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.

WLTM A NICE RUGBY PLAYER.... (for dancing)

Two things that really piss me off, just now, like badly, like snagging on barbed wire every time you hear it fury, like hijacked derailed fury... when I really need to be thinking about something else...


this.

middle men, talking, talking about the Belfast Rape Trial,  saying girls (these days) go on like groupies don't they? they're up for anything aren't they?,
game for anyone,  bait for everyone, asking for anything, aren't they. Basically.
...from I mean celebrities? from rugby players? presidents? producers!  All those guys, like... everyone knows, these girls they go to tents, to bedrooms, hotel rooms, buses, parties after,
because they're, THEY ARE,  basically,  UP FOR IT...

                                                                                group sexing,
                                                                   
                                                                                                   spit roasting,
                                                                                                                             use.

...you have to see the gleam in everyman's eye in giving this recital, this declaration, this charter to abuse.... to understand the comfort all this BULLSHIT gives them, not to mention the vicarious sexual buzz (let's mention that)

I asked my daughter about it, this fine and self serving argument that girls can't wait to give group head to strangers, lie down to be devoured by braying men, gratify without being gratified...
she shuddered, and not in anticipation either,
" oh no, ah no, ah no one... no one, no girl wants, would want...ever.. that... not drunk of sober, single or no....you wouldn't want that? it they paid you, even, you wouldn't want that? never, ever, no!
"I mean you might go out in carefree casual anticipation of a...like encounter?...with a sort of...like nice rugby player? for maybe dating? or like dancing? or maybe to walk you home, I'd say, or loving if you really really liked him, maybe, maybe?"  so,  that's all?

that's all guys,
                       that's really,
                                          truly
                                                   all.

and this

the middle class male barristers talking, talking,  questioning, oblivious, (to their own unconscious bias) girls.  About rape.  YOU WHAT you smiled, you touched, you simpered, stumbled, followed, danced with, smiled? you smiled???...
YOU DID NOT go home early, stay on bitter lemon, move in girl packs, go home early, punch him, kick him, go home early, have a, measured, conversation during which you told him no? OH NO? You what you FROZE? you say YOU FROZE???  convenient no? when all you women make your fake claims, yes you, yes you say you, FROZE?.

                                           .... so he was tired of your teasin'.....

OH BOYS OH BOYS IF EVER ANY ONE ONE OF YOU DIG DOWN INTO YOUR OWN DEPRESSING BIAS YOU MIGHT SEE ALL THOSE MEN requiring alcohol and  paralysing fear TO KICKSTART  PREDATORY SEX.  A FULL GROWN MAN CAN HURT, CAN WOUND, CAN INCAPACITATE A WOMAN,  CAN KILL, DOES KILL, DOES INCAPACITATE.... a woman. 

it's fright or flight for women, women, adrenaline floods and paralysis, in this uneven battle. 

Now get the hell out of my road to Dublin for this march today...
it's just a march, a lot of shouting, chanting,  placards, useless,  maybe. Useless...
But what else is there here between you and the picture of some violated girl with torn vagina, shattered (shat on ) in a cracked mirror held up by Law, the Courts, the country...
....(all the) spit roasting men.






   

Saving Snowflakes. Old Feminists.

                                                                Old Feminists

I was siting in the cafe at the National Art gallery, on a visit with the Turners before January was out, thinking about old feminists.  Old women, Catherine Deneuve, Germaine Greer, Margaret Atwood, criticising, ridiculing even,  the #MeToo campaign. Snappy accusations tossed about, that the young women were, actually, party to a sexual exchange which was mutually beneficial. Young women were Snowflakes,  precious, needing to toughen up.  And they, Catherine, Germaine, Margaret, why they would have seen those guys off with a razor sharp quip,  with sheer force of character. And without, never that, whinging.

Hmm. Old women will be dead soon enough, and sooner anyway than all the spinning tumbling Snowflakes, still obliged to be out there in the world.

All the hopeful snowflakes wanting...aspiring...to be asked. To consent to any (sexual) mingling of the body or the heart. To consent? And not, as you go about your daily round,  toiling in the Work Place, getting there and back on the Luas/bus/train, buying groceries, having a drink, drunk and sober, concealed in coats or lightly clad in your best pretty dress.... not to be troubled by predatory raids, disrespect.....not to be hobbled by blind assaults, rape.

