A mother’s love’s a blessing
No matter where you roam
Keep her while she’s living
You’ll miss her when she’s gone
Love her as in childhood
Through feeble, old and grey
For you’ll never miss your mother’s love
Till she’s buried beneath the clay
It’s my birthday today. If I live to be as old as my father, I will be dead in ten years’ time.
A sobering thought this Daffodil Day, with the Big C lurking around every corner it seems.
My uncle Billy used to sing the song above, A Mother’s Love’s A Blessing, usually at closing time. For an encore he’d do, Nobody’s Child. That usually cleared the place and not a dry eye in the house.
Mother’s Day on Sunday. Some may baulk at the commercialisation of such designations but you don’t have to buy into that to still enjoy and fulfil the spirit of the occasion. It still is the thought that counts. I’m not saying be a cheapskate but the nicest cards are homemade.
Now I’m not suggesting that around the rest of the world that they don’t love their mothers too. Just like the sentiments that Sting evoked in, ‘I hope the Russians love their children too …’
But no matter what anyone says, we do it differently here. We have a different love affair with the Irish Mammy. I remember coming out of a Pogues gig one Christmas and bumping in to Nell McCafferty, who turned to say that we were all just a bunch of Mammy’s boys at the back of it all.
She was referring to the biggest cheer and loudest applause of the night, ringing out as Shane waltzed his mother on the Olympia stage to the strains of Fairytale of New York, after they had both knocked the duet into the night sky.
Grown men. Mammy’s boys. Not always necessarily in a bad or feeble way. Grown men, just under the influence of something other than alcohol. Irish men do have a particular love affair with their mothers.
Mother Mo Chroi, Mother Ireland, Mother Nature, Mother Earth.
Mothers are at the heart of it and home is where the heart is. And Freud is out of fashion …
It’s fair to say I’ve lived in many towns and villages and enjoyed some great homes and yet the phone number saved on my mobile as HOME, is the home place in Monasterevin, my mother’s house number. If I am calling up to see my mother, I say, ‘I’m going up home for an hour’. I haven’t lived there since I was first married 35 years ago.
My favourite living Irish poet Paul Durcan devotes a great many verses to this uniquely Irish transaction at the intersection of life, our loves, our love lives, our loved ones, our mothers and going home.
From Charlie’s Mother
Brendan, does your mother have a hold over you?
Mine does over me. I keep beseeching her
Take your purple-veined hand out of my head
But do you know what she says, the old cabbage?
Stirring and churning her hand round inside my head
She crows: “Charlie m’boy, you’ve got a lot of neck.”
But mothers scarcely come alone; but as a couple, as partners in love or in life, for better or for worse, with fathers, complicating things even further for some mother’s sons.
***
Durcan again, this time from the heart wrenching forlorn lament for a home, Windfall, 8 Parnell Hill, Cork
Mammy and Daddy holding hands on the Normandy Beaches;
Mammy and Daddy at the wedding of Jeremiah and Margot;
Mammy and Daddy queueing up for Last Tango in Paris;
Boating on the Shannon, climbing mountains in Kerry;
Building sandcastles in Killala, camping in Barley Cove;
Picnicking in Moone, hide-and-go-seek in Clonmacnoise;
Riding horses, cantering, jumping fences;
Pushing out toy yachts in the pond in the Tuileries;
The Irish College revisited in the Rue des Irlandais;
Sipping an organge presse through a straw on the roof of the Beaubourg;
Dancing in Pere Lachaise, weeping at Auvers.
Year in, year out, I pored over these albums accumulating,
My children looking over my shoulder, exhilarated as I was,
Their mother presiding at our ritual from a distance –
The far side of the hearthrug, diffidently, proudly.
Schoolbooks on the floor and pyjamas on the couch –
Whose turn is it tonight to put the children to bed?
That was until we all seemed to forget that mothers do not come alone. Mother Mo Chroi and in our darkest hour, the dark ages, so long ago that no one can even remember exactly when, we decided to celebrate Mother’s Day so differently.
We decided to scorn, shame and shun them, those fallen mothers with their sons still hanging out of them, just as if they were middle aged men, having a middle aged crisis in the Middle Ages. The pitter patter in our heads wasn’t the sound of tiny feet but that of consciences churning overtime.
We sent them to the so called Mothers and Babies Homes. The scandal of it all. What would the neighbours think? Then or now?
Some mother’s sons.
Some Mother’s Day.
I try not to do regrets. But sure I do harbour a few. One, is that I missed my father’s 60th birthday. I missed his 70th too. So did he. That won’t happen again …
If you are lucky enough to have your mother alive, do make the most of this Mother’s Day, make a mother’s day of it every day …and not just on Facebook.
SEE ALSO – Stop bitching about Paddy’s Day – the world is green … with envy
