A Conversation with My Mother.
I first started drawing the lighthouse when I was seven. Perched high on craggy cliffs, a restless sea and rolling horizon beyond. Always the same image, stuck on repeat. In bored moments, doodles on scraps of paper, in watercolour, pencil, ink; a memory of a place I’d never been, an itch I couldn’t scratch. When I finally solved the riddle, I never felt the need to draw my imaginary light house again. It exists and some time soon, I’ll be going there for real.
I’ve always known I was adopted, and I was one of the lucky ones, folded into a loving Anglo-Irish family. But it still felt like pieces of me were missing. Rejection still snarled its way in there, making me feel lesser somehow. I mean, who wants to be given away by their own mother? No one. The end. So there was always this open wound and questions, lots of them. All I knew about my birth mother was her name, Fionnuala Butler, and that she was petite, Irish, and had auburn hair and brown eyes. They got the brown eyes bit wrong though, they were deepest orange like tiger fur.
Fionnula wrote to me when I was eighteen wanting to make contact. She sent the letter via the adoption agency and it took a while to get to me. Meanwhile, I knew she’d written. I was travelling around South East Asia at the time, hitting Koh Phangan for my birthday. There might have been magic mushroom pizza involved. But I vividly remember lying in a hammock, staring at my eighteen years on this plaent moon, knowing that she was out there desperate to make contact. So it was a surprise when I got home and amongst the cards and well wishes awaiting me, there was nothing there from her.
It did get to me in the end, the letter I mean. Contact was made, and we began writing to each other. Over time Fionnuala began filling in the missing bits of me. I learned that she had been a lighthouse keeper’s daughter, and her favourite had been along Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way on a place called Clare Island. Then she sent me a photograph of it. Perched high on craggy cliffs, a restless sea and rolling horizon beyond. Just like the one I had been drawing since I was seven. We vowed that we would go there together one day. What a full circle that would have been.
Some psychologists, most famously Carl Jung, have theorised that we're born with the experiences and memories of our ancestors imprinted on our DNA. This topic is controversial, but if you go down a Google worm-hole like I did, you will find a lot of material on the subject. It wasn’t just the light house I shared with Fionnuala though. There was also the pull of the sea and the need to be near it. A deep love of nature and wild things, caring for the ones with broken hearts, wings and paws. Cats, art and music.
My relationship with Fionnuala was complicated. Love laced with pain and bitter regret. For our first visit, she flew me out to Dublin and put me up in a hotel. I’d been to Ireland before, my mum’s family is from Limerick, but it was always a place not a home. This time a deep connection fired up, a proper sense of belonging and identity. She told me our family once had a seat at Kilkenny castle and were distantly related to Anne-Boleyn. I lapped that up. That her dad, Ambrose, was one of a long line of light house keepers and light ship captains and the sea is in my blood. My ancestors lived alongside those of pirate queen, Granuaile. And I also learned Fionn had been madly in love with my birth father, whose family came from Sligo, and who has the same grey-green eyes as me. I was as Irish as the blarney stone, but instead had been born in England with a passport to match. And so my cultural crisis began.
We wasted a few years. Like I said, it was complicated and we fell out for a while. There were clashes and misunderstandings. But we found our way back to each other when my son was born. While the mother thing was complicated with me, she was always Nanny Fionn to Tom. This was a brief but happy good time montage before things plunged into the black.
Covid happened.
With an ocean between us I missed it. Fionn’s gradual decline. I didn’t know she was so ill. Or that she wasn’t eating and wasting away. I didn’t know about the cancer or heart problems. Or the full extent of the drinking or how lonely she was. One afternoon she rang, Tom and I had just come home from the school run and I almost didn’t pick up because we were dashing out again. I was hurried, thinking about other things, not fully present in the moment. But we hadn’t spoken in a while and she’d been on my mind. It sounded like she was struggling to breathe, but she said she was fine. She told me that Tom and I were the best things she had ever done, and she loved us, so much. I told her we loved her too. And to go to the doctor. Then I dashed off, onto the next thing. Not knowing we would never speak again.
The next day I got the call. Fionnuala was dead. She had been very ill, had a heart attack and the rest blurred. She had called me as she was dying. I wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral because of Covid restrictions. Less than twenty-four hours ago I had been speaking to her and now she was gone. I hate the first day of sadness when someone dies. The rawness of it. How you can actually feel your heart break and the weight of sorrow bears down like rock. It’s exhausting. And you know the road ahead is long and lonely. But everyone walks it when they love.
That night I went and laid on the damp grass in my garden, the need to have the earth bearing me up, so overwhelmed with grief and shock. At some point I felt something settle beside me. A fox. My fox. I saved her a few years back, got her medicine for mange. Met her cubs over the years too. She’s pretty wild but always comes to me when she’s needy. Recently she had been set on fire somehow and had an open wound on her flank. I wasn’t sure if the antibiotics The Fox Project had sent me had worked this time, or even if she was still alive at all. But there she was, moonlight revealing her wound was healing. Lying quietly beside me. I’m not sure how long we stayed there, but it felt like it was the three of us, together beneath the stars and shush of the wind.
Fionnuala told me her story. How unmarried Irish mothers were given a rough deal in the seventies if they got pregnant. The social stigma and wrath of the Catholic Church. There were no benefits back them. No alternative. For these reasons she came to England and stayed at a Catholic home for unmarried mothers-to-be, from where I would be adopted.
She told me some horror stories. About how babies would be crying for love and sustenance, or to have sodden nappies changed. But the nuns wouldn’t allow it. How she had to hand me over to new parents, then return to the convent on the bus, milk still flowing from bound up breasts. How she didn’t want to give me up. What was done to all of those poor women was cruel and senseless. There are stories far darker than ours.
After she died, I found the place where I had been born, the Loreto Convent Mother and Baby Home in Epping. Fionnuala had been forced to work in the laundry room and milk kitchen to pay her way and repent for the sin of getting herself pregnant in the first place. She was punished for being brave enough to have me and I’m not sure if I ever thanked her enough for that. I shied away from my miserable Dickensian beginning and felt sorry for myself, lacking the right depth of empathy, and when I did and allowed it all in, it was too late. I never got to say what I wanted, and there’s still a few things I need to ask her myself. But most of all, I just miss her.
I love the Irish language with its lyrical, often optimistic view of the world. There are many words for sadness. The word ‘brónach’ for example, refers to sadness born from grief but it also references a sadness or emptiness that could be likened to desolation. In Irish, you don’t say ‘I am sad’ you would say ‘Tá brón orm’ or, more literally, 'I have sadness upon me.' That's because our sadness can be lifted from us. It doesn’t have to be a part of us. Realising that we are not defined by our emotions and that all manner of things will come and go is an empowering gift. In the Irish soul there is melancholy, an acceptance of death and an ability to live alongside sorrow. It’s not an unwelcome imposter but an inevitable result of being alive. So I must remember, as should we all, that we are only a resting place for sadness. We mustn’t let it define us.
Nowadays Clare Island Lighthouse is a Bed and Breakfast. There is a single room to book, which overlooks the same ocean my mother loved. She might once have sat in that same room, the air busy with bird song and crashing waves. She would have been lost in her imagination, barefoot with tangled hair, wild and free. Sea salt on her lips. Tiger eyes alive. A whole life ahead of her. So maybe if I go there, and really listen, she’ll be with me again, and we can have that last chat.
End.
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