All the Good Boys Bend Over. Degrading Democracy.

Permitted exercise

Pulling the door behind me and stepping out on to the path, I take a breath of the good clean air.  I  check to see who's in my path, who's breathing my air as they pass, and who might object to the space I'm intending to claim for a walk.  Permitted Exercise.

                               cocooning

Navigating the brave new world ordained by our (good boy) Government is not for the fainthearted, people.  It's a trip down the rabbit hole where the public space is forbidden the Over 70s. Period. Regardless. Well or ill or robust, doesn't matter.  Makes no difference. They can stay in their houses can't they? They can be left in there alone, can't they? Just a few months we can steal from what's left of their good living days, can't we?  Sure, it won't be the same for them, Limbo.  Not as though life moves with any felt tumult through their ageing veins. Not as if the sweet song of sound and vision, birdsong and burgeoning nature sings to them or for them.   Nor connection, fined tuned over a lifetime, with God in the ground you walk, the long line of trees on the river road, the first pale pink hint of the apple blossom, needs preserving.  Cocooning.

                                                     within two kilometres              

I am developing an etiquette out there on the open ground. Sometimes its like Easter. Open-ended Easter. The light, the calm quiet spaces you find on that holiday, that gift of days when work stops, schools close, traffic thins, a holiday without Christmas frenzy,  summer crowds.  It's Easter, there are only chocolate eggs and Christ dying and rising again in the gentle melancholy of Holy week. On those days, my brain says it's Easter! I'll take it!

Sometimes it's End of Days, Mordor.  You are a wraith meeting wraiths and Winter is Coming.  Grey sky only slightly less ominous than the silent spreading gloom in your house, the stale air in your living room, redolent of sanitiser, bleach. Your hands in your pockets close-fisted,  skinned red. Within two Kilometres.

                                                                             with (un)social distancing

Days where the people cross the road 20 metres back when they see you, when you see them, or else shuffle out to the edge of the pavement as you segue unto the grass margin, to pass.  When you catch the eye of the other out of stubbornness, need,  exact a wavering smile, a blank nothing, depending.
                           
Days you reach Main Street, hear your shoes slap the pavement as you pass shops shuttered, doors closed, an emptied out world.  But wait, just up there on the corner, a gang of men calling loudly, talking loose, claiming space. You will not cross the road, you do not walk around them but though them to throw them off course as you have learned to do.  Scattered,  they separate, the sense of tension that is not quite menace, easing. For that day, for that time, at least. Social Distancing.

                                                                                                              and tell on your neighbours (do)

A speeding jogger,  a flying cyclist, two girls softly chatting, a woman pulls out her phone...to report them? Well maybe.  I listen to one such on the radio yesterday,  enraged by joggers,  indicting flying cyclists, pleading for policing, arrests!  You are invited, no, encouraged! to unleash your inner paranoiac, your instinct to judge, your will to control.  All the glad haters come in from the cold!  The Swedes says their people have judgement, discretion, control. Go, Prime Minister Loften! They hold the line, the public space, as the rest of Europe watches and waits for them to fail. Anticipates failure. And tell on your neighbours.

                                                                               
                                                                                                 necessary journeys

I remember the scattered men later, alone in my car on my solitary shopping trip for groceries, medicines.  Alerted, the hair standing stiff on the back of my neck, as a lorry drives tight to my bumper, trailer rocking perilous behind,  never once falling back on a ten km journey.  I speed up, he speeds up,  he does not pass.  I slow below the speed limit, grit my teeth and watch him through my side mirror as he watches me, slowing, revving, slowing, bumper to bumper until I turn off the road for the shop.

A few days later I get out of the path of a carload of howling boys, slipping unto the hard shoulder sharpish from necessity. Necessary Journeys.
 
                                                                       so why as I doing this again?

