Love and Death and What.

                                                           WHAT?                                                                                              "What! what?  WHAT IS IT."  Oh how my temper, like a dog straining on a leash , is about to run away with me.  I started out well,  as I  enquired of my subdued and distant daughter,  if all was well. "Yes"..... well,.... no"., she offered before relapsing into silence. But what is it?....." It doesnt matter. And YOU wont like it",  her voices becomes fainter, colder all the while.. This is an old trick, a working stratagem  she employs when on shaky ground, when feeling wronged, pained  (think of the fairytale pea penetrating twenty matresses) . It drives me a little mad. And I'm driving the car. And I should know better. My husband tells me I should lower my own voice, follow suit.  I agree. I do. But it's just not in me  "WON"T LIKE IT? , why won't I? FOR GODS SAKES what IS it? Darling."

                                              THINGS NOT BEING HOW THEY USED TO  BE                                                                                                                                              
So she tells me. Its a well worn path. An often fingered list.  They boy is rude and and intrusive, the boss gets all the attention, she herself has simply given up trying to be heard...simply given up.   And also, we treat her like a child,  we don't pay her enough attention, we even planned last Saturday's movie  trip without her, and I myself am cursory, with my husband on a constant basis, and, well, things just aren't how they used to be . Before.  I splutter through the round of attentions paid her, the  taxi service provided, the money supply, my  exhaustive monitoring  of  things like internet use,  dodgy  diets, (tortured) hair die applications by her friends, her  iron intake,  and.....and  daily  making sure you  PUT YOUR COAT ON before you..you  on before swan off  in the cold and the rain.

                                                       CIRCLES CLOSED
Later on my husband sniggers at this litany of mothering,  over a restorative glass of wine.  But  "oh you know" I tell him, "I remember this. You want to strike out for yourself and you want all the old supports to be in place, just in case. Also, its a profound and mysterous fact that coupledom, a love affair,  is excluding. It warms the two encircled lovers,  and is a line between you and the others. Troublesome then for a fledgling adult, who feels she can't fall back on ancient certainties as the mood takes her.

                                                     ON WEDNESDAY JOHNNY DIED
On Wednesday Johnny died.  Not a remote  or  distant grandfather he, his relation ship with the threesome was warm and generous. It is the first death for them. He is the first  person close to them to depart. They struggle to respond. The elder  agonises over a suitable black outfit, WHAT TO WEAR. The boy wants to be assured that  he can still  go to the Mid Term Disco falling  two days on.  The boss would rather wait until the morning  before embarking on the journey  west where the funeral will be.  They don't get it that he won't actually be coming back.

                                                       A FUNERAL                                                        
And still it all unfolded. The boy, unsure but willing, carried the coffin with the men, he being the tallest rawest man to assume it's weight.   His sister  walked straight backed  beside her grandmother,   draped in swathes of black chiffon.  The boss followed dry-eyed, because, as she later told me,   " Dad cried and everyone else a little, but I did not,  because he was like all waxy and I knew it wasn't...wasn't ... like  really him. I knew.  And anyway , when dad sent me in before he died, he like  squeezed my hand and winked and grinned ...at me...when it was still him, and you could tell, his eyes were joking, you could tell he wasn't scared, and then like nor was I."

                                                   VALENTINE"S DAY

On Thursday my husband and I went out for an Un Valentine's day dinner. Well I was working late, starving, and persuaded him. He was outraged to be in a restaurant with all the other saps, on this day. It fulfilled all his expectations. Pink menus limited to a sort of mass produced offering, at a set Valentines day price. The restaurant crammed to capacity with couples, young and shiny, the food banged out and very much below the usual standard in this our favorite restaurant. He managed to ease the pain with a plenteous supply of wine, but couldn't refrain from telling a charming, giggling east european waitress to tell the chef he would be better off driving a bus, when she asked us if the meal had been "alright for you?".

I brought him for a soothing pint  of Guinness on the way home to our local, where all the other hardbitten grownups greeted us with raucous jeers when we told them where we had  been.  "Oh sure all that love stuff was burnt out of us all  years ago,  our deadpan barmaid assured us. "I mean if I went home now to find rose petals laid up the path into the house and up to   the bed room I"d say James Derrane (she always gives her husband his full title) I'd  say, FOR FXXXXK SAKE, WHAT DID I TELL YOU,  FOR FXXXK'S SAKE,  I  MEAN I ALREADY TOLD YOU ABOUT THIS KIND OF STUFF, I MEAN FOR FXXXKS SAKE." We walked home tittering helplessly at that one, a vision of her laconic farmer husband firmly in front of us. We held hands too as, after all,  we decided to marry a  year ago on Valentine's Day, " it being the best way, darling, to get away with sleeping together before the appalled gaze of  three teenagers" as I put to him. I guess you could say we are a couple of old frauds, after all.

