Lá an Mháthair (not Mothers' Day - Mother's Day)

Ok - it's just a pesky apostrophe... what I mean is - this is not about Mother's Day, it's about the Day I became a Mother.

When I first found out that I was pregnant, the idea of childbirth terrified me. Literally a case of 'ar eagla na h-eagla'. It was the fear that frightened me. The idea of this quite large thing coming from this very small place just did my head in. About a week before my first baby was born, I was marching down Patrick St. in Cork, absolutely refusing to waddle like a pregnant woman does, when I missed the pavement and stepped down on the street. There was this sensation in my belly a sinking feeling, and boy did I waddle away after that. But as I walked on, there were a lot of people walking toward me, and it just struck me 'All of these people have been born, someone has been through childbirth so that these people could be here'. So what's the big deal, they could do it, I can do it. and from that moment, I had no fears, total acceptance, que sera sera, if I tear apart, if I break up, I will - so be it. I was told afterward that that sensation was probably the baby's head engaging, and I figure that the hormones really kicked in at that stage, and that's why my fears abated.

When labour started, a few days later, my body know exactly how to cope. It was the only time in my life when my mind and my body/brain separated and each dealt with its own priorities. The natural drugs that the body releases did their job, and my mind took off and floated while the body got on with the job in hand. In between contractions I was cold, calm, flat, white, then as the pain built up and concentrated into a hard, blazing hot, fist of pain, and then relaxed and spread out again as the contraction subsided.

Time can take on strange properties. As labour went on time stretched and stretched, and my mind searched for things to occupy it while this was going on. As the time of birth approached, I thought of my other, how she had been roughly the same age as I was then when her first child was born. But when I was born she was 43, so I had never known her as a young woman, and even though my head knew that she had once been young, I had never acknowledged those other versions of her that had preceded my birth. Sometimes when I come across someone like a teacher I had when I was very small, for a single instant, I become again that ungainly ugly, gap-toothed little girl with scraggy hair and big ears, and then my adult self slips back into place again.

But that little girl is still there somewhere inside me, and so is the smart-ass, swaggering, teenager that I was, and all the other versions of me to date. They haven't gone away - they're just encapsulated by later versions. But I had never acknowledged Mother as anything other than 'Mother' - the role. Then, just before baby arrives, there's this pause. Not a lull or a calm, but a pause full of expectation and panting breaths, and in that moment it struck me that now I was becoming Mother. and that terrified me, because Mother to me meant two things. I loved her dearly, but she was also the source of the most intense irritation to me, and I didn't want to be like her. And now here I was, on the point of becoming her, becoming Mother. And there was no way that I could change that. But also I realised that she had gone through this same process, and I felt a kinship that I had never felt before, and the fact that my baby was a little girl meant that this process was being repeated again, and again. There's a sort of mirroring of the push-pull of birth, and the push-pull of versions of ourselves, and the push-pull of the relationships we have with people.

And then these versions of ourselves are battling for a bit of territory as well. Often when we change from being one version to another, it's quite sudden. One moment you're single, the next you're married. One moment you're married, the next you're a widow(er). Other people regard you as being the 'new' you immediately, but generally we have to evolve or grow into the new version. Another image I had thought of using in this poem was immediately the new baby was born, they put her on my stomach. I could feel this wave of expectation from the mid-wives and from within myself, to go 'Ahh, isn't she gorgeous' but I just went 'Yuchh'. My expectation of a baby was soft, and warm, and pink and cuddly. But this was cold, and slimy, and wrinkly, and purple, and I thought 'Ohmigod, I am not NOT ready for this - Help' Just because I've been through the process of childbirth, that does not mean that I automatically click into Mother-mode. I still don't know how to change a nappy, I've never done it in my life. Why is it expected that I automatically know if she's sick, or dying of hunger, or choking? I don't know how to do all of this Mother-stuff yet. I don't want to be Mother - My mother. I don't know if I can be Me - Mother because this version of me is too new, the skin doesn't fit yet, I'll have to grow into it.

Then when the baby cried for the first time, I went through that same acceptance thing that I had before. This was all part of a process. The likelihood was that this baby would probably have babies too, and so on, and so on, and the parts fitted a little better together in the jig-saw which had been thrown at me, higgledy-piggledy in this maelstrom of hormones and sensations and unaccustomed events. I was just one more piece of this continuous line of mothers and daughters which stretches back unimaginable distancesWe all cry - we cry in sorrow, in grief, and we cry when growing pains and other pains afflict us, and we cry with happiness, and with joy.

My daughter’s name is - Joy.

Mother's Day

And then each second sagged on the clock on the wall,
And the pain pulled and pulled in and in to the core.
Bone will break
If it must
It'll wrench the flesh to dry dust.

Morning welled up and spilled over the window,
Drenching the cold, milk-white, walls with its light.
But I am
Full of heat,
There is blood, on the flat snow-white sheet.

I wish to dissolve in a still, dropping, pool
Of crystal and ice, to dive down to the deep.
Numb my heart
But I gape -
Blot it out - no, no, look - no escape . . .

Mother ? My mother ? Me ? My daughter ?
One more heave,
My world shifts.
But my self is the same,
Though cells will divide and they cluster and grow,
Turn old and dry wrinkle and shrivel and die

Deep in that womb, weeping that woman,
Holds baby, the beauty, the bride,
The wife, mother, widow - all cry.
They push and then pull, and they bawl.
They all cry.