I'm going with this lockdown, this shutting down, for now.  This slowing down of a lung eating virus, dispatching those of us already in the departure lounge,  threatening those beloved others living by grace of Vaccine, Transplant, Chemotherapy, but tell me this good boy Varadkar, all of you good boys voting in your emergency laws on Friday last,  giving way everyway to a virus, (as you gave way to Bankers, a decade ago) to whom do you imagine we're ceding our public space. Who and what will colonise, gain ground, in the spaces we have so obediently vacated. Every idle bad actor, every dispossessed, untethered soul, rocking up from the highways and byways vacated, that's who.


Even as Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, gain ground in the world.  While we carry on carrying on, turning back a Virus that keeps on coming regardless.  About which the science is not clear. You think you can easily turn back this tide boys? can whistle back an abandoned economy, throw in a shifting Sunset Clause to a Charter for a Police State, an Autocracy.  And afterwards, Pandora goes obligingly back in her box?  Do you know you don't know what you do? And why am I doing this, again.

                                                       degrading oppression.                                                                            

I talked with a man last year,  a refugee to whom asylum was granted after long years in Direct Provision, after endless Requests, Appeals, and Court applications.  He told me every counted hour of trying, waiting, disappointment, was worth it to be here and not there under the dictatorship he escaped. He told me how the very air in that country was poisoned from top down, how the stealing of personal space, of any say, of human rights, degraded all.  All.  Those who assumed the power and those who allowed it to be taken from them, whether they could stop it or not.  You did what they said until you could not,  he told me, and then you ran for your life from your own hopelessness, depression, despair.  Degrading Oppression.

  ... only for a little while...

Back home, my daughter's days are entirely virtual. She sits for her virtual lectures, has virtual chats with her struggling, jittering friends, consigned all to virtual reality.  She sings like an angel alone in her room,  Billie Eilish today.  She uploads on Instagram, for her friends, for her virtual audience,  for me.  For us, who have failed to hold the space for her and for all the jittering girls and boys.  Failed... as the good boys fail us.

"Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me".

....only for a little while?

OH CORONA

Having a sustaining glass of wine,  post shopping for (essential) supplies.  Just a quick in and out I figured, just  a few necessaries, bread, wine.  I stand in a snaking queue for the check out, pushed and rushed and shaken by a panicked crowd, wondering whether, maybe, the universe had sent a plague to test us, shake us, hold a mirror to us, people.  I have a notion that the Virus, all the Viruses, have a function, shifting, nudging body rhythms in effect,  altering perceptions ( of survivors ).  The Virus as an instrument that refines, retunes, reboots, releases, human bodies.

Holding up a mirror, showing us what we are, or have become:

1.  Supplies.

We are not short of foodstuffs people. We have more stuff stashed.  Foodstuff, medications, sanitisers,  tissues, loo roll, paper towels.  We have warehouses,  supermarkets, trucks a  trucking across continents with stuff, more stuff,  And yet, and still, and anyway here we are.  Pushing, shoving, grabbing, emptying shelves so that we will have it before the next woman takes it.  I WILL have my sliced bread and my loo roll in my bunker.  I WILL ALWAYS eat (and wipe my bottom) whatever!  Whenever! things run out...on you.

2.  Loving Care.

Don't touch, don't hold, don't speak too closely, whisper kiss, go skin on skin.  Don't accidentally brush, doors handles, people, petrol nozzles.   I think of orphanages, in Eastern Europe before Glasnost,  all the love lorn places, where infants, tiny humans, were driven mad,  irreparably stunted by lack of touch.  Forget the loo roll, people, grab a loved one, snatch a partner, take an infant, a random relative, into the lock-down coming down the tracks.

3.  Go Virtual (at your peril)

And here we'll be corralled in our houses, busy bees  remotely working, living, eating, safe removed from human contact, in the kind of isolated bubble Child Psychologists, Talking Heads, tell us leads to (has led to) to over-weigh, disabled, anxious teens. Teens are us.

4.   Avoidance.

Is this lockdown for a week, a month, a year? Are we shadow boxing with a mystery Virus
which may or (may not) have been here for  a week, a month, a....since November 2019?  Eh?
Who can say? People have been dying, getting better, since November last (or forever).  Of... well ...something! Influenza?  No one panicked? No one knew back then to blame, to name, Corona.