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Tell me why. Heroines.

                                      Soft Shoe Shuffle                                                                                                                                     On Sunday we do a sidestepping  soft shoe shuffle out of our house of looning adolescents for  a winter's walk. Don't think they noticed.   The bright warming sun shines at last,  January having been and gone under a grey and claustrophobic  hood. A spacious day of grace it is.  After christmas,  extravagance strained,  the festive cup emptied to the dregs,  January felt like swimming underwater, eyes closed, legs kicking stubbornly, in anticipation of being spat up at its end for spring and an actual new year.  "Yea its  over, January, no question"  I assure the spouse.   A row of  tall denuded trees stand dignified, intricate skeletal  branches  spread like carefully worked lace across the pink streaked bluegold  sky, as  I tell the dear man.  "Like filigree" he nods. On  the village green the bushes, seared, bare ribbed, are elegantly grey,  drifting to tawny red at the tips in winter's light.   "And oh, you know, tonight we have Borgen".  A glass full of blessings, then.

                                                             Heroines.
And we do . Though, sadly, the final two episodes. All of it,  the character of Birgitte Nyborg, the broad consoling cadences of the Danish tongue,  the humanity of  the story lines and and  the politicking is  irrisistable. The show got me through January.  Birgitte, neither  flinty ice queen or conniving siren, is  a real woman and a heroine in her way

                                                     Something different in the State of Denmark.
It's a rich tapestry, and her teenage daughter's mental breakdown and treatment became a major thread. . She sends her to a private facility dedicated to adolescent illness, there being a year's wait for the  public facility. The story of the girl's treatment with drugs and cognitive therapies, her subsequent recovery,  is  believable,  fully fleshed out. I am bemused,  struck . I think about  Ireland  where there is no dedicated facility whatsoever  to treat young people, and the only treatment easily accessible is prescribed medication. Or self prescribed booze. So it was when I was an adolescent and so it is today.

                                                         Derailed
On Tuesday the boy is quite derailed by the suicide of a school mate.  He carefully recites what he knows  to us, his knowledge acquired from the Facebook network, full of bombastic, tragic and dramatic posts by his friends. "but.... I don't know why" he adds, a remark he finishes with each time he tries to line it up for us over the day. He asks us if we think it will be on the news. He tells us how many "likes" the postings get. "It make's no difference to that boy, and HE will never know" I tell him and I shut the broadband  down, wanting only to stem the unrelenting flow, short circuit the current of the cyber chant for him.

                                                             Grim Twins.
The thing I remember most starkly from my  own adolescent  experience of the grim twins, the double act  of anxiety/depression was the terror, the sickening sense that it would never go away, never let me go.  And no help then, my friends, you were very much on your own. Oh, now I know the labels, yes, I know what to call it,  but then I saw only a spiraling craziness. Teenagers are not us. They take life with a sort of heightened awareness, all feeling amplified as the hormones hack a highway through body and soul. When things go out of kilter the psychic pain, the fear, can be catastrophic.

                                                                   Stones
It took me years, decades even to get back on track, and I have lived to hear more people than I would ever have imagined tell a similar tale.  I have listend to the halting confidences of the middle aged. And still, with all we know or ought to know, we give our children stones to get them through.  Facebook, alcohol, drugs and trash TV. Plus ca Change. Maybe in  Denmark.

                                                        I am Birgitte. Hear me Roar.
And in the final episode of Borgen, one  last satisfying  thing.  Birgette's assumed burden of guilt about her daughters breakdown  is neatly flipped,  as she understands that her nice kindly husband's  abrupt departure from the marriage at the vital point when she is appointed Prime Minister is  squarely in  the  frame.  Oh how she roars this truth at him, in a fabulouly guttural Danish  rage, as she throws off her womanly burden of blame.<a href="http://www.blogsbywomen.org/" title="women bloggers"><img

Separating the Men from the Boys. Francis Ledwidge.

