My Mother's Body
/Carmel Mc Mahon
My mother and I rarely speak; I live in New York, and she lives in Ireland, but we are never really far from each other. Whenever one of us is sick or troubled, the other will call to say, I knew it, you were on my mind. If one has a cold, or a flu, or is going through a dark spell, we will say it is passing, passed—so as not to worry the other. Still, we can read between the lines, smell the air.
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All women alive today can trace their DNA back to a single woman living in Africa two hundred thousand years ago. We have named her, Mitochondrial Eve. She is our closest common ancestor and our oldest mother. She could not have foreseen the tiny contingency in her body that changed the course of history—she could not have known that a mutation in her genetic code would be passed on to her daughters, nor could she have envisioned me, her great x 10,000 granddaughter, sitting here thinking about our matrilineal lineage. Wondering, how far it might stretch in either direction, before it strains and snaps?
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Grotto: from the Italian grotta, grotto, from Latin crypta, “cavern, crypt.”
On a visit home, my mother gives me a photograph. We are sitting on her bed going through the old albums. She is wearing a pale blue sweater and a pair of white jeans. Her hair has been freshly colored and her nails painted the pale peach of the moment. She always keeps herself “presentable” at home, but she has taken a little extra care for my arrival. I, on the other hand, am going through a uniform phase: black t-shirt and black jeans. I don’t want to have to think about dressing at the moment. My nails are cut to the quick, and if I remember, I will cover the grey hairs with a box from the pharmacy. Despite our opposing attitudes to appearance, we make the same shape on the world. People mistake us for each other in photographs, and sometimes, we even do ourselves. Is that me or you?
Sometimes, I see what my mother sees when she looks at me: a childless woman in her forties, never married, always busy; a strange bird who spends her days pecking about in archives, scratching out stories. She does not ask about my life or work, because she does not believe in disturbing ghosts. Can she see what I see when I look at her? A mother of nine children, swept up into a life she never intended? I want to see myself in her, but I never wanted her life. We seem to be locked in a perpetual groove of reacting to our limited view of each other. We skirt and side-step, because we do not want to hurt each other’s feelings, and so the distance grows between us: an umbilical cord, an ocean, a college education.
I examine the faces of our unsmiling ancestors for traces of us.
“Can I have this one?” I ask.
“You can have all of them,” Mam says. “You are the only one with any interest in these old things.”
“Who are they?” I point to the photograph.
Mam squints at the group of men huddled together in front of the house where she grew up on Mount Drummond Avenue. Their names sound like music to my long-term emigrant ears: Albie Murphy, Neddy Bolger, Gerard Bolger, Bill Hennessy (my grandfather), Jack Mahony, Pa Neelan and standing apart, my great grand-father, Christy Bolger, the neighborhood money-man and a book-keeper for the IRA.
The men are gathered to celebrate the opening of a Marian grotto. A small garden dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, where people could come to pray. A collection was taken from the people of the parish to commission a statue. The photograph was taken 1954. Pope Pius XII declared it a Marian Year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the decision to make the conception of Mary an immaculate one. Almost two thousand years after the fact, the men in Rome agreed that Jesus could not have come from the body of an ordinary woman.
The centennial was celebrated all over the world, but it had particular resonance in Ireland: A country constitutionally connected to the Catholic Church which had rushed in to fill the power vacuum left by the British. Ideas about the danger of women’s bodies proliferated. They needed to be controlled in the Church/state union of marriage and put to good use producing more Catholics/citizens, whose bodies would in turn replenish a population halved by famine and colonization. All around the country, churches were dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, Marian grottos dotted the land, and baby girls were named Marian, Miriam, Maria and Mary.
Where are the women? I ask. My mother shrugs and a familiar feeling blooms between us, a kind of chaotic silence that signals the end of the conversation. I want to know if their invisibility meant they were excluded from all social affairs, or if they were just not bothered with the pomp of the day? Maybe they were busy making the tea and sandwiches behind those net curtains? But, the past is off limits, even though it is here with us, in this room, all these years later, in a 4” x 4” image, the freeze-frame of an eternal present. Mam cannot go back to Mount Drummond Avenue, and I cannot make myself reach across the silence to ask her why.
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Crypt: from the Latin, crypta from Greek krypté, from the feminine of kryptós, “hidden, secret.”
This photograph was taken in 1986. It is my brother Martin’s Confirmation Day. He wears a red tie and a red rosette. Our younger brothers, John and Peter stand at either side of him. The three boys are posed in front of the commissioned statue of the Virgin Mary. They smile awkwardly for the camera, because they are not used to being photographed. Film costs money, and shots are not to be wasted.