So now we know. What do we know? We know The Virus will be defeated by the young folk who are not, if they are not, immune compromised. There will be an uneven battle with the old, the sick, and all those people whose immune function has been messed up, broken down, un-underused. All the people insulated by vaccine from the common cold, the influenza, everyday infections, whose immune systems sag flaccid and unused. How many are there of those people? Do we know?

5.   Fear:  

The hardest thing to hold steady in the mind, for us poor humans, is that fact that we will die. So we do not ( hold it in the mind)  We cosset children, prolong adolescence, hobble resilience, suck the marrow from the buzz of living,  rather than let life flow to dying when it comes. We vaccine, insure, corral, distance ourselves to the point where children suffer anxious states, self harm to feel,  grow into helpless half baked adults, narcisstic, lost, irresolute. We would not let them face the perils of the world and leave them reaching after chemical highs. We will not face the abyss, or accept the defining, life enhancing clarity, that we will die.

6.  Denial:

I listen to the pundits, politicians on the radio, on the TV,  Social Media, getting off,  enlivened, as they talk talk talk.  Oh, not about the Virus, no,  but about the things we'll do to stop this happening, backs turned oblivious to the Elephant in the Room. We cannot stop this, people? We can delay it, yes, give the always patchy Health Service, our heroic Health Care Staff, a break,  but can't, we can't  close down normal service indefinitely,  or turn the Virus back.  And so we lock-down for a month, six months, a  year, await a vaccine.  And then the next Corona, and the next, and the next one after that.  Each one oncoming sooner than the one before.  Until we learn. We can only live, eat, mind ourselves cannily,  live, until we die.

7.  Consolation.

There is a strange strange turnabout just now between the minders and those who must be minded, that is truly rich.  How often have I listened lately to the young ones blaming, claiming, wailing how I, and you, have stolen their future, wrecked their planet, used up all the good stuff leaving none for them.  How often tried to soothe their youthful terrors, anxieties, about climate change, the carbon footprint, a planet dying while they're on it,  quite before their time.  Apologies, soothing, good attention, silence offered as they speak, accuse, indict.  Rage, against this, that I have not and you have not prevented dying, ending, death. That we will not.

And now it's us, the minders, first, who face this grim and grinning Reaper.  And I'm waiting for the Darlings to step up, get the picture, read the writing on the wall.   See true and clear, unblinkered,  for whom this great bell tolls.

My daughter, my cell mate in isolation, drops a Newspaper article from 2017 in my lap concerning long dormant Viruses awakening.... from frozen places melting,  from buried places unearthed, from forests burned for profit,  headless hardcore fracking.   Elephants in the Room. 

Valentine's Day.

Another year, another Valentines.  You think the day will come, has come, when all that jazz will pass you by by unnoticed!  Irrelevant to you! A Marketing Nonsense!    Remembering forever Valentine days when you were 16, 17, hoping for Valentines, just one,  thinking one would do, as you watched Helen Moran counting hers at lunch time, waving red-edged cards with captured pink-gold hearts about for all to envy.

You decide there might be maybe one small plain one later, slipping through the letter box at home on the wind of your want. You figure maybe next year, some year anyway, your's will come?

Ah yes, the fevered expectation of school girls ready for the magic, for the love and the passion, all the dark mysteries, to start. The hunger for it!  Life's essence in you and you might never get out from the traps to have it, to love, be loved, adored, have babies, kisses, tongue! Or ever get a single solitary Valentine...

Decades later you find out, at the only school reunion you’ll ever do, that Helen Moran? she sent those Valentines to herself.   That neither she nor we humble on-lookers, actually got any a single solitary Valentine between us.  Someone get Helen another double whiskey! Not a pink heart, a black-gold question mark, a fat red cherub between us! Oh, we got 'em later on from boyfriends, husbands maybe...Duty Valentines! But hey, that never counted? And the mad wild longing on us every Valentine’s Day for something Other.  A Secret card, Unknown Admirer, Arrow Shot Possibilities from the Virtual Universe.

