Friday 18 October 2019

This Butterfly Has No Wings.

                                                 who knows where time goes, 


A year has passed since the Boss, my sweetest girl, left me to live among the Dutch people, spicing up the international melting pot at AOC Amsterdam University with a pinch of eccentric Irish.  I sit and brood this September on all those things I didn't do, never got round to... actually abandoned... over this past year without her.   All my projects half begun, my notions of things I would start at last,  things dreamed up, half-visioned.  New Dawns, siren calls to strange horizons,  sit (going off) on the back burner.  Unrealised, basically.

I read a million online reviews on the eBike,  chasing visions of myself flying past the hedgerows, peddling deep into the countryside,  taking on the Waterford Greenway.  My inner cynic boring on about expense, picturing the eBike cobwebbed in the hall.  I read some more reviews, I never buy.  All my Dreamzs! receding, fraying around the edges now.  Where (oh where) has the year gone?


                                                               Calling Paris

Where???  On Distance Parenting, that's where!  Online Mammy,  messaging,  texting, skypeing, video phoning; firing out into the ether prescriptions, instructions,  enquiries... care.  "How are you now darling... really? truly how are things?" "So how are things now?"
Long hours listening into your iPhone to the Beautiful Girl in Paris, to the Boss in Amsterdam. Troubleshooting.  Containing crises; of confidence, of disasters pending.  Hearing; urgent requests for advice, to discard later maybe, but to have now.  Receiving; homesickness and sorrow and terror,  happiness only real when it's told.  The tug on the umbilicus across seas, a visceral need that you, neither of you, imagined on setting out, on kicking off giddy with Prospects.

Time...looping backwards, sideways to circle my children, and never on the linear path I imagined.

The Beautiful Girl, teaching in the Sorbonne in Paris, in deep in her beautiful life, done and dusted I'd thought.  Actually launched to go anywhere, I'd figured?  Not foreseeing, oh not foreseeing,  landlords who failed to drop by with your keys, leaving you sitting on your massive suitcase weeping with exhaustion.  Not allowing for tormenting employers, shouty contrary students, calculated  to overwhelm your beautiful soul.  She is the kind of girl who cries in sympathy with your (rare) crying, struggling to mediate her fine tuned sensibilities, her vulnerability, to live in this messed up, incalculable,  crazy dumbed down world.  And it's a burden, bascially, your Beautiful Soul.

I have now stretched the boundaries of mothering to France.  I have sternly lectured a French Landlord on the phone? I have menaced a strange and unsettling housemate at her house, on a visit?  I have advised, on a loop, on how to dance your way around Snappy Parisians, oh yes.  And I have sat quietly, on the cyber level, with the beautiful girl in her room on the fifth floor of an ancient Boarding House for Girls in central Paris while les Gilets Jaunes stormed, each and every Saturday past her window, past the streets where she liked to walk.  'So why not go out and have a look, maybe mount the barricades' I suggest one day as we, on a video call,  watch from her window. 'Why don't you come over here and try' she answers, watching the massing howling crowd, the cops, le Flic, running with raised batons, automatic guns, on her screen.  No princess imprisoned in her Ivory Tower spoke with such tragic dignity.  My bad.

I have visited,  wandering enthralled in Paris with the dear girl many times.  Often enough for the streets to feel familiar, the Seine a silver snaking glory I can find on foot. I went inside the warm dark beating heart of Notre Dam Cathedral with my daughter before it burned.


                                                         And Amsterdam.

And her sister, striding away from me in Station Central in September, rebounding rubber band like all through the year.   Her disasters, her super marvellous experiences in equal part requiring a listening post,  a talking head,  a willing ear.
 "I mean,  just tell me what you think... like, what I actually ought to do here?" And I tell her, carefully, thoughtfully. (I think!) And she is satisfied. (Although she never actually does it) Ah yes,

She was a signal dish buzzing with incoming calls to join, partake, go out and meet,  to go; to Berlin, for the Student Shadow UN Conference, to climate change marching (XR to you), to Paris to see the Beauty in her tower.  And then to mix it up with Super Nice People at Parties, where she dances, sings, and takes in everything there is on offer (oh I know. )  She buys; a bicycle second hand, her winter clothes in the market.  She scolds; on sustainability, on the sin of buying New Things, sustainable sins.  She struggles; with the learning curves on her courses,  with money. She refuses: to be less that the best, to live mindlessly.

She crashes, burns, oh sometimes she burns.  She falls from her speeding bicycle, saved by canny Dutch cyclists flying past who do not crush her.  She slips, at Christmas, on impacted snow, coming down hard on her ankle,  hobbled for weeks.   And poisoned, yes she's poisoned, on a trip to the Netherlands countryside where she and her Hungarian friend Anna fill their eco bottles from a tap in a ditch, over which hangs a sign saying Don't! Drink the Water. So they do! drink the water.  And that becomes a phone call at midnight from a weeping girl racked with pain, spasmodic vomiting.  A horror show running for days,  demanding random medical advice,  careful emotional soothing, judicious bracing, from Mammy and a kindly dutch nurse.   (It occuring to me later that she had never suffered in that way before, or in any consistent way at all?)  (Though she would certainly not agree.)

