aisle in the supermarket this morning, looking at the offerings on display, trinkets to purchase for Mother’s Day: creams and potions, scented candles and diffusers, plastic boxes of tinsel-wrapped ambassadorial chocolates, a proliferation of polythene-wrapped tulips. I saw a box of six fancily decorated buns so full of preservatives they’d probably outlast the receiver. There was an assortment of pastel-coloured greeting cards heralding the “Bestest Ever Mummy in the Whole Wide World”, “To My Lovely Mummy”, “To My Wonderful Mum”, “For My Angelic Mother”. I riffled through the card stand – not a “Mam” to be had, good, bad or indifferent.
Mother’s Day is a blunt old instrument. And yes, of course, for some it’s all sunshine and peonies and a nut roast in the gourmet food emporium with little Casper and Jaxx dozing in their double buggy. But it’s not about a bit of me-time, immersed in the micro-algae bath oil, for all of us, is it?
My mother’s generation, it seems to me, didn’t set out to birth small armies of children so much as find themselves sucking on the gas and air as offspring after unavoidable offspring descended. After my own birth, the last of four (I was somewhat candidly known as “the mistake”), my mother, fair play to her, refused to be “churched” – a post-partum rite of purification performed in the church 40 days after giving birth. It was an insidious declaration of a woman’s readiness to return to society and, presumably, the marital bed.
Coming of age in the 1970s in Ireland, where it’d have been easier to unlock the third secret of Fatima than get your hands on a prophylactic, the spectre of motherhood, of pregnancy and birth outside of marriage, was truly terrifying. This was a dangerous, institutionalising country, a place from which there was often no escape, not just for young unwed mothers but for any woman who was declared unfit or problematic.
I love my children, I’m moved and grateful if and when they give me a card, a plant, a cinema ticket. I’m uncomfortable, though, with the intrusion, the insistence, the insensitivity of what has become a Hallmark holiday. What is Mother’s Day to the women I have known throughout my life who until so recently found themselves taking the lonely boat to Holyhead or the brisk flight to Stansted? Or to the women who have arrived at the end of their reproductive lives and, despite wanting to have had children, have not? And what about women who feel the draught of an empty house, whose children have been lost or are dispersed far and wide?
I think about being mothered and being a mother and, let’s face it, it’s difficult and messy territory. I wonder if Mr Hallmark might consider altering the sentiments on his greeting cards. I don’t know – something along the lines of loving being laced with aggression and need being laced with fear and an acknowledgement that we all of us make mistakes. There is no such thing as a bestest-ever mother, there is no maternal majesty; most of us do our best most of the time, and that’s about as good as it gets.
[ Some wisdom learned from a half a life (and counting) spent parentingOpens in new window ]
Just before we left the beautiful bar in Belfast city the other day, to walk over to the train station, to retrace our steps towards home, my friend told me about a card her stepdaughter had sent her, a brilliant antidote to the saccharine staples on sale in my local supermarket. “To be fair,” the card read, “the competition is mainly sociopathic child-poisoning witches, but you’re definitely the best.”
I think that’s a sentiment we could all endorse.