I totally get Bathsheba Everdene’s naughty giggling act in sending that Valentine to William Baldwin in Far From the Madding Crowd.  And thereby pulling loose the thread of reason in his love lorn mind,  unraveling painful until he murdered Captain Troy. I sent a few myself on that very principle?

I used to think that it was all in The Waiting, for The One to find you, but now I'd see it’s the Found  Fusion with the Mystic Other? Hah!  Valentines means coming home at last.  It's the falling into the abyss of the real true.... Chemical  High.  Valentines will come to you,  I might have told my sixteen year old self, or even my sixteen year old daughter,  yes!  And you will ride the whirlwind, yes you will.  Emerging bedraggled on love's withdrawal, grim and sober and swearing on a rational life.

And also, I would tell her, age won't save you!  Or Maturity.  Valentine’s Day comes round each year for all of us and if you are not pierced to the heart, a little, with memory and longing I would not credit it.

Or maybe even, looking at a small white card, a rose, a question mark... even, as you swear you won’t succumb, fall into the Irresistible Madness one more time. Oh yes, yes. yes.

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              

,annacogan.com  

The Heart's A Slave.

It was the best of months it was the worst of months, August. A roller-coaster month and now it's done. We are, I am, drifting around psychic chasms, looking out at the trees on the road, the leaves beginning to turn,  getting lost oftentimes in a Thousand Yard Stare. I'm counting on coming about in time.


                                                  For today I am a Debutante.


It all kicked off with a second hand Debutante's Dress, a handover at a hotel, a Saturday morning trip up the motorway.
"I mean like, I'm getting something good?  But not, I mean new? not wasting money?  But like,  good.  I'm gonna sell it afterwards. We won't want it afterwards?"
(Yeah, yeah, clogging up the wardrobe space with the others, her last year's satin affair for some hopeful lad's event, the beautiful girl's three floaty concoctions. Crumpled stained and forgotten)
"I mean it's like a big decision to make on a Saturday morning early, darling girl?"
I point this out, speeding up the quiet motorway in the brightest cheeriest morning sun, feeling quite unequal to the task at hand. She had a summer cold. I have a suspicion she is feverish.
"so, will you like, will we, maybe...nip...into the hotel bathroom or something? Sort of discreetly try it on?"
"Yeah yeah, we will, we could? I hadn't thought..."
She only sees the big picture, this girl.

And so we crowd into the hotel bathroom, me, the debutante, the owner of the dress  (last year's debutante) and her Mammy watching the beautiful dress protectively. We wait outside a cubicle for the dear girl to change. And wait. There are many many hooks and eyes, tiny satin buttons, requisite arranging....
I decide to take a walk down the thickly carpeted hotel passage for this bit, following the smell of brewing coffee, moving away from the other Mammy's breath hot on my neck as we wait.

"Ah lovely! lovely! yes, ah yes. that's just...."
A Man stands with the the other Mammy, looking in at the glowing girl in the champagne dress, the jewelled bodice flashing, the floating skirt hanging dreamlike under the garish bathroom light.
He, moving in to catch this vision at a better angle, catches my eye instead and melts away from the ladies bathroom fast-ish.  A remnant from yesterday's wedding, last night's bash, I'd say, dishevelled and wandering in search of the gents, falling into this bathroom tableau randomly, with lip licking acquesience you might say.
Anyway, we close the deal, we have the best, the most perfectly wonderful Debutante's Dress. We take it home, she, satisfied that she has herself a really good dress without buying into uncool insane extravagance. Me, satisfied that she is satisfied. God is in the laughing morning sun.

And perfection is fleeting.  Champagne dresses invite staining, despoliation.
The debutante, waltzing downstairs to the kitchen,  modelling the entire ensemble, the beautiful shoes peeping out under the beautiful dress, stretches out an arm, long fingers finding the spoon, to stir the supper on the hob. She doesn't see the splash of blood red sauce flying faster that light to the beautiful dress. Taking the shine off things.

