My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (27 page)

For weeks afterwards the biggest regret I carried was that I had never hugged her or told her that I loved her
and for the first time I understood the potency of the dictum which says that when we lose someone we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we did not love enough.

My mother had not been in the habit of demonstrating her love with embraces. We lived in a kind of reciprocal alliance; my paintings were my tokens of love towards her, her admiration of them was hers.

Such inhibition is a feature of the ‘Irish way', so I took my cues from her. This shared shyness had made us incapable of expressing that most fundamental of desires. Each night I cried myself to sleep with the frustration of that neglect rioting through me. Why could I not have performed such a simple act? Why was the language of love so difficult to express? And now it was too late.

But she heard my plea and came to me in a dream one night, quietly smiling, and gave me the biggest and longest hug I could ever have wished for; its strength melted away all the dereliction I felt inside. She was happy at last. I got up the next morning elated and healed. She'd come in the night at the sound of my cries and wiped all my tears away. Still the loving, dutiful mother, stepping over from that other world to take care of me in this one.

O
FFERING IT
U
P

M
y life changed from that point onward. I realised that the coherent narrative I'd assigned to it had been altered beyond measure. My mother's untimely death had warped the fundamental meaning of all I held dear. There had been no happy ending for her, no fanfares of applause or awards of recognition for her endeavour. She had lived and suffered the life a repressive rural society had moulded for its benefit but at her expense, and she died with all the injustice of it in her heart.

Her own mother had been her sole example. It also followed that, with an inadequate education and no access to books, the acquisition of a husband – preferably a wealthy one – became the future prize she had to win. She had two attributes that gave her a head start in the race to attract a mate: she was slim and she was beautiful. It was ironic and cruel; the two factors that assured the near-certainty of marriage would swiftly be consumed and destroyed by marriage itself.

The slim beauty met her handsome prince. The wedding picture is a potent reminder.

How beautiful you were, and near, and young,

So vivid, you might still be there among

Those first few days, unfingermarked again.

Their courtship was brief and father played the chivalrous suitor convincingly, reverting to form once
the vows had been exchanged and the bride had been ringed and requisitioned.

I wonder at what point she realised her mistake; was it as he rushed ahead of her down Grafton Street after the photo session, or in Bewley's café when he thumped the chair with such alarming disapproval? The short answer is probably ‘yes, both'; knowing so little then, she dismissed those ungracious actions as shortcomings that could be worked on and changed. But as time passed she must have perceived the awful reality that lay beneath that which she'd placed her hope and trust in.

The peaceful life she'd wanted and envisaged that day in the café remained, but the cherished snapshot of fantasy – the peace and freedom that picture offered – hung for ever in the useless distance. All her life she strained towards it like a drowning soul for a branch, her fingers never quite grasping the hold that would pull her free.

Each year of the first ten years of her marriage a baby appeared, yelling and screaming for the love and attention only she was prepared to give it. Each successive birth heaped yet more burden upon her suffering. We children did not bring her joy, we simply added to her pain and the torment of her unfulfilled self.

Germaine Greer insists that motherhood is a never-ending condition, and that bearing children causes a woman to suffer more pain than she could ever have imagined. Her children, she says, will always cause her pain because they are of far more importance to her than she is to them.

In my mother's case that pain was multiplied by ten not nine, if one counts the ninth child who died aged seven months. She had very little choice available to her when that gold wedding band was slipped onto her finger; in fact she forfeited her right to freedom by her acceptance
of it. My father caused her more pain than all nine of us put together. Only by changing the circumstances that were causing such anguish could she be liberated from her sorrow, and she could not change the circumstances because society had rendered her powerless.

Women of her era had no choice but to remain captives. She had neither job nor money of her own to enable her to make more life-affirming choices. She grew up with a trenchant adherence to Luther's axiom that a woman's place is in the home and with the Church's unyielding stance regarding the sanctity of marriage, and its inviolability, no matter what the situation.

The law in those times did not favour disaffected wives, and this injustice was to endure up until recently, when finally the courage of the Women's Movement shone a torchlight in the guilty face of Ireland's blatant oppression. In rural Ireland we saw little of the feminist revolution that swept through Western society in the 1960s. The Church and the menfolk were having none of it.

I understand now much of what moved my mother then. When she shouted at us children and cried and raged so frequently, she was transmuting all that frustration and sadness into the anguished phrases she knew would hurt us too. Christ was never off duty when mother was around: whether in oath or prayer she blasted out the Holy name with all the force she could muster, flooring us with those frequent rants about the sorry state of her life.

The tragedy is that she had no other means of expressing her despair; offloading it onto us made her feel somewhat relieved and lighter. We helped her carry her cross; we, the unfortunate innocents caught in the nuptial crossfire.

As a child I hated to see my mother cry. Sometimes she'd take a walk to a distant field, just to get away from us, to steal a glimmer of peace in the solitude of a meadow. I would stumble after her, unnoticed, making my small, determined way over the ruts of the baked earth, falling down to dirty my knees and skirting puddles just to see where she was going. I'd always find her in the same place, sitting on a fallen tree, silently weeping, and I would weep too. She would get up then, dry my tears, tenderly take my hand and lead me home.

We suffered along with her solely because my father refused to unlock the love that was in him, share it and so set us free. She knew she was fighting a losing battle. Marrying had not only cancelled out her name, it left her dreams of love and peace unfulfilled.

The Catholic Church, mother's great succour, could not entertain the thought of an unhappy marriage. If her religion taught her anything then it taught her the language of repression.