On Sunday afternoons we visited our grandparents’ house. All the people who lived on Mount Drummond Avenue were old. The street smelled of boiled onions and marrowfat peas. Paisley pajamas and piss-stained long johns flapped along the clotheslines that crisscrossed the gardens at the back of the terraced houses. In the kitchen, my brothers and sisters sat on the floor in front of the telly and ate jelly and ice-cream. Dad and Granddad sat in the old armchairs by the fire and discussed the football and the week’s news. Sometimes granddad talked about the time he worked in England. Coming home on the ferry, he would lose all his earnings on the horses or the dogs.
I sat at the table with Mam and Nanny. We drank tea and ate apple tart like ladies. Mam and Nanny faced each other and whispered stories about women who suffered from their nerves. The smoke from Mam’s cigarette curled back into my face, and I inhaled it and pretended I was smoking too. The gold mantle clock, the nail art ship on the wall, the Spanish dancer souvenir in her red and white dress on the windowsill, and the net curtains behind her, stiff with an old lineage of dust-mites busy about their day, eating, shitting and mating in their polyester-blend universe, completely contained and unconcerned with our affairs.
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Twice a year, Dad took us on a short drive to Mount Jerome Cemetery to visit the grave of our sister: in August for her birthday, and in December for her death day. Mam never came with us. Inside the graveyard gates, there were tall trees dark with rookeries that blew about in the loud wind. Caw! Caw! Caw! We called back to the crows, as we ran along the curbs and breathed in the special graveyard smells: rot and moss and old flower water. We jumped and twirled with the little tornados of dead leaves. We kept an eye out for solitary magpies, one for sorrow, and if we saw one, we had to wait for it to fly: one in flight is worth two in sight. Two for joy!
Dad told us to keep our bloody voices down. To have some respect. We made our way through the maze of graves careful not to step on any, so as not to disturb the dead. We could see Michelle’s grave from a distance. It stood out because it was so new and clean.
Our Beloved Daughter
Aged 5 Years
I counted three months on my fingers between Michelle’s death day and my birthday. I figured out that I had been living inside Mam’s body for six months when the car hit Michelle outside the old school. Nobody had to tell me. I already knew. It was a kind of memory from before I learned how to speak or to make a certain kind of sense of things. We blessed ourselves, said a prayer, and left.
Wait. I am here again. The memory accessed over and over. I add to it. I take away. The magpies and the crows. My father’s exact wording. Impossible to remember the details with such certainty. The weather? How can one be sure? It doesn’t matter. Not really. I don’t think. I don’t know.
We picked Mam up on the way home. She sat in the passenger seat beside Dad. The rain beat the bonnet and blurred the edges of the city’s lights. The smoke from their cigarettes clogging our throats, so we could only watch as a silhouette of tears streamed down our mother’s cheek. The horror of it: Michelle was real/is real. A chasm opened, and our mother was lost to us.
I have asked my siblings: do they remember it like I do? Yes, they say, they remember. Then they say, “Oh God,” and shake their heads. “Jesus Christ” they say, and shake their heads.
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Trauma can be passed from generation to generation. We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, “narratives, actions and symptoms.” This is how the trauma was carried into our lives: Our mother held it tightly to herself. She refused to burden her children with it. Still, despite her best efforts, it seeped out in slips of story and song. Whenever we heard the name Michelle, like when the radio played that Beatles track, a panic rose among us. We developed an unspoken code: we must distract Mam from it. We fought with each other, we fought with her, we fought to keep her face from falling. Sometimes, most times, anger just is grief that has forgotten its name.
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Carl Jung observed that children react less to what grown-ups say than they do to the “imponderables in the surrounding atmosphere.” They unconsciously adapt themselves to the weather, which produces a correlative compensatory nature. My compensatory schemes involved touching and tapping things. One time, tap. Three times: tap, tap, tap. Walls, railings, tree trunks. And blessing myself: once for Churches, hearses, and graveyards. Three times for holy statues, holy pictures and grottos. I bowed my head. I avoided the lines in the pavement and the cracks in the road lest they opened up and swallowed me whole.
I found a dashboard Saint Christopher at the end of our road, and I could not believe anyone would discard such a sacred object. I found a Padre Pio keychain in the sweet shop at Woolworths. It contained a tiny relic of Padres clothing. This was the beginning of my collection of Holy Things. I started taking them to bed with me, and before long, I could not sleep without them. In the morning, they were placed, for safe-keeping, in the carved wooden box that my best friend brought me back from her holidays in Lanzarote.
Childhood was for other children. Death was my deepest and most primary concern. The death of the body was not nearly as terrifying as the life of the soul. We understood that heaven was hardly likely for ourselves. With any luck, we might make it to purgatory, and we could work our way up from there, otherwise we would be going to hell—for all eternity. Time without end. Our whole lives were geared toward avoiding this outcome: Sunday mass, monthly confession, sacraments and observations. We did the First Fridays which ensured the presence of a priest before we drew our last breath. The school gave us a set of scapulars, which, if worn at the moment of death, would ensure entry into heaven. Best take all precautions. I blessed myself (three times) and genuflected in front of the picture of the Sacred Heart at the top of the stairs. Sometimes on visits home, I still take this reflex action, even though I am long-lapsed and the picture of Jesus, his wounded heart exposed, has been replaced with a mirror.