Feeling bemused and cross both today, after last nights trip to Django Unchained with my husband. He is impressed at my new  tough mindedness in not, as is my habit,  burying my head in his shoulder at the visual onslaught of, surely, buckets of blood. "Oh it just became old hat after the first five exploding bodies " I assure him. " a side issue".  And it did.  I was engaged, intrigued  by  the movie until three quarters of the way through.  The last twenty minutes rendered  me incredulous. Firstly, I watched the heroine squeal,  squawk , cower and simper for the entire time, despite showing promise of being quite something, in earlier descriptions.  The  other  female on offer  was (monstrously) of the simpering kind also, mostly  at her brother Leo DiCaprio's character in some dodgy  incestuous/ oedipal melange..  The Older Back Man  was shown to be equally monstrous  and in cahoots with  the dark side. And I know,  I know,  its  a fantastical visitation from present day African American MAN  to the deep south  to exact a fantastical  revenge, but why oh why so clownishly one dimensional? . Its 2pac Unleashed.   Real   women,  older men,  are redundant in this fine  scenario.  Its laughable,  adolescent,  mysogenistic,  self indulgent  male fantasy..... unbound.

 Basically,  Django splattered. He splattered  everyone; figuratively  father and  mother,  literally all the  bad white folk,  watched admiringly by the enslaved, being  themselves incapable. You might say the movie is an insult to the suffering of those people. It may even have managed, unwittingly, to be an indictment on a kind of gun toting  macho black male culture, current in America . But I don't want to give it too much credit.  Not for the grown ups then. Not for the men  One  for the boys.

On Monday,  my husband asks the boy if he would like to learn how to shoot., in a proper shooting range. The boy is stunned to silence and then offers that he WOULD  in  breathless tones. He had been talking at length and most  knowledgeably about tanks, weaponry,  panzer divisions?  in the Second World  War  with my quite as interested spouse. The spouse  did  a  stint in the army when he was a young man,  and is  pretty positive about it. The outdoors,  the courses, the discipline and sense of control it gave him. And he  discovered that he was a crack shot.

The boy has  recently joined Facebook  and finds,  I think, that  his horizons expand on a daily basis.   Well,  you know, GIRLS, who I am not going to mention.  But also  touching  base with new people,  like ,  for instance a  German youth, who told him about his older  brothers having  served in the  Army when  national service was obligatory, and how he may himself do likewise. "Oh and you know they (the Germans) have an army in reserve if they ever need one". Hmm   My husband  is interested in the  idea of training, of  learning to  handle  oneself , the acquisition of  basic self  control as a  man. A sort of  rite of passage, if you like. Me,  I  think of hours on the  X Box,  obesity,  eternal boys who never  leave home and  assume a man's estate. The twin horrors of  young male suicide and homicide. And  I wonder.

Later the boy, six foot one in his stocking feet,  roars into his sisters face as he snatches the Laptop from her. I ponder, as I gird my loins to squash him good, whether the Army visits schools on career/ future planning /day, these days? Now that would be a cunning plan, a brilliant wheeze. Yep, that  might work. I'm guessing not.

OH I know that solders have a function, go to war. I know that. I am calculating enough to think this an unlikely outcome in Ireland just now, and  see a limited learning curve only.  But still  I think of Francis Ledwidge the poet and nationalist, who fought and lost his life   in the First World War,  twenty nine years old,  because, he said, he would not stay to enjoy freedoms that other men had fought  and died for. Son of a labourer, he became a poet, and before he was blown  to pieces and put in the ground at Passchendaele, wrote this;
                                                                  JUNE.

Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
                  and plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
                  floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair,
 Tanned face of June, the nomad gypsy.
                            laughs
above her widespread wares, the while she
                            tells
the farmers fortunes in the fields,
                       and quaffs
the water from the spider peopled wells.

The hedges are all drowned in green grass
                     seas,
and bobbing poppies flare like elmo's light
       while siren like the pollen-stained bees
drone in the clover depths. And up the
                     height
The cockoo's voice is hoarse and broke with
                     joy.
And on the lowland crops the crows make
                    raid.
Nor fear the clappers of the farmer's boy,
Who sleeps, like drunken Noah in the
                   shade.
And loop this red rose in that hazel ring
         that snares your little ear, for June is short.
And we must joy in it and dance and sing
        And from her bounty draw her rosy worth.
Ay, soon the swallows will be flying south
     The wind wheel north to gather in the snow,
Even the roses split on youth's red mouth
      will soon blow down the road all roses go.

Mothers log, tween to teens, weird and wonderful days.: Faithful Departed. Waking the Dead,

Mothers log, tween to teens, weird and wonderful days.: Faithful Departed. Waking the Dead,

Girls on Girl. Walking slowly for help.