The Church was clear on the woman's role. Women were to serve, obey and produce babies; love hardly got a look in. ‘Offer it up' and ‘This is the cross you have to bear' were phrases I heard often when I was growing up. So many women of my mother's generation took those platitudes as the dogma of their deliverance, and struggled to make sense of it all through a constant round of novenas, masses and rosaries.

Some might regard the Catholic Church as an easy target, yet surely it deserves our criticism. This Christian organisation has flourished for centuries on the anguished silence of women like my mother, and the onerous chauvinism that drives it remains in place. This unwillingness to acknowledge the debt that is owed is realised in its insistence on a male-only priesthood.

How different things might have been. Jesus and Paul viewed men and women as equal partners, to enjoy equality and mutual respect. However things had changed by the time the later scriptures came to be written. Misogyny and the fear of sex are evident, particularly in the post-Pauline ‘Letter to the Ephesians':

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. …

Taken together these attitudes and restrictions contributed to the unhappy circumstances in which my mother found herself. Her pain and grief were those of the caged bird, yet she felt them far more keenly than a feathered creature could.

This was her cruel reality. She died with the gathering awareness that she'd served her time; all the years of pain had been ‘offered up' over and over again. Paradise surely awaited her. She embraced death; she did not fear it. Her unhappiness had brought her to this pass.

R
OLL-CALL OF
D
EATH

F
ather survived her by 19 years. With the exception of James, each of the McKenna brothers made his world-weary exit before him. James and father died within hours of each other, battling it out with the Grim Reaper one sunless afternoon in August 1999, defiantly clinging on to the end. I would like to be able to say that after mother's death my father had softened in the light of the cruel reality that the loss of a loved one brings. That simply was not the case. He carried on as if nothing had happened, the absent father who made his presence felt through indifference and contempt. He expected his daughters to become the substitute servants and for a time we rallied round as best we could. But we had jobs and other responsibilities. Times had changed and father hadn't noticed.

Towards the end of his life I looked in vain for a sign that would acknowledge our pain, something that would serve to lift the inestimable weight of suffering he'd caused in all our lives. But sadly, in all his remaining days, his ‘mind lay open like a drawer of knives'.

The little love he'd allowed himself to experience went towards the carpentry he had by turns admired and attacked in public, and tried to emulate in private. As a child I would hear the bitter music of hammer and saw in the toolshed which was his domain. In there he was doing what he did best: driving home the nails, making that wood outdo itself with the chairs and shelves he would carry into the house.

He had built the house we'd been raised in brick by brick and had left the imprint of his hands on window frames and doors. The scrubbed table in the kitchen – rock-steady and functional – spoke of the life he'd always wanted. The life of the woodworker, before his wife and children had got in the way.

I can still hear the disenchantment in his voice, like the rasp of an unoiled hinge.

I can still see him in the fields, bent and wordless over a shovel, slicing into tubers, sinking all that anger and regret deep into the soil. The injustice that he felt was never of
his
making; it was we, his family, who'd snatched his dream away.

When I wept at my father's graveside I shed tears that were not of sorrow for the father I would miss, but rather tears of sadness for the father he could have been.

It was otherwise with Uncle Robert, the schoolmaster, keeper of the family fortune. Robert, in whose lifetime pleasure sank and hardship rose, who was always careful never to get carried away on the crest of things. He made a sudden exit one morning after his daily jaunt to Draperstown. Edward found him in the musty parlour, slumped at his desk, with the
Irish News
spread out before him, opened, significantly, at the obituaries column.

The millionaire died in his grey raincoat in a house without electricity or running water. His final view was through a grimy window overlooking the yard where sat his one extravagance: the Ford Anglia. In the bank sat the fortune he'd amassed and guarded throughout his adult life, swelling with the interest Robert would never enjoy.

And James? James was paralysed by a stroke. All that movement of arm-flapping and indecision was arrested on a chilly day, the thirteenth day of November, on the
thirteenth anniversary of my mother's death. James, who had grasped the meaning of land and money but never the meaning of life, endured a stalled existence in a disconnected world for the final eight years of his life. Like father, he remained steadfastly unrepentant to the end.

Edward, the occasional drinker, the underdog, had the happiest departure of all. He smiled and called for his harmonica to serenade himself into eternity.

It could be said that each of the brothers had died at 25 and was buried between the ages of 70 and 83. They spent their lives preparing for life instead of living it, and each left the planet never having known the meaning of love and happiness.

My uncles Dan and John by contrast died in the midst of ‘living', John Henry after completing another hectic day at the
Sacramento Bee
, Dan while engaged in the humble task of bringing in fuel for the fire.

They all went in time, those people of Ballinascreen who had populated and shaped my childhood, the gentle and the vain. Down the funnel of time I can see ‘Aunt' Margaret sitting in a tweed chair by a hospital bed. Her stomach swollen with cancer. Margaret – nearing the end of a life sprung from loneliness and longing, who'd never heard the music that had beckoned her to dance – wearing that same distracted look, still questing for answers, still wondering what it was all about. The urge to hug her was strong, to let her know that she'd always belonged, but I knew that such an alien gesture would confirm for her what she didn't want to know. That she indeed was dying. So for her sake I tearfully turned away, taking with me the Judas kiss and the last embrace that would have both delivered and betrayed me.

My mother's true and dear friend Helen died five years after mother's passing. She was 52, too young and too
good to have gone so early. She took with her a reservoir of my mother's confidences, audaciously purified throughout all their years of friendship. With her going she broke the final link that held me to my mother but in her wake left such beautiful recollections that forever stir and caress my memory, like remnants of silk in a breeze.