A tiny tiny stain, I say. Minuscule! "sure you wouldn't know it was there unless you actually knew it was there" I tell her. She is distraught, distinctly feverish now, and sips sadly on the proffered mug of Lemsip. I try some anti-stain solution dabbing, but she decides that I am making things worse, that we may have to have it dry cleaned, but oh, wouldn't that be such a terribly uncool waste of time and cash and besides she doesn't want to think about it anymore  anyway (putting the tainted dress away, across the landing, away away in another room)


                                             
                                                  Mitchelstown  and Castletownsend

And anyway, at that point she had moved on! projecting, anticipating the Indie concert in Mitchelstown, a late summer concert,  a pre Leaving Cert results 'sesh' planned back in the dog days of pre exam cramming. I leave her and her dizzy dark eyed friend at the concert site, watching them melt into a multitude of carefully tanned girls in tiny shorts, of laughing boys, and breath a sigh.

I am taking advantage of things, taking myself down to the sea to see my very good friend, knocking around West Cork for the warm glad weekend that's in it. I meet the lovely woman in Skibereen, and we sit basking, drinking coffee, talking for hours.  Afterwards we go to Castletownsend to look at Harry Clarke's stained glass windows again. We climb the steep stone steps to St Barrahane's Church and watch the sun pierce the vivid blues and reds of the Nativity, Saint Peter and Saint Luke.  We discover a window obliquely to the side of the alter, never spotted before, a picture of a slim and perfect man miniatured, delineated, stained in blue and pink. St Luke. We marvel at the things you miss, until you have eyes to see, mind to receive.

On Sunday, I take the long road home, listening to the dazed and chattery girls in the back, telling in chorus, Indie stories of collapsing tents, Facebook friends met in tents, at sessions, wandering...and pushing upfront to hear, so close so close, him, Jake Bugg, they coulda shoulda touched him....they hear the music still, intoxicated yet with boys, attention, other stuff...
The dear girl wants to keep on keeping on, hasn't slept for hours, for days! She messages friends at home about a gig that evening, unwilling, not wanting about all else to stop.


                                                            ...old stains forgotten...

She was dissuaded. She was advised to save herself up, to keep her pagan fire for the Debutantes Ball, the Leaving Cert, the trip to Collage after? She was directed to the quiet of her room, to nurse the spiking temperature, to rest the whispery croaking voice, to still the slightly nutty light in her staring eye. Ah yes, the morning brings realisation.  She was ill! And boy did she gave that it's due, gave into it until Debs night.  But then, ah then, downing a Lemsip, sucking on a throat lozenge, she cast aside the fever, donned the dress joyfully, as thought the dash of ruby red had never stained the thread, or lurked in fold under fold of diaphanous creamy pink, as though it never was.


                                            Another window, another staining, dear Harry Clarke

And you, snapped back from murky dreaming by the singing iPhone, at 6am. ("keys? you have your keys? you won't forget, you'll bring your keys? my what? my keys? my....yeah,  I will... I wont... forget my....oh um Mum?  forgot my... keys"?)
standing at the window, waiting for her to walk in from the bus, behold her in the pearly morning light striding up the path, hair flying behind, a fistful of dress caught up casually in her hand, a white sock that may be a surgical dressing on the right foot, the feet encased in flat summer sandals. (the cruel heels for the photographs). An Amazon Girl, a Vision, back from the Bacchanalia, from wars.

Inside the door, she stands talking breathlessly about the night, the people, dancing, as you take in  the splatters of pink and red of blood...the champagne skirt... blood stained...
"yeah yeah I was, we were, like, laughing? we were sitting for a moment and like, glass, a piece of glass? goes up in to my heel? and it was... bleeding? and a man, he had a first aid box, he wrapped my foot for ages, oh for ages, and the blood you know the blood it kept on coming,  kept on bleeding, so I started feeling dizzy? I was crying? but it was ...grand, oh in the end he stopped the bleeding, he worked like really hard to stop the blood?"
"Oh but...oh... did no one...I mean no one, call..."
"and so then I went back dancing? when I saw no sign of bleeding, sure the bandage held till morning, and we danced, we danced together, in our bare feet, in our flats, I mean you only stopped for drinking, it was savage, it was brilliant, and I never, like I never felt...no... pain..."