"But....but I walked away  so slowly... to get help ....and I walked so slowly back, " the boss uttered in  anguished tones as she describes  a dream to me where a school friend threatened to take her  own life as she walked into the bathroom, and when the boss returned with a teacher " it was too late".  All my children give me a premiere viewing  of their dreams.   I am expected to interpret.  Some are memorable,  some frankly disturbing like this one.  The boss dreams clever and true. She provides an interesting   inside track,  almost,  to family matters. This one though is easily connected to  a school drama,  when such a threat was made by a girl who is,  I  suspect,  being  given a bit of hardship by the group.  "Oh, she 's just looking for attention" one of the boss's  friends said  sagely, after this was said,   but the boss mulls over the matter obsessively and tells me more than once that she and her friends are still, always,   "nice" to this little one.

"Nice" is a killer word here. I had heard  these girls  talking with positive relish, as to how annoying and different the unfortunate one could be,  though   "still and all " they would never dream of being other than "nice"to her. I don't know about that.  The girl seemed refreshingly herself  to me, and was the boss's absolute best friend some weeks before. I know those female waters of old, and struggled often myself to swim in the   slippery, deceptive  deeps and shallows,  as girl and woman. Being on the inside of an excluding group exerts a powerful glamour , an intoxicating poison. There seems to be  a dynamic at work between the "nice" girls and the scapegoat  which draws her to shipwreck ,  as surely as any  sailor was lured to the rocks by siren call in the myth.  There is danger here and self awareness is the only antidote..

 The Boss slept little after the dream, was pale and drawn as she  recounted it to me. . I advise her to talk to her class teacher, which she does. An approach is made to the child's family, and the girl in question fiercely  reproaches the boss and her friends because she says "you made my mother cry".  Ah yes, as  I  believe I may previously have mentioned, dear reader, sometimes its hard to be a woman.  Anyway, the boss is much chastened by the entire affair and  assures me shudderingly that she intends  "never to  talk about ANYONE to ANYONE ELSE in school, EVER again,  and  ALWAYS to treat everyone exactly the same".  She hasn't missed the icy wind threading through this girlhood  tempest  then.  Her  dream has served its function, I think.

Faithful Departed. Waking the Dead,

"Isn't it so strange to see some  folks in the day light?" I observe to my husband, both of us standing at  the back of a circle of  mourners, who await the emergence of the coffin from the deceased publican's house. We have come,  being fond of the deceased man and his mourning wife,  to this inward facing circle of local people variously  related,  neighbouring and pub clientele,  who wait patiently  in the crisp cold day for the publican to come out of his house one last time.  Time slows down as we wait, pick out people we know from the pub,  until at last the coffin emerges high on the shoulders of the men.   Three women walk pale and steady behind it  looking neither to right or left, and the crowd fall in after  on the short walk to the church.  Every  soul here knows exactly  its  place  behind the soul  departed.

"Are you going to look at the body"  the Boss asked the evening before when we told her we were going to the wake. As we  laboured to explain  I thought of  how this ceremony would have vanished by the time she grew up and must bury her dead.  I remind her of  how  she had been brought when younger to my brothers wake where she  and the other two had indeed clamoured up on the coffin to look at the body of my dear  brother, who,  reduced to his  essence,  was  childlike and safe .  "It's to say goodbye"  I offered. "To offer sympathy to the living family" my husband added.   "To.. to...um..um.. see that the person is dead.....".(to look at the body). Its all that, yes. .

"Do you think that's  who he really was all along" I whisper as I clutch my husband's arm against the strangeness of being in the intimacy of someone's house, the bedroom, containing only this coffin, this man, whose face looks stern  and fine, the care and the  blurring of illness, age  and trouble  melted down, fallen away  from his face . At my father's wake his coffin, lying  high on the  bed, was  circled  by our best sitting room  chairs on which sat people, some solitary, silent, some in little groups, talking,  softly laughing , drifting in and out over two days and nights, until at last they took him out to be put in the ground. The bringing  in to the living breathing house of the lost one  breaks the heart quite as much  as his last  going out.  The graveyard in front of him, a mountain of used tea cups, empty glasses, residue of cake,  sandwiches behind him in the gutted house.

a href="http://www.hotvsnot.com/Add-Site/Add-Site.aspx">submit site</a> t" You are not telling us he is dead..... I said"  His wife stands, surrounded and isolated  both   by the  mourners, and tells  her tale for  the umpteenth time. . "I mean, you know, they said he was better, could go home soon. So we left. And  they phoned  And they  said we should come up so we did.  And they called us into a room, and we knew.  It was serious.  But then  they said..they said... they did all they could, And. And... We hugged the widow long and hard, and took ourselves off to the end of the bar, opened to cater for this crowd,  clutching our proffered drinks,  loosing ourselves in the soft voiced  crowd.

