It is Mother’s Day in Northern Ireland. I had marked the day on my calendar but still forgot to send a card, time running away from me like Bukowski’s wild horses.
The water is wide, but it will take only a second to transport me back to my mother’s kitchen. I’ll pick up the phone to tell her about my good intentions this Mother’s Day and sorry about the card. She’ll tell me in the parlance, to catch myself on. I’ll make a mental to note to call the florist in Magherafelt tomorrow.
In my mind’s eye, mummy is always standing at the ironing board in her kitchen, just as she was one morning on a recent visit. It’s raining again, and there’s no craic, she tells me, hoping I’ll have some news. She’ll ask me if I ever did get that kettle. She still can’t get her head around the fact that anyone living in this century does not have an electric kettle. “Some people have two. My God, no house should be without a kettle in this day and age.”
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 Northern Ireland people do 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. A couple of months ago, we had invited friends visiting from Dublin to come over to watch a Six Nations match. One was a coffee drinker, her husband a tea drinker. A proper tea drinker. Excited to find out I had a stash of Barry’s tea bags in the cupboard, he volunteered to put the kettle on, but he stopped short when he spotted the red kettle sitting on our gas stove. He didn’t know what to do. “You don’t have a proper kettle?”
No. But I have an iron, purchased in Guadalajara to atone perhaps for that time in Phoenix when, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill, no small act for someone raised by a mother who ironed everything, including handkerchiefs, socks, and dishcloths. My mother is a master. The last time I was home, I sat in the kitchen 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 her 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 to strike a balance between shielding me from the world’s dangers as they play out 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.
Maybe this is why the granny’s words in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast packed such an emotional punch, “Go now – don’t look back.” When I was very young, I heard my own granny say the same to my mother. “Go. Follow the sun.” She and my father had toyed with the idea of immigration—pondering a future in Canada, South Africa, Australia, America—places some of our neighbors had chosen. Ultimately, they remained where they were, and I wonder about any regret they feel, especially when they watched my immigrant life unfold from afar, their American grand-daughter growing up so far away, with everybody else’s grandparents always there for all the special days— for birthdays and Christmases and trick-or treating.
I still feel a kind of guilt about 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 and sisters are all dead too.
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 also 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.” Over 60 now, having spent much of my adult my life in Arizona and the last five years in a Mexican village, I know 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—for Northern Ireland, wild and green, its low hanging clouds full of rain, the coastline, 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 Ireland, to a little shop in the village. “Si, si amiga,” and the young woman behind the counter handed me a bag of brightly 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 my mother is young again rushing in from our wee back garden with a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain.
Thank you for being there 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 Mother’s Day.