And afterwards they crowd onto the bus and sing, the whole way home, the whole ninety minutes of the journey in her bloody dress, it's thin jewelled bodice....
(" a coat? you want I bring a coat? you wouldn't take a... coat!.. to your debs?")
and she shivered for the journey, "kinda registering I was cold? really cold?"

And so, dear readers, more August days of spiking temperatures, the dear girl valiantly feeding herself with vitamins, zinc, Lemsip, submitting to foot bathing and binding, ahead of the Leaving Cert exam results, the Leaving for College.


                                     ...  just tell us already? just say, how did we actually get on?...

 I was on the lemsip myself when that day dawned (for nerves), watching again though the window as she in the midst of a jittery chattering rabble set off for the school, for the envelopes solemnly handed out one by one, while we waited to hear. I waited for the last time, for my last childs' exam results. And the phone's incongrous sweet song came quickly, my faint voiced girl calling, to say "Yeah. Yeah....it was... good...it was...grand...?"
a silence while I marshalled my resources to respond appropriately, no matter what..
"So um what... what did you...  how did you exactly ... get on"?
Anyway, she got on superbly, so much so that she was for once and only once, silenced.  Monosyllabic in her response.

There followed a day of events, an interview with a journalist, a photographer from the paper, (her results were very good indeed), visits, congratulatory messages and the evening's great big Party of Parties.  You were uttering grim warnings to the dear girl though the car window, as you delivered her (again, again) to the gathering for Prinks, before the Actual Leaving Cert Party. Afterwards,  climbing grimly to your bedroom, slopping your yellow Lemsip, you felt the same alien virus that had grappled with the debutante for the entire month, stirring ominously in you.

And that night she came home early-ish. "Hot! It was too hot! and I mean crowded?"
In the morning  she began the packing for College and for her actual leaving. I was taking her to University in Amsterdam in two days time.

                                                    Leaving Home Forever.

We flew out in the morning and I came back on an evening flight, thinking how utterly pointless it would be to stay over, having left her and her massive suitcases at her college apartment?  Thinking how I'd deliver her, (carefully planned out in my mind) via plane, train and tram to that place, and then, after dinner together, would just, I mean, go? Never actually coming in my mind to it, to that final leave-taking at Station Central in Amsterdam, the convulsive hug, the look-back at my Amazon Girl standing tensed, upright, like the child I left at the primary school, the girl I left at the secondary school gate, and so here we are, here we are, now, where I can't bring her home again, ever.  The tannoy blared, the people melded, losing edges as I walked, my back against her. Walking blind for the airport train. ( dont look back)

Her summer cold hummed in my blood all the way back on the plane, spiking on arrival so that I slept in my car in the short term car park for the few hours till dawn and drove home in the kind of rain that feels as though its been flung sideways from a bucket at the windscreen of your car.

Home. People murmuring, sympathetic, about nests? empty nests?, you are not, you say, a bloody bird? a stepford, sad sack Mammy, you are not! even while, ah, getting ambushed by her book on the kitchen table where she left it after breakfast, and her shoes, under the radiator,  her recordings on the sky box for that show we watched together,  and her coat, her old cream jumper hanging at the end of the stairs, until you realise you're living now, that you live now, in her abandoned house. You live in her abandoned house, with everything unpicked and  flittered by absence. 

Oh get a bloody grip you tell yourself, just get a bloody hold. And it isn't as though it's the first time, after all.  After all, the Beautiful Girl, she went to college? Up to Dublin, student lodgings? Ah but she came home for weekends with her stories and her laundry till we more or less could manage being apart for each and every livelong day. And besides, you could always get in the car and get her, if she needed, if you needed.  And you always had another one at home.  Until now, until now...

 It's a hardy women who has children, I say now. And a hardier one to lets them go.


Anyhoo. September's here. At last.  Just about. There are things that I've signed up for in the great wide vacuum left me.  I am going to Australia, at last, at last. And to Holland in October and to Paris in the Spring to see the Beautiful Girl.

