For twenty years I was the person who opted out of the Mother’s Day emails. My eyes skipped past the cards and bouquets at the till. The day and its words – Mother, Mammy, Mum – were words of loss etched on a headstone. And then one day they applied to me.
Becoming a parent is startling. In an instant you are shifted up a generation, from the parented to the parenting. For many of us, this means facing a changed identity, or our tricky relationships with our own parents. Becoming a mother having lost a mother added a layer of complexity to this identity change that I did not anticipate until the baby was in my arms, and I felt something inside me crack open.
I lost my mother as a teenager, and the first wave of grief I experienced was the kind of visceral, self-oriented grief you would expect a child to have. I mourned all I had lost, my emotional safety net and the person who rooted and connected me to this earth. The unmooring felt savage and violent.
It also set off a secret internal countdown clock. People who lose a parent before their time commonly hold the idea in their head that they will have a similar allotment of years, whether they realise it or not. Mine drove me to move and seek and explore and learn, to wring every last drop out of the day.
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A second wave of grief hit me in my 20s when a conversation with my aunt helped me see my Mam as Catherine, a whole person, in a way I couldn’t as a child. I wanted to know her for who she was. I spent days in a daze of empathy and rage for this young woman, in her prime, who had all of those years of life and joy and love and adventure taken from her.
‘My first experience of this primordial love was the earth shattering realisation that I could, by dying, be the worst thing that ever happens to her’
I did not expect a further wave of grief to hit when I gave birth, in the moment so often described in terms of overwhelming joy. The midwife handed me this tiny, perfect creature that my body had made, and her cries faded as I held her for the first time. A poem by J Hope Stein reads simply; “a newborn rests her head on the earth of mother/everything else is outer space”.
People describe the force of parental love as knowing you would, without thinking, be willing and ready to die for your child. My first experience of this primordial love was the earth shattering realisation that I could, by dying, be the worst thing that ever happens to her. I can see now that this reaction came from a place of deep love, layered with the trauma I had been busy avoiding. I would have had a much easier transition to motherhood if I had dealt with my grief in those earlier waves. Through talking therapy I am finding peace from the anxiety and fear of loss, and joy and (relative) calm in motherhood.
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Our inner life is made up of the stories we tell ourselves about the world. These stories help us make sense of the past, but they can lock us into unhealthy fears about the future. Just because our parents suffered something doesn’t necessarily mean we will too. I cannot help seeing parallels to this in the society around me, as we collectively confront the legacy of the institutions of motherhood in this country.
In the lead up to giving birth – amid Covid restrictions, and perhaps aware I was without a maternal figure – I was showered with supportive phone calls from female family and friends. Many wanted to share advice and wisdom from their own birth experience or those of their mothers. Much of it was advice on things to be wary of; very real experiences of a system that, for as long as living memory stretches back, let women down. I heard of past generations who went into labour not knowing how the baby would come out; no one had sat them down to tell them. Of not understanding what the midwife meant by “push”, and not feeling able to ask. Of walking out of the hospital while in labour and getting the bus home, so objectionable was the treatment. There were also very recent stories of distrust that medical decisions would be taken with the mother’s interest in mind. “You need to be your own advocate,” was a repeated refrain.
‘I continue to work on making sure her inheritance does not include the things that I struggle to confront, within myself and in the world that she will one day make her own’
[ ‘I am struggling with potty training my three-year-old daughter’Opens in new window ]
These stories came from a place of deep love and solidarity and a compulsion to support. They also follow threads of trauma passed down from one generation to the next. These stories are survival instincts triggered by real pain and transmitted in whispers. And the overriding sense you get is of having to stick together against a system that isn’t on our side.
We don’t live with most of these institutions any more. When I was in the early stages of labour, I knew there was a safe and considerate team ready to receive me at the hospital. And yet I felt the weight of what women before me had gone through. The legacy of systems that disrespected, and in too many cases violated and diminished women is still intertwined with many of the stories we tell and hear about pregnancy, birth and motherhood. The fight to make sure that these stay in the past continues, and their memory is a burden and our fuel for those battles.
Next year I will turn the age that my own mother was when she died. I have been able to turn down the volume on the countdown clock in my head, and look forward to decades of getting to know this beautiful girl I am privileged to have call me Mama. I continue to work on making sure her inheritance does not include the things that I struggle to confront, within myself and in the world that she will one day make her own.