The Our Father
Three Hail Marys
The Glory Be
The Apostles Creed
The Confiteor
Saint Patrick’s Breastplate
The Hail Holy Queen
The Prayer to the Guardian Angel
The Prayer for the Souls of the Dead
Nightly prayers were said with focus and intention. If I drifted off, I had to start over. From the top. Occasionally, I pissed the bed. To comfort me through the confusion and embarrassment, Dad would say, little girls don’t go to hell. Mam would say, there is no such thing. I didn’t believe either of them, so I waded through the safety of days, dazed, dark-eyed and exhausted.
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My grandfather went to mass every single day. He wore a three-piece suit and a trilby hat. He took up the collection, and gathered the missals after the service. My grandmother did not go at all because she did not like priests or nuns. She shuffled about the kitchen in her slippers and pinny, saying, “Don’t mind that ould-fella, he says more than his prayers.”
When my grandparents were born, Ireland was still colonially tied to England. Nanny came from Kevin Street in the Liberties when it was the biggest slum in Europe. My mind did not connect her to the history lessons in school: the Lockout of 1913, the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish War of Independence, or the Irish Civil War. I did not consider how she had survived malnutrition, rickets, tuberculosis, or between my uncle and my mother, five miscarriages.
In the 1930s, Dublin Corporation built housing around the city. It was the new Irish government’s initiative to clear the slums of the city center. For years, my mother’s extended family, six adults and seven children, lived together in the two-bedroom-semi at the end of Mount Drummond Avenue. They were grateful for all the extra space, but they missed their old friends from the tenements and the way of life they had known there. People looked out for one another, Nanny said. Not like now, they’d step over you in the street like they do in England.
On Sundays, when RTÉ sounded the six o’ clock Angelus bell, it was our cue to go outside and give the adults some peace. We joined the old neighbors in the grotto. Mr. Fox and Mrs. White said we were very good children. With them, we stood in front of the statue and said the rosary. It was an agony of boredom, but we gazed up at the twinkling star-lights animating the Blessed Mother’s face. The lights were a gift from my family, restitution, we heard whispered, for some secret and ill-gotten gains. Something to do with the horses or the dogs or the IRA.
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Grotto is an angry word. I said it over and over inside my head, growling. I looked up and asked Mother Mary why she didn’t help that girl who was in the news. Ann Lovett died in a grotto, just like this one. She gave birth to a baby in the rain and the cold, and no one came to help her. The people said they didn’t know. She was fifteen years old. I counted on my fingers, four years older than me.
“Did she go straight to hell when she died?” I asked. “For committing a sin?” My parents said no, but they took me into our front room and closed the door. If I ever got into trouble, they said, I must not be afraid to tell them.
Everyone stopped talking about Ann Lovett, but I could not separate her grotto from our grotto. Every week, I imagined her face blank, the rain falling, the blood and the dead baby in the cold grass. Every week I looked up, but the mother of the world was made of stone. Still, we petitioned her, muttering our prayers, rattling our beads: Hail Holy Queen!
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Secret: Middle English, from the Anglo-French secré, secret, from Latin secretus, from past participle of secernere, “to separate.”
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In 2018 when Netflix started streaming the Irish comedy-drama series, Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope in the US, I settled in for a binge. If you don’t blink during the first episode, you will see my grandparents’ house with the statue standing out front.
Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope follows two friends, Danielle and Aisling, coming of age in Dublin. Aisling gets the morning-after pill for her younger sister, Rachel. Against Aisling’s wishes, Rachel does not take the medication. One of the most powerful scenes comes in the final episode when Rachel roars, “I can do what I want. It’s my fucking body!” (13:48). When the series was made two years earlier, abortion was not yet legal in Ireland, and the morning-after pill had just become available without a prescription.
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Clare, my younger sister, tells me about the time she was consumed by an inexplicable and urgent need to drive over to Mount Drummond Avenue. It was the late 1990s, and she had just found out she was pregnant. She was not married, but everyone wished her well, so she had no idea why, when she parked her car outside our grandparents’ house, she broke over the steering wheel and sobbed as she had not done before, or since. Was she moved by memories older than herself? Thirty-odd years earlier, our Mother was there with Michelle in her body, she was not married either, but no one would have wished her well.
