Irish Blood and Irish Bone.

They fuck you up your Mam and Dad?

My Father, My father. (was a 1950s Model)

We used to talk about fathers. In that that first long conversation. You know the one that goes on all night and into the next day, after the drunk sex, the gradual sobering, when time is stretchy, rich, pregnant with possibility. We covered a lot of ground. Revisited endlessly afterwards, yes, but that first time we did put our cards on the table. All the big stuff, childhood, world views, fathers & mothers:

Yeah, you told me how you went to see your father as he lay dying. Driving across country to the hospice when the family were told to come, you sat with him and whispered in his ear… that you’d never forgive, never forget what he’d done, how he’d been, how he’d failed you…and when I exclaimed, you told me it was the only time and the final time your father had to listen. Couldn't answer back or deny.

It all came tumbling out after that. Punishments (once naked in a coal shed, you said), a beating on Christmas morning, your mother rushing down the stairs to make him stop. He really hurt you that time you said. And yet.. a man who took you with him on his Vet rounds, when you were small. Always you, and him in the car. But he turned, you said, when you grew into yourself, and no longer were solace and consolation for the first born, first loved son, who, two years old, slipped his hand from his mother’s hold and ran through the open front door of the house into traffic. Killed by the car that never saw his tiny dancing body. Your father loved you, you said, until you grew lippy and oppositional. A man (he was) who married your mother’s sister, within months of your mother’s death, when you were 20 years old.

But there were other sides to it. Traveling from Dublin to see him on weekends as a grown man. You went a lot, it sounded to me. Hanging out with him, even as you hated and baited his wife. Going home to him. A respectable man, who promised a priest that the children would be taken to mass every Sunday, when he married his protestant wife. A Vet, who would doctor car crash victims he found on the road. One time he made you, unwilling, hold an eyeball of a dying man in place, while he drove off to get help. Unforgiven for that too. A Whiskey drinker, who when he did the bad things was probably drunk, or provoked by your expert prodding. (Death by a thousand cuts, they never saw coming, you called it) (that thing that you did) ‘I I mean yea, 1950s style fathering!’ I said to you then, and you said that didn’t absolve him at all.

And my father, who didn’t do beatings, I told you, or drama, assertions of love. Who managed with words and his presence to wound, to be (always) in charge. By way of asserting his fatherhood. He was known as ‘the boss’ (like an accolade). And I mean, I was not his favourite child? And it seemed to me at the time that I was basically beyond the pale of something, regularity maybe, female appeal….so that really, in that sense, I was no use at all. And I felt his detachment sometimes as indifference, contempt. But was that what he meant? And he fed us and paid for us, laughed with us children, made jokes! Came in on the weekend to sit with us all in the house. To watch some TV with his children, enjoying our banter, the drama on screen. There was that.

There was more. His authority, a presence (you would not take on). A respectable man. A drinker in pubs, his time out from family, the farm. A functional man, who admired all the movers and shakers, the cynical cute whores, who prospered around him. He, who was, nonetheless, broken by banks, agricultural loans. And managed, regardless, to live life on his own terms. Charismatic, in his way. Beloved. A man who would describe how his people came up from the south of the country, in flight from some crisis he never explained. To root themselves here. ‘Of his time, of his place’ I said to you,’ so. And you said that that didn’t absolve him, that wasn’t enough.

And I held you, you held me, so carefully. Mindful of all those old wounds.

My Mother was Loving. (she loved me, she loved me)

We talked about mothers. Your mother brought nine of you into this realm. A personage. Angel. So clever and nurturing, your mother, she never slipped into indifference, blaming, or rage. She passed on her blue eyes, her slight frame to you, only you. Your mother, who died on you, worried, still warning… on finding your place in the world. How she minded you, keenly watched over you, defended you always and ever, in all your mad ways.

She left you one day, when you were little, you said. She vanished to have the new baby, somewhere in the town. But you listened hard to the adult talk, and figuring out where it was she had gone, got unto your tricycle, rode into the night and peddled like hell ‘til you reached the place where she was… and she laughed, how she laughed! when she saw you, held wide her arms. As your father frowned fiercely, the new one held tight to his chest? ‘Mother’s always an angel’ I said to you, ‘back in the day. With her harvest of children to love and get round to! deliver, bring each one back home...

My mother too, I said, gone that whole week to St Bridget’s (nursing home) every two years (give or take?). Her absence a shock and a mystery (she was always at home?) But my father took us in to her once in that week, and we waited at home for the baby, excited, impatient!, maybe slightly derailed… How I held them, the babies, helped out with the feeding, the walking for hour after hour of unsettled newborns. Quieted only when held and in motion, in seemed. She gave out to me sometimes as I picked up the baby, marooned in our sitting room, wailing and lost in our cavernous pram, to comfort. Maintaining that there had to be schedules, routine. Ah yea, thanks for that, Dr Spock.

She had favourites, I told you, and I wasn’t one. Though I never blamed her for that? I was troubled and troublesome. She was burdened with (never-ending) cooking, and feeding and washing (though we girls helped out with all that). She failed me in something she did not intend. I mean something left out of the mothering manual, or her mother’s example?… Woman’s Weekly or suchlike instruction? Like her presence, her attention… safe harbour when emotion or energy boiled wild in me threatening destruction. Overwhelm in Intensity (the feelings the feelings, like anger or sorrow or love) ). Things you could not contain on your own? Only freeze, at the threshold of panic, and manage somehow. To leave you half thawed in effect, in the business of living. Though you learned, (and in time) you unbent. It is possible to learn.

Then you laughed and you held me, said you’d be my mother! be all that I’d needed in this our new dawn…

Forgive them, forgive me, forgive.

One more conversation before you departed to that place beyond suffering (so that you only live now in my mind). One night when you suffered such pain! past philosophising or rationalising, your fine store of endurance gone. The memory of your father came to you then, on that last blistering time. You told me you did not regret that you could not, you would not forgive. I told you the statute of limits runs out on that too? And a true thing, that parents were tethered and wounded as we’d been, should mean we’d forgive, let them go. (but your father was yours, and your lightening rod taking into him terror, your pain). And you would not, you could not. You did not.

I told you then about the healer man in Sligo, who told me my father had carried a great burden, in the kidneys he said. From his grandfather’s grandmother’s mother he thought. Who had walked many miles from her home place, displaced. As she carried some drastic, irredeemable loss. From the famine times, he figured. And my father had never been able to process/release what was caught there. And that had been given to me. So the task was now mine and there’s that?

And anyway…anyway!… now you are free of it, and your father is free or it, and your mother is too

And my father, long gone, he is free of it, and my mother, still here, she is fully paid up and is free of it too.

Once We were Irish.

It seems we are in here like poor souls caught in amber, this web… only managing (stubbornly) ( clumsily) to love. to rear our dear children blindsided with programs, old stories…. but never, regardless, give up on the war or the ghost. Defined in a place, in a time, with a task. to unravel old stories for new…

In the land of our fathers, our mothers, who bore us and fought for us, gifted us… this… burden of torment, endurance (all love)

We are here in our moment, the stories, our roots ( to untangle ) and we know, who we are what we are, what may be. We are claimed in our history, this geography, only. We are Native. Exclusive, We are Irish