                                                        J.M.W Turner  (Radical Watercolours)

I was thinking I drowning in there for a while, with the pictures. Drawn into the canvas, helpless at the way things were blurring into other things, towards a hinted at mystery spilling from his painterly precision, immense, overwhelming the small human figures

And now in the cafe queuing for coffee, all the way along the narrow chrome counter, the clatter of crockery bouncing off the walls, the steam hissing from the machines, taking my place at this table, cup cupped.  I am thinking, tranced,  brooding hard about blurred lines and paintings. Turner's delineations, visions of vastness hiding in plain sight. And all the young women, their ecstatic vigour touching on magic, exposed, always exposed....always vulnerable. Needing boundaries sharp as knives to keep boys at bay, parasites out.

                                             Thelma and Louise  (not asking for it)

In the week after  Christmas, wallowing in afternoon ennui, filler movies, idleness, the Beautiful Girl and I found Thelma and Louise and we watched it together at my urging
"Yeah, You'll like this. Saw this in the cinema, yeah... we... all of us, went to see this back in the day...in the  cinema...we loved it,  when first it was out?"
I said.
So her channel flicking slowed, she went back and we watched.
'So yeah, it's Brad Pitt? Brad Pitt's hot in it! ...and the women are cool.
 And it's .... about rape? Yeah, two rapes.  And, but...  like Redemption in... Suicide? Isn't that how it ends?
"Um, well..... but, I mean, they refused to be caught, to go back...?"
A silence
"to the prison of roles or the, you know, actual prison awaiting, darling girl?  They were brave! It was resolved! In um transcendance and glorious um...yeah, I guess, suicide."
Another  silence.
"But, anyway dearest, are things different now?"
"Umm yeah? Surely?  Better than that anyway?"
"So... is your college having one of those classes on Consent then?"
"Oh no! I mean maybe, not sure. I mean I don't think...we hardly need..."

I remind her then of a recent magazine article we read about a very modern student who could not prevent and felt she could not report a gang rape by boys she was drinking with, boys she knew...
"Yeah, I know. I mean....I know, almost everyone I know,  has had, has been...forced? ....to do things. Like assaulted, or didn't know what to...how to stop...it. Or do anything after...complain...?"

We wonder then if those traumatised girls could not stop it,  could not report it, because, like poor Thelma, they figure that everyone will always say that... will always say  "Yes, but, wasn't she... asking for it? ...asking..."
And the sleepless nights afterwards, trying to figure out what it was, what happened, how it happened, when you're all torn up in your mind, your vagina, is the same still for all of us... our good women friends giving tea, kind words, solace.

and did i, consent, to a kiss yes a kiss to a fumble, a cuddle, yes maybe some groping the sex i said no i said no i said God was i asked though i froze God i froze i was deep under water his hand gripped my neck was a vise till the last one the pause i got over the waterline then and i ran i said no i  said no i said no

Oh Catherine, Germaine, Margaret Atwood, we were smashing through purdahs, glass ceilings, confinement, tossing corsets and bras in our outrage  but we did not had internet porn?
Nor suffered this wild-west unbound, this free-for-all heaven to predatory males.
Give over the wallowing in ballsinees (yours), giving comfort to oblivious men.
Our girls are in trouble
Get behind them.
Get beside them,
Support the #MeToo.


                                                    Storm at the Mouth of the Grand Canal.                                                 

And back you go flying up white marble stairs, like an arrow though hushed gallery hallways, to the Turners.
A last glimpse for this year of the best loved, the same one,
you come like a lover at last.
One last tipping over,
to vision,
the boundaries, the ego quite gone.













  

In Amsterdam the Women Wait / Anne Frank

                                               
                                         Things to do in Amsterdam... before you die.

We went to Amsterdam at Midterm, the girl and I,  wanting to get away but not too far away,
wanting to loose ourselves among strangers, though not too strange, the Dutch, and (handily) english speaking.

"You know my friends? the girls? ah, they were telling me, like, that I should buy you a sneaky Space Cake? for the, I mean,  craic?"
the dear girl smiles... looks at me quizzically.
"Huh?  Buy me a huh? Oh... right! and catch me on camera, eh?  kinda spaced? Eh? put it up on You Tube, eh?"
She grinned.
"Hmm, well... you can tell your friends, my darling, that if I'm having Space Cakes or weed in any other shape or form I'll get it for myself, in Amsterdam?  No You Tube clips, no sneaky snapchat shots, no dizzy laughs..... except, perhaps, by me...?"
Her beautiful eyebrows lift, disturbing the perfect lines she'd drawn in her bedroom, communing with the mirror at the crack of dawn, her half packed, unzipped suitcase gaping on the floor, her passport 'somewhere'  'probably'  'in the drawer'?
"you wouldn't though...actually...wouldn't...ohmygod... "
"Like maybe. Possibly. Depends. In Amsterdam...."