Still, you wonder, all that loosing, all that flying, all that texting, all the talking on the phone,
surely something's gotta give... gotta fail, gotta break...
surely. Surely...
heart's a slave. Heart's elastic, beating helpless, it's a universe expanding. It's a slave. It's a slave.

   

CHOOSE NOW CHOOSE NEVER, DEAREST HEARTS.

We will be stepping out from this house to vote on Friday 25th May 2018. The boss has been resolute in getting herself registered to cast the first of all the votes she will make in her life. My daughters have made up their minds now and I knew my mind on this for years. There has a lot of talking between us.  Respectfully mostly, heatedly too. Sometimes, looking up mid rant, I catch a wry look telegraphed from one to the other. They do not understand. They think that this is new to this generation, this decade. Women, older women, old women can not speak to them. One way or another. They are indulgent.

I shove a scissors in my bag and march to the village and a massive low-lying billboard with the words  'licence to kill' in bold over a great fat baby in utero. The thing is at eye level, deceptive, offensive... manipulative. I cut it down and fling it over a wall unwilling to hold it for long. Another one, too high to reach, on the main street, likewise uses the image of a woman's body, her pregnant belly to depict a child, who looks to be at least eight months old though still anchored to the umbilicus.  Deceptive, offensive... manipulative.

"The thing is darling" I tell the boss on our Sunday walk  "the thing is I can't get it out of my mind, this vision of them coming by night, in the dark, with their ladders...or...or cranes, to plaster, insert, shove into my eyeline this nauseating horror show. Uninvited. The visual mugging... using women's bodies,  everywoman's body..."
She laughs at me then, at my hissing, and points to a poster high over our heads. It shows a man talking at a small girl. She looks back at him smilingly. The word NO hovers over her shining head.
"I mean that one? Look at that one? What's the point of that one. You think like he's saying
'when you grow up little girl, you too might want to kill babies? may not be trusted? and, I mean, Daddy says no? Daddy will protect you... from you?"
"And that one" she points upward at a sleeping infant who at least seems to be born and wrapped in a blanket.
"..like that one? like someone took a picture of their baby and used that? For that!"
When we get home the boy is in the kitchen frying sausages, lost in his leisurely Sunday drift, unperturbed by any of this, or anything at all.
"I mean posters? what posters? never noticed any posters. Are there posters? Have a sausage? There's a few over there I don't think I'll eat..."

The thing is I remember, I was there, when the wretched article went into the Irish Constitution in 1983. I wasn't much older than they are now.  I lived in that time. That time of college, of wry acceptance that there would be no job for you when you were finished, when the idea of an income, a car or, one day, a house was a dim chance in your worldview. And the Church, the Catholic Church was everywhere, fingers poking into everything still.

Your best aspiration, your most hopeful gameplan was to travel, to leave, to go to England, America, Australia. You'd go to work, for a laugh, for a life. For a termination of pregnancy should you need that when and if you were raped, caught, found yourself accidentally and disastrously pregnant. That too.

 In Ireland,  a conforming elite mopped up the good stuff, hoarded from scarcity, stayed.

And then came, who saw that coming? the Celtic Tiger and the Internet.  Access to money and discourses, the possibility of choice.  A way to live in your own country, whoever saw that?
And the Catholic Church losing its stranglehold, slowly, slowly, and now with dizzying speed. Our minds, opening like flowers, expanding, understood.  Our eyes opening, saw. We saw at last the women imprisoned and abused in the laundries, the babies taken for rich catholics,  'unsuitable' infants neglected,  starved.  And finally we saw the culpability of the church in sheltering paedophiles, sadists, predator priests.  A patriarchal state in a dark willing waltz with the church, the priapic hypocritical priests.

And since then I have had children, I have struggled, I have prospered, suffered dark days and good ones. I've had decades of bloody periods, bloody childbirths, hormonal tides. I have had beloved sons and daughters. Above all else, I have chosen. I have chosen each childbirth, each relationship, each passion I followed. And that trip to England when, disastrously pregnant, I travelled to end it, I have chosen that too.