"You know I'm being cremated myself" I tell my reluctant husband,  on the way home.  He tells me to shut up, and when I  assure him that he can go first, he tells me firmly that he would not do that to me. As we gently argue this point  I bat away a memory of my mother, alone,  pale and quiet in her house, absently sipping a solitary cup of tea,  where I found her that evening after my father's  funeral.  Crockery, glasses all washed and put away, floors swept, priest paid, her husband waked and most  thoroughly  buried, three miles down the road in the  silent  graveyard. 

Pub Talk. A kiss before dying.

"MY friends are down under THERE, or  d'you think I'd be bothered talking to you"?  Old Eithne stabbed a finger downwards as she spoke to us, in the pub where we washed up one evening at the fag end of Christmas. Her strong boned face under the still dark hair twists between grin  and grimace, as she launches into a story, sucking up whiskey as she talks, about how THEY wouldn't serve women in Dublin pubs when she was a young woman, and she called them on it, banged out a deal with the manager of her (soon to be) local, whereby she and her friends would be served provided they pay for their own drink, and so they were for many a year. But friends are all gone now, and only she has lived to strike terror and awe in the hearts of locals in her home place. She turns her gargoyle face on me as we leave. "I knew your father, Oh I could tell you things. I knew him allright.  I LIKED your father. Did I tell you that I knew her  father".(to my husband).  Yeah, Eithne you told me, every time you catch us in the headlight of your ferocious attention, you tell me that.

I have a regard for Eithne, I tell  my husband on the way home. My first experience of her was of a disembodied corncrake voice soon after I returned to this part of the  country, in what has become our local.
"What's YOUR  problem with my fxxxing coat, YOU BET  I 've had this coat for years, this is a good fxxxking coat and I fxxking like it. So fxxxk you and the horse you rode in on, I'll wear this coat to the fxxxking grave I can tell you".  I like it that she is a woman who does not care to appear civil or nice, . that is rare,  admirable  in a woman I think.  Also, she is one of a legion of elderly  stalworths, in and out of the pub, who  take it on themselves to tell me they knew, admired, were deeply fond of  my father,  now dead for twenty years,. My edgy husband from edgy Cavan  says I should go beyond a benign smile to these constant, relentlessly admiring offerings, and tell them.  I  too knew  my father, .

http://www.blogtune.com/Maybe. In some black winter's evening I might speak, might stir up the quieted stock of the past and say....yeah he was....., he used a brutal clever tongue to hold in submission,  and control  his children, imposing a suppression  of Taliban like  proportions on his daughters, and keeping his sons on the march in a docile line. When I was nineteen, I was reluctantly hauled  by an unaware boyfriend over to speak to him, to greet him, in one of the many pubs he patronised, and he , when he saw me, froze, and later cast me from the house. And then there is the sibling, a  tall strong man  now middle aged. who has nightmares  about him still,  and the one who asked me why on earth I was crying, me of all people as she was not,  at his funeral.

Or I could tell them maybe about the joker man, who sat with us on Sunday afternoons to watch Little House on the Prairy, amused,  engaged,  interactive as the rest of us. Or the one who was to be found in regular pockets of the day,  sitting in his large shabby arm chair in a scattering of cigarette butts, laconic,  vague and bantering with my mother, who bantered with him till the day he died.

I could say how he, disconcertingly, first  began to give me fatherly advise on week end visits home, when I was quite grown up and his health failing fast.  Both of us drunk more or less on a Saturday night. He mumbled, almost toothless, drink sodden, about men to be avoided, and how he had, and I might, handle relentless banks, financial  pressures, that sort of thing. I strained to understand him, beset by some stray sense of urgency about him (and the charm of being talked to, at last) whilst thinking to myself, Stable door, horse bolted etc.

I could say that the only time I ever kissed  him was on one of those nights, before I left him for my bed. I don't know why.  Something in the way he ducked his head, something scared and asking in his eye. Anyway I did, and squirmed in the morning at the recollection, as though both he and I must  think how foolish that was , in the sober light. He died a week later.

I sometimes extract  a nugget from his  mumblings now, that has sustained me in adversity, shown me a cock eyed slanting way out of  a fix, financial and otherwise. Brought me home.  I could say that.