If you would like to watch or listen, I have recorded a video of me reading this piece. It is the same content as the text, but I know how much video and audio help me to hear your voices so I would like to offer you the ability to listen, watch, read this piece in the way that best fits your day.
Five years ago, I claimed an orphaned tea-set
Said I would care for it, when my beloved Mama-Jo died
One of the china saucers
has repeatedly entered my thoughts
over these past weeks.
The one with six fractured fragments
Glued by my grandmother decades before.
Yellowed veins of togetherness.
It occurs to me
that this saucer that was once in pieces is the one
I am most drawn to.
The one that could have been discarded
But wasn’t.
And for that, it somehow feels all the more loved,
Tended to.
How its story seems all the more worthy.
That is what I want to speak to you of today.
Fragments.
Conversations
I have had in my head.
Dreamed of having
At my kitchen table
With you
With a toddler on one hip
As I tend to you and the mothers who have joined us
Pour tea into delicate china cups
As we make mosaics
of mothering.
I would turn to
Tell her how beautifully it strikes me
That she never capitalises the ‘i’
How in that simple act
I recognise that the ‘I’ of the mother becomes smaller, as life expands around us
Of how we tend to so many things one-handed.
Since the light has returned, I have started so many things.
Too many.
In Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s book ‘A Ghost in the Throat,’ she describes motherhood as living in ‘the eratic orbit of others’ needs.’
As mothers, our desires squeezed to the edges,
around and between the constancy
and consistently -changing everything-else-ness.
In my notebook, four weeks ago, sitting outside the school, the toddler asleep I wrote
‘I carry my hopes in my handbag. Two books to read. Pen. Notebook. List written on a piece of cut-up cereal box. Most of them, most days, are mostly unmet. Unmet because the hopes I had, long before, are now here. The hoped-for, longed-for, imagined babies are now real. Two years old, eight years old and twelve years old. Each one a so-called rainbow baby. But these babies are not of the air. These babies in their tangible, complex human-ness are of the earth. Skin-on-skin. Lips on downy newborn head. The held breath, released.’
Gar plants saplings on our farm.
Hundreds each year. We understand that not all will survive.
But they all become part of this earth’s story.
And part of the one who broke earth and blessed this land.
At the kitchen table, I would turn to
, moon mother, guide and gentle soul who somehow reflects lightDespite living through the darkest winter.
I would gift her the tiny wildflower from the bottom field,
so delicately purple, whose name I do not know
and thank her for the space she holds
And for bringing us together,
We Women
Whose voices I needed need to hear.
As we sit, one of us would notice the slant of light
Look up at just the right moment.
It would remind me of
’s words.Last week, she quoted Claire Keegan, who quoted Emily Dickinson.
Inherited, passed down. It feels important,
the way these words have come to me.
‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’
I would tell Layla that her words arouse so much within me.
Honesty does that.
Now, as I flick through my journal, I find fragments of another sort from early in the Spring. Honest. Hard. Where the light had not reached.
‘The tender, gentle mother I wish to be would not approve of the one I am today.
My head thumps and tears are stuck and stinging behind my eyes.’
The silent vow made at each birth to only ever mother with love, overshadowed by the overwhelm of the mothering itself.
Later the same day, in a scrawl that looks like it was done by drunk, blindfolded spiders
‘I am failing. Am I the only one? Or is this a privately, shamefully, silently-held, collective experience of mothers?’
That feeling has passed. But I know it. The craw in the throat, scratchy ache of rage. Of unmet needs. Of being unheard. unseen.
My grandmother always said a trouble shared is a trouble halved.
She also said not to air your dirty laundry.
So often, I hide the deepest troubles. The ones not for public consumption.
Soon after I made that entry, I read a piece by
In it, she said hope is a circle of women.
When I read it, I thought of all the words
we could replace hope with.
Honesty. Understanding. Acceptance. Forgiveness. Care.
Hope.
When I read it, something softened inside me.
A hard edge
Of comparison
And the fear of coming up short that has grown with me from girlhood and wedged itself between me and ‘other’ women. That one sentence of Annette’s, removed not only the edge. It removed the ‘other’
And brought me with her into the circle.
Of women
Of mothers
That one fragment.
Held all that.
Some of the most important conversations,
are unfolding
in
f r a g m e n t s
with ourselves
with each other (our ch’other, as my eight year old son used to say)
Seed. Root. Bud. Blossom. Shed. Seed.
What one fragment could you share with us today?
Of Honesty. Understanding. Acceptance. Forgiveness. Care.
Hope.
What one moment of mothering? A thought found floating in the slant of light or one buried in the shallow shade.
What one sentence have you read or heard that has gone on to live within your being since you silently uttered it?
I would so love to hear. To share.
Take a seat in my kitchen.
There is tea in the pot for you too.
Oh my heart, all the hearts, this is so beautiful, Aoibhín ✨ What a profound honour to have my words included among those of mother-writers I admire so, so much, thank you 🙏🏻. If I were to share one word, one line, and add one fragment to the circle, it would be something I read in Clare Mulvany's Bealtaine post: "The tree must risk its bud to blossom. The birds must risk their branch to fly." Thank you 💖
This swallowed me - thank you for your invitation. I recently learned of a song from song keeper, Peia Luzzi. It’s a song from the Hebrides Islands sung in seal language. She pairs it with her telling of the Selkie. I can stop singing it. I’m reminded of the animal body, returning to source and all the ways our heart opens and breaks at once. It’s something to be spoken so I don’t have written words for it but felt drawn to share.