We did the things you do in Amsterdam.  Oh yeah. We walked the streets, we pilgrim tourists, charmed, by elegant gabled houses, individual, solid, other,
stopped, to eat at vegan, chinese, danish, eateries, better than Dublin, better than home, we swore, sauntered, over arching bridges lost,
and gloriously rudderless over water cleanly flowing in stone canals,
sitting dreamy at last with aching feet by water.

The mild grey weather folding us in. . .happy.

We saw no desperate drinkers there,  no wild eyed down and outs, no huddled shapes under sleeping bags in doorways, thrownaway, homeless, in Amsterdam, not one. The streets were easy, clean and thronged with people going somewhere watered, fed.

                                                   The Men look out, the Women in....

In the Rijksmuseum I let the girl off to find her pictures, see her way.
I found her by the Night Watch, standing with all the dwarfed observers, absorbed.
Drawn in so deep she didn't see me,
caught in Rembrandt's light and dark; locating each man in the frame, she told me after,
the place and shape and face,
of every man who fought to catch her eye.

Afterwards she found the great Dolls house,
stood, head to one side smiling, lost.

I  saw the other pictures too. The women.  Women, waiting, watching, writing letters. Thinking.  A woman warms her hands, absorbed.  She wears Pearl Earrings, solemn.
Women in the windows waiting. In the red light district women wait for johns 
to buy, to stare.

Out on the streets you have another brush with sudden death by bicycle,
adrift on the bicycle lane, unable to distinguish the walking path.
Saved by skill of cyclists,
dazzled by the silver streams of pretty boys with man buns,
glowing girls,
the sturdy middle aged, the children perched up high in baskets,
front loaded.


                                                                 Secret Annexe

Hours fly, days disappear, in Amsterdam.  We go to Anne Frank's house on that last day.
I was there, I, in a snailing line of silent people moving through the dim and empty annexe,  the yellowed light,
staring, at Ann Frank's pictures on the wall of 1940's movie stars, and snapshots of her people as they lived,
wall markings of the growing young who lived there between July 1943 and August 1944, (stretching like angel weed in the darkness)
Ann, Margot, Peter grow taller, nurtured, somehow, anyhow, in the claustrophobic space, waiting for the end of war.

Pictures there of the lived-in annexe rooms before the Nazis came and took the furniture,
the people..... they took Anne Frank, her passionate living voice that called all day long in the secret  rooms,
silenced,
tossed down the death camp's filthy maw.

Released into the bare and sterile space of the museum, we watched ancient crackling film of  lamb-like humanity, men, women and children wait for the train to Auschwitz and such places,
grainy pictures of clothes collapsed on bones,
poor murdered fragments of the Jewish people.

The scattered pages of a young girl's diary waiting in an empty room,
falling slow from stolen furniture, settling on bare trampled floors.
The legacy of a writer.  Undeniable.  Accounting.
                                                 
                                                         
                                                          A  Haunting

Afterwards we talked about the future, the girl and I,
walking through Museum Square, past the pretty houses, over the tidy humming water serene in the canals,
the Christmas lights twinkling in still fading glory of Autumn leaves, already... already...
Drinking coffee, talking, mind tugged, a little absent, a little still in Ann Frank's House.
(You bought the book to read again, last read in adolescence when you were the fiery writing girl)

And now, this eve in Amsterdam, you are all of them,
All. You are Margot, Anne and Peter, Otto, Edith, Hermann, Petri, Albert.
You sit in the house in Prinsengracht, on the Merwedeplein Square and wear the yellow star of David, waiting.
For the war to end and your life, your precious, precious life, to start.


In Amersterdam the women wait, they wait
                                  for johns complaining after on internet rating sites.
                                                            You weren't warm or loving for the money,
                                                                            there were cracks high up there on your ceiling.
                                                                                         (and the act, the sex itself, was only average)
                                                                                                                       

In Amersterdam, they stand,
in windows, rooms,  they warm their hands, they do not speak, they think, they read, they write, they wait.

They wait (for you)