IN THE NAME OF A WOMAN

We called her "Mammy".

When I first came to live in England I noticed how unusual that was. Here it’s "Mum". There is something chirpy and matey about "Mum", even a touch of humour. "Mammy" sounds too much like breast-feeding.

Waving a placard that says "Hello Mum" at the television cameras is fun, but "Hello Mammy!" you wouldn’t dare. But that’s what we called her, my mother. Mammy she was to all eight of us. All the other mothers around were "Mammies" too. It’s the way we were back then. I don’t know what the present generation says, I can’t recall. I do recall however coming face to face with the reality behind, "Mammy". That comes easily into focus even now.

I was thirty six years of age and my mother was not well. I was sitting there just "being with her" as they say, in her bedroom, the same bedroom it had always been. Here she had retreated to "say her prayers" when the sound and fury of family life got on her nerves a bit. My sister, a busy woman in those days with children of her own, handed me a bowl of milk pudding, semolina I think. "Help Mammy with that, will you?" she said and left. I did, immediately, without thinking. But I had only just begun to help her with the first spoonful when the power of what was happening struck home. I was spoon-feeding my mother in the same room, on the exact same big brass bed where thirty-six years previously she had given birth to me. I suddenly felt quite overcome. Foolish? Maybe, but it was and remains the most difficult thing I have ever done for another human being.

She dribbled, or was it my hand; what’s the difference? I took her face flannel and wiped her chin, then offered another spoonful. No big deal really! But all the while I was thinking of a Thursday afternoon in August thirty six years before, my father working away from home and the kindly old Nurse Gogarty helping my mother, "Mammy," through the pain and the sweat and the blood to bring me into the world. And it had all happened right here on this same bed, this same big brass bed. And now she needed me, the labour of that long-gone August day. I should have loved it for I’m made that way. Ask any of my family and they’ll tell you how I’m a great one for seeing meanings in things, latent significances in dates and places. I should have loved it, but I didn’t, I did not enjoy one moment of it. And the reason I did not enjoy it is quite simple; she did.

There was I, her son, the priest, complete with breviary, black suit and a mind full of theology. There was I the "Man of God" at the place of my conception and birth faced by the work of my Creator as it was before ever my learning coloured things in and taught me how to name them. This was no page in a book, no nice prayerful thought, this was life plain and simple and if God is at the heart of life then maybe Life is God’s maiden name. Could she sense that I felt out of my depth, out of my depth in the very circumstances where I should have felt most at home? I don’t know. Nor should I know for this was her moment as well as mine, her side of the experience. She laughed, not a laugh you could hear, but still one that lit up in her eyes and for a moment at least brought back that same old flicker about her mouth.

As that smile appeared, an old awareness gripped me again. Here was a real human being, separate from me. Not just "Mammy," but someone with her own story and her own "take" on life. Here was a local girl who had done her growing up in the same place I had done mine, except earlier. Here was a young woman who had caught my father’s eye and in their furious courtship had set the tongues of the neighbourhood wagging. Here was the widow who had bravely faced very difficult years. Here was Angela.

She has her own grave now. Long ago I thought of putting her maiden name on the stone, but convention won. But I had thought about it for it seemed a truer witness to her selfhood. After all, growing up, getting married, having the eight of us, that and lots more, is her story, distinct, and individual. "What I do is me, for this I came" – so the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. True enough; and what our "doing" means to others, the relationship it puts in place, even how, in the end, they choose to name us, that is their story.