One afternoon in the household appliances section of a store in Guadalajara, I paused by an impressive selection of irons before placing one in my grocery cart. Atonement, I suppose for that time in Phoenix when, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill. If you’re from a certain time and place in Northern Ireland, you’ll understand this was no small act. I was raised by a mother who ironed everything, including handkerchiefs, socks, and dishcloths.
My mother is far away in Castledawson, the village that made her, and it is Mother’s Day there. With all good intentions, I had marked the day on the Northern Ireland calendar she has sent me every year since 1988, but I still forgot to send a card, time running away from me like Bukowski’s wild horses.
The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me home. I pick up the phone to tell her I was full of good intentions this Mother’s Day and sorry about the card. She tells me, in the parlance, to catch myself on. I make a mental to note to call the florist in Magherafelt tomorrow.
In my mind’s eye, mummy is standing at the ironing board in her kitchen, just as she was one morning when I visited her a couple of years ago. It’s raining again, and there’s no craic, she tells me, hoping I’ll have some news. She lights up when I tell her that I’ve been spending time with a girl visiting here from Belfast. It’s been lovely, I tell her. Long chats and cups of proper tea and plates of biscuits and buns. Somehow, I let it slip that I don’t have an electric kettle. There’s a too-long silence on the other end of the line and then, “How can anyone living in this century not have an electric kettle? ” She’s just getting warmed up, “Some people have two. How can you not have an electric kettle? My God, no house should be without a kettle in this day and age.” I don’t tell her that my friend from Belfast had the same reaction. It’s 2024, after all.
People from back home don’t understand that people everywhere else don’t have the kettle going at all times. To be fair to me, there’s not much point, because the only other person here who would drink tea with me the way we do (think chain-smoking) is from Enniskillen, and he moved to the other side of the village so I don’t see him enough anymore to merit buying an electric kettle. And, I’ve lived with Scott long enough to know that he’s not about to start drinking tea either. He’s a coffee man, a heathen who has to grind the beans himself.
Drinking tea alone just isn’t the same. It’s a bit sad, a bit Bridget Jones at the beginning of the first film with Eric Carmen’s “All by Myself” in the background, except with tea not wine. Zero craic.
Still, after my second cup of coffee this morning, I know I’ll head over to Amazon to order the latest greatest electric kettle. Then I’ll ring the flower shop.
But back to the ironing – my mother’s a master. The last time I was home, I sat there and watched as she expertly smoothed out with hot steam the stubborn wrinkles in my favorite old denim shirt. When she paused to make a point about something I’d forgotten, I was drawn back to all those times she eased into a story I’d heard a time or two before. Lessons from behind the ironing board I call them, and they include the one about taking time to consider the lilies and to mark her words that there is plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea; and, to believe that what’s meant for you won’t pass you by.
Implicit in countless explicit admonishments not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away. We’re a long time dead.
Mostly, my mother has tried – even still – to strike a balance between shielding me from the world’s dangers she sees on the news – from bombs in Belfast shops to tsunamis and hurricanes in far-away places I have never visited, and mass shootings anywhere in the United States – while at the same time encouraging me to find a voice to explore its realities without hurting myself.
I wasn’t open to what she had to say all the time, especially not when I was in the throes of adolescent boredom, my eyes rolling to the heavens in response to the kind of home-spun wisdom I never thought I would miss. Not all the time, because our world was Northern Ireland in the 1970s and I couldn’t wait to turn my back on it.
Many of us felt the same, and maybe that’s why the granny’s words in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast packed such an emotional punch, “Go now – don’t look back.” I heard my own granny say something similar to my parents so many times when I was very small. “Go. Follow the sun.” My parents had toyed with the idea of immigration – Canada, South Africa, Australia, America – places some of our neighbors had chosen, but they remained where they were, and I know it was probably one of the most difficult choices they ever had to make – especially in their later years, as their American grand-daughter grew up so far away, wondering why everybody else’s grandparents were always there for all the special days – birthdays and Christmases and trick-or treating.
I still feel a kind of guilt over leaving Northern Ireland, leaving them, especially now that our once massive extended family has diminished in size. The last of my dad’s brothers died a year ago. My mother’s brothers are all dead too. I have no more uncles, but in my mind’s eye they are vibrant and young, full of hope for their youngsters.
Maybe the best thing would have been to stay, to strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night, to “stay on where it happens.” To keep going, like my mother and father, like my childhood friends, my cousins, like all the families most grievously harmed by our Troubles, all hurt but buoyed by hope and the promise of peace.
But I left, unafraid of what the future held, taking what Doris Kearns Goodwin once described as a “spectacular risk.” At 60, having spent much of my adult my life in Arizona and the last four years in a Mexican village, I know very well the unguarded moments of dislocation that bring a visceral longing for “home,” perhaps even for the things that sent me away in the first place – low hanging clouds full of rain, the accent, the colloquialisms, the oul’ banter.
One day last Spring, armed with what seemed an acceptable translation on my phone – “pinzas para ropa” – I drove over cobbled streets that would not be out of place in Connemara, to a little shop in the village. “Si, si amiga,” and the young woman handed me a bag of pastel colored plastic clothes pegs. Victorious, I returned to our sunny back garden where there is a clothes line.
While the workers took their siesta, the cumbia no longer at full blast, I did a load of whites and turned my back on the dryer, because – and every Irish person will understand this – “God, there’s great drying out there.” Standing back to watch my blouses flutter in the warm breeze, my mother was with me.
On a day like today, the thousands of miles between us fall away, and there’s ma rushing in from our wee back garden, a young mother with a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain.
Next is the ironing, and then the folding, a precise\and intimate ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by my mother’s ironing board but on the sandy edges of California, late one August afternoon as the fog rolled in. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she steps forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we meet, and there we pause to make the final fold.
Unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs. He wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.
Still we dance.
I’m thinking of mothers back home today, and paraphrasing Branagh’s dedication at the end of Belfast – the ones who stayed, the ones who left, and all the ones who were lost.
Thank you for staying, ma – for being home for me.
As between clear blue and cloud,Between haystack and sunset sky,Between oak tree and slated roof,I had my existence. I was there.Me in place and the place in me
Happy Mothers Day.
From Clearances V by Seamus Heaney
In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984I
“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”
