I don’t know whether I want to – or indeed whether I physically could – be a mother. The largest global happiness study conducted to date showed quite unequivocally that people are less happy after they have children. Most women think the baby dilemma over quite carefully. They discuss it with their partner, if they have one. I’m sure they discuss it with friends. I certainly do. I’m sure they discuss it with their mothers. After all, who else knows you like your mother?
Let's be honest, in modern Ireland, the majority of people that I know, at least, heavily enlist a mammy's help (their own mammy or their partner's, or both) in raising a child. It's the mother who gets called in a panic first when the baby won't sleep, or has a funny blotch somewhere, or when you are wondering whether it is big enough to taste custard yet.
Unconditional love
My mother died just over a year ago, when I was 27, so we didn’t have time to talk about this sort of thing in depth. Once, when I was sitting by her bed at Milford Hospice, she looked at me and said, “I’ll never meet your children, if you have any.” She cried then and I held her, feeling bereft and useless because I didn’t know what else to do. While she was dying, and after, I would get jolts of realisation about the things we would never share. I would never see her be a grandmother, and I couldn’t call her – ever again in any situation – when I needed help or advice.
I was never going to be parented again. Never going to be taken care of. I was never going to feel as safe or as accepted as I felt with my mother.
The understanding that followed was among the saddest (and maybe the most self-indulgent) I would face in a future without her. I was never going to be parented again. Never going to be taken care of. I was never going to feel as safe or as accepted as I felt with my mother.
I am lucky to have a great partner. He is thoughtful and he smells nice and he makes me feel safe and cared about. But, at least theoretically, he can leave, and I hope that he would if I changed thoroughly enough for long enough to make his life worse rather than better.
Ultimately, through losing a parent, you become less vulnerable because you become more fully alone. It is cruelly galvanising.
I don’t believe in unconditional love. It seems self-evidently masochistic to suggest that you won’t stop supporting or loving someone no matter what they do to you, others or themselves. I hope that my mother didn’t love me unconditionally, but it is certain that her tolerance as my progenitor would have stretched a lot further than that of anyone linked to me by a mere twitching tendril of volition. In other words, she put up with my shit.
Sparkling insights
Her death flayed me raw and left me to scab over. Ultimately, through losing a parent, you become less vulnerable because you become more fully alone. It is cruelly galvanising.
A few weeks after her death, before my newly skinless person had started to scab and even the subtle movement of the air around me was an acrid sting that resonated down to the bones, a friend gave me a book. It was Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk – Macdonald's memoir of dealing with her father's death. For months, I couldn't read anything meaningful and then one day I picked it up and didn't put it down again until I had finished it.
The book is full of sparkling insights into grief and losing a parent. “There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.”
I cannot talk with my mother about the future, but can only reach into the space she left, remember, and carry the memories forward, figuring it out as I go. There is nothing more to be done.