I choose that. I tell my daughters that:

"You get to choose, dear ones.  You carry your babe in your body, in your mind, in your heart,  in your soul. You must choose that. Pregnancies happen randomly, accidentally, deliberately, thrillingly, and sometimes as a result of a criminal act. You are not (actually) Handmaid, Incubator, a Vessel of the Lord. You are a woman. You know.  You know when a pregnancy will damage you in your own heart's core.  And you terminate.  You choose and you terminate, and you know that is the right thing for you and an embryonic being burrowing into your body. Sometimes you cannot deliver,  and you choose."

When I woke up that time in London I was crying.  Lying quiet, staring out at blurry leaves shifting in sunlight through the long french windows on the ward. The voice of a nurse, strange, kind english vowels, behind me asking if I was all right, if I going to be all right?  "Yeah... no... I'm not... but I will be. I will be all right." Thinking how I didn't know where this place, somewhere in London, where I was leaving my blood and my embryo, actually was. Didn't know where I actually was...

And afterwards, long desolate months of the massive hormone fall, the bleedings I was glad to suffer. Knowing, at the end of it I would have my life back. And so it has been.

And now, with this Referendum, you tell yourself that this is not 1983? That's what you think, before the posters, the No-screaming naysayers, the singleminded absolutists come back again among us, roaring about unreliable, helpless, infantile women, who have terminated 'boys and girls' for 'social reasons'. Who must not the allowed' to choose. Not to choose. Never to choose. Choice, the final frontier for women in casting of being 'less than' womb bearers. In rejecting patriarchy, catholic control.

They come on from the Church, the IONA INSTIUTE, the Catholics. Maria Steen, David Quinn, Patricia Casey et al, directors named. You find the website. They describe themselves;
"The only organization in the world designed exclusively for top-ranking Catholic business-leaders and their spouses' Also 'The Iona Institute promotes the place of marriage and religion in society. We defend the continued existence of publicly funded denominational schools. We also promote freedom of conscience and religion'
Top Catholics then, (your everyday souls need not apply ) seeking to speak for us, act for us, choose for us, same as it ever was.



They scream like demons, when Google, Facebook ban adverts from abroad. They have the money, the power, still.

Will we let them do this again? Will we insist that our democratically elected government legislate as we direct, to regulate Abortion.  Will we allow this Diktat to remain, this law beyond the reach of our laws, in the Irish Constitution. Will we let the catholic church or any other church continue to control what happens to women by stealth?  By ruthless barracking, posters, lies?

Will you walk to polling booth on Friday, will your children walk with you, your people, your men, and vote for this, only this; for women's personhood, women's experience, women's choice, for women and only women's right to decide?

Vicky Phelan.

...so everything enraging here, so much so (headlined),
Cancer! Cervical! False Negative!Screening. (smearing)
smears.
So having up your tender insides, smears.

Cold metal instrument you cannot see
so helpless so
don't! tense.  T'won't hurt...much.
A scrape across the flesh is all,
so who would want that, who? You? do that, though. You do. You.
Have to. Or not; no sex no HPV the paralysing vaccine risk
Oh hush! Don't speak...that,
you must be mad or bad to say
That.
And after That,
false negatives.
no telling
Anything true.
No telling...you...you have your cancer now its yours.

Is it 'cause you're Herd?

I mean like Cervicalcheck?
they must protect
the screening plan?
The herd immune?
fake news about false negatives.

strategic stoopid...

No, that's not it, Oh that's not...it. not that.  it's...
Slippery diss-ingenuity talk,
it's talkin' on the TV talk
it's talkin' talkin'
(smiling)
The herd the herd the good work
Done.
The innocent failure of planning after the inevitable errors in screening after the perfectly predictable
misreading of your unfortunately misleading...smear.
The way no woman wasn't
treated.
The way every woman was
done.
Your cancer.  Yours.
White elephants dance behind him on the TV screen, the hospice rooms.

It's this I mean, it's this. I mean
...the three year wait to have another scan.
       American systems scraping less
           Flesh. America having yearly scans.
They knew they knew they knew they
resigned... figured...did the math...
You tell the herd, it only takes one headline one, dying woman one
to find us.

She found you anyway,
Vicky Phelan.