After Christmas she was, for a few weeks, giving up and coming home.  And not just her I learn, but  other girls,  particular friends, all going home.  All wanting a break from Education, they say.  All yearning after time out, gap years, wanderings, romantically and experientially, in the Great Wide World.  (Well, Thailand anyway, or Iceland possibly)  'But,' I offer, 'but... education!... is a...it's a privilege?  Not a sentence?  And The World is cold and bare and dangerous, essentially? Experience it where you are! Where you're warm and occupied and lucky.  She doesn't think I'm, kind of, getting this?  My cold dark world is not the world that was promised to her.

So anyhoo, she doesn't leave.  That passed. The year completed.  She never was the kind of girl to permit herself slip lightly from the hook she's chosen.

There were video chats between us on people's mental health,  on minding it.  (Which has become another thing you have to mind as it turns out. In this permanently switched on, wired up, relentlessly connected online world)  The young, I think darkly,  are led by the nose. Soon they will exist and have their being only in the mental (cyber) realm.  Addled.  Logged-in, stranded, and helpless in still forming minds.  The heart becomes a mystery to them, the senses a little visited wasteland.


                                                       Meanwhile back in Ireland

At home, the boy was tipping along, smoothly, in the midst of all this overseas turmoil,  dramas across the wires,  distractions in myself, preoccupied with Distance Troubles. He stays with me for this, his final college, year, spending his days discussing his Thesis on the second world war, playing on his Xbox, watching his box sets. He introduces me to Peaky Blinders,  The Lost Kingdom, Vikings,  for some evening viewing together. And how he is content! How long has he waited for this, to be an only child? To have his way on Boxsets, Music, Food, at last.  His sisters and their vegetarian ways, their female TV viewing, are just not here!  Last year I watched The Affair, Victoria, The Crown, and only eat red meat with him when the sisters were absent.  Now he and I, cheerfully carnivorous, spend our evenings having the chats about the Third Reich, rooting for Ragner Lothbrok in Vikings, binging on Peaky Blinders.  It turned out to be unexpectedly delightful?  I wanted to give him his year when I see that he wants that, and find myself drawn in too,  richly rewarded.


                                                                    Choosing                              

And where does the time go, when does it end, in a frantic, improvised, crisis strewn, busy busy year?   When does your own stuff start?  How can you locate and stay in the interior space where you can think, where you can breathe?

Can you, a Mother, choose?  Can you decide to hand back the dilemnas, terrors, devouring needs to the owners thereof.  Can you ask them to mange these things for themselves, as you once had to?  And is it true that young lives are so bleak now, so taxing,  that they need, deserve, can't manage, without the constant support that you yourself were never given?  I can't decide, a kind of paralysis grips me here. I  find that to make my adult children care for themselves, to insist they try,  is quite as challenging for me as it is for them. In truth. I seem to be unable to let that other woman, hovering in me now, in.  She is bad Mammy, non Mammy. And if I am not Mammy always, who am I now? Who used I be before the children?  How can I be the unMammy? And yet, I need to try,  it must be tried.

I wonder if it's guilt in fact,  forced on women by the culture,  swallowed whole,  that holds me here.  Expiation, because we, the adults, have personally and wilfully despoiled the planet.  Mea Culpa. We have destroyed the future.  Mea Maxima Culpa. And now we owe the children we have nurtured with lifesblood ... everything we can salvage in ourselves to help them through.

I think of being young, that young.  The adults overheard discussing Iodine Tablets and did we have enough to offset radium damage?  Explanatory leaflets in the post on how to survive the fall-out from the Nuclear Bomb, as the world awaited a nuclear strike and devastation.

And all the hobbling, pitch black Catholic Guilt, the leash of the Priests distorting every natural instinct,  jerking on on your neck as you fought to have your hopeful life? We are all dying anyway. We were always, all, dying anyway and there was no quarter then or now for anyone except in the fragile succour of loving, the truth in creating.

The pupae, incubated at last, must have its struggle to claw its way from your careful woven cocoon, and claim its place on the planet.   Or see the Mammies everywhere disable the butterfly.  Aborting Metamorphosis.

So yes, my task is not to Mother,  Mother, till death do part us.  My task is to stop!  To stop, and return to the notions, visions,  dreaming.   To be an example to my children in this,  of what a woman is and who she is and what she may become.  I decide that.


And yesterday I wave the children off.  I buy the fleetest Ebike on review,  and start my word press blog.  I begin              

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