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When my grandparents died in the early 1990s, my family sold the old house. On a visit home in 2019, I had a yen to see it again, so I took the bus over to Mount Drummond Avenue. Daydreaming all the way, like I used to, yielding to the muscle-memories of being in Ireland in April when the ground is soft and the rain is soft. Now, I like to feel my way down to the deep and tangled roots of things. Of humans, trees, words, stories. The ancestors and their calendars of stars: the spring equinox, the full moon, Easter.
There were Christians in Ireland long before Saint Patrick arrived in the fifth century, but his is the story around which the narrative threads of Ireland’s history have been woven. On the evening of the spring equinox in the year 433 BCE, the High King lit the great fire at Ireland’s seat of political power, the Hill of Tara. This fire celebrated the sacred relationship between the darkness and the light. Agrarian people understood the spectrums and the interconnectedness of the days and seasons, of earth and sky. On the spring equinox, day and night are of equal length, after which, in the northern Hemisphere, the days continue to grow, and with them, everything else, too.
The seventh century monk Múirchu wrote in his Life of Patrick that the law of the land stated that no other fire could be lit until the first flames of the sacred fire had been seen. But, on this particular night, before he lit the great fire, King Laoghaire saw another fire burning on the neighboring hill of Slane.
Patrick, the son of a Roman soldier, had been kidnapped from his home in Wales and sold as a slave in Ireland. After six grueling years, a dream showed him the way to escape. He vowed to return to the pagan land to spread the Good News. Years later, he lit the Paschal fire on the Hill of Slane and was preaching to the natives about the Risen Lord, when he was summoned to Tara to be brought before the High King.
For protection on the way, he chanted this incantation:
Christ with me
Christ before me
Christ in me
Christ beneath me
Christ above me
Christ on my right
Christ on my left
Christ when I lie down
Christ when I arise
Christ in heart of everyone who thinks of me
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me
Christ in the eye that sees me
Christ in the ear that hears.
At Tara, the pagan and the Christian faced off. King Laoghaire’s druids worked their magic and Patrick performed his miracles. Finally, the druids sent a mist to envelope Patrick and his followers, but Patrick dispelled the mist, impressing King Laoghaire. He allowed Patrick to preach his new religion. Symbolically, Patrick brought the light that banished the darkness of pagan superstition and ignorance, but in effect, he took darkness off the spectrum and put it on a binary. The wrong side, the bad side, the side that needed to be denied and dismissed, ignored and punished, and so, the ancient relationship between the people and nature was changed thereafter. There began one of the many social, economic and cultural shifts in Ireland. The staggered and frayed end of an old order, and the uneven and unfinished beginnings of a new.
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On Mount Drummond Avenue, the former council houses were painted and bright and the old cottages were renovated and rented out. Who can save for a home today with most of the paycheck going to a landlord? Everywhere in the city, there are signs that another kind of power has swept in to fill the power vacuum left by the Catholic Church. From a distance, I saw her outlined on her lone pedestal. There were no flowers to adorn her, even as we approached the Marion month of May. She was exposed; her stone was stained and her features weatherworn. Without the halo of star-lights, her head was round as a baby’s, and she was so much smaller than I thought her to be.
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When I returned to Ashbourne, my sister and niece were sitting at the kitchen table. Mam had put the kettle on.
“What did you do today?” She asked. A reasonable question, but I hesitated for a second.
“I went to Mount Drummond Avenue,” I said, and waited for the oxygen to evaporate.
My sister shot a panic’d glance at me, at Mam. I was perilously close to breaking our code.
Mam took four mugs from the kitchen cupboard and placed them on the table.
“What’s it like?” my niece asked, and a new air entered the room. A disturbance, a contingency. An opportunity for a mutation in our emotional DNA.
Mam took a jug of milk and an apple tart from the fridge.
“I saw Mr. Fox’s house,” I told her, “and Mrs. White’s. They were these old people from the road who were very kind to us.”
“Will you bring me there?” my niece asked her mother.
“We should all go together,” my sister replied, cutting the tart open.
“The street looks lovely,” I said, while watching Mam from the corner of my eye.
She turned around. “You couldn’t afford to buy a house there now,” she said, putting the teapot on the table.
“If you’d waited a couple of years to sell in the boom, we’d be rich,” my niece said. An oft-repeated fallacy in our home. “Sure, how were we to know?” Mam asked, pouring our tea and taking a seat with us.
I told them that the statue was still there, and they knew what I meant when I said, that the old house was the same, but all our ghosts were gone.
Author’s Note: This piece is a response to Luce Irigary’s claim that inauthentic bonds develop between mothers and daughters in patriarchal societies.
Carmel Mc Mahon holds an MA in Liberal Arts from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her essays have been published in the Humanities Review, the Irish Times, the Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction, 2005-2015 and Longreads. Her hybrid memoir, In Ordinary Time will be published by Duckworth in spring, 2023. She lives in County Mayo with her partner and dogs.
