My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress

by Christina McKenna

  I understand now much of what moved my mother then. When she shouted at us children and cried and raged so frequently, she was transmuting all that frustration and sadness into the anguished phrases she knew would hurt us too. Christ was never off duty when mother was around: whether in oath or prayer she blasted out the Holy name with all the force she could muster, flooring us with those frequent rants about the sorry state of her life.

  The tragedy is that she had no other means of expressing her despair; offloading it onto us made her feel somewhat relieved and lighter. We helped her carry her cross; we, the unfortunate innocents caught in the nuptial crossfire.

  As a child I hated to see my mother cry. Sometimes she’d take a walk to a distant field, just to get away from us, to steal a glimmer of peace in the solitude of a meadow. I would stumble after her, unnoticed, making my small, determined way over the ruts of the baked earth, falling down to dirty my knees and skirting puddles just to see where she was going. I’d always find her in the same place, sitting on a fallen tree, silently weeping, and I would weep too. She would get up then, dry my tears, tenderly take my hand and lead me home.

  We suffered along with her solely because my father refused to unlock the love that was in him, share it and so set us free. She knew she was fighting a losing battle. Marrying had not only cancelled out her name, it left her dreams of love and peace unfulfilled.

  The Catholic Church, mother’s great succour, could not entertain the thought of an unhappy marriage. If her religion taught her anything then it taught her the language of repression.

  The Church was clear on the woman’s role. Women were to serve, obey and produce babies; love hardly got a look in. ‘Offer it up’ and ‘This is the cross you have to bear’ were phrases I heard often when I was growing up. So many women of my mother’s generation took those platitudes as the dogma of their deliverance, and struggled to make sense of it all through a constant round of novenas, masses and rosaries.

  Some might regard the Catholic Church as an easy target, yet surely it deserves our criticism. This Christian organisation has flourished for centuries on the anguished silence of women like my mother, and the onerous chauvinism that drives it remains in place. This unwillingness to acknowledge the debt that is owed is realised in its insistence on a male-only priesthood.

  How different things might have been. Jesus and Paul viewed men and women as equal partners, to enjoy equality and mutual respect. However things had changed by the time the later scriptures came to be written. Misogyny and the fear of sex are evident, particularly in the post-Pauline ‘Letter to the Ephesians’:

  Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. …

  Taken together these attitudes and restrictions contributed to the unhappy circumstances in which my mother found herself. Her pain and grief were those of the caged bird, yet she felt them far more keenly than a feathered creature could.

  This was her cruel reality. She died with the gathering awareness that she’d served her time; all the years of pain had been ‘offered up’ over and over again. Paradise surely awaited her. She embraced death; she did not fear it. Her unhappiness had brought her to this pass.

  ROLL-CALL OF DEATH

  Father survived her by 19 years. With the exception of James, each of the McKenna brothers made his world-weary exit before him. James and father died within hours of each other, battling it out with the Grim Reaper one sunless afternoon in August 1999, defiantly clinging on to the end. I would like to be able to say that after mother’s death my father had softened in the light of the cruel reality that the loss of a loved one brings. That simply was not the case. He carried on as if nothing had happened, the absent father who made his presence felt through indifference and contempt. He expected his daughters to become the substitute servants and for a time we rallied round as best we could. But we had jobs and other responsibilities. Times had changed and father hadn’t noticed.

  Towards the end of his life I looked in vain for a sign that would acknowledge our pain, something that would serve to lift the inestimable weight of suffering he’d caused in all our lives. But sadly, in all his remaining days, his ‘mind lay open like a drawer of knives’.

  The little love he’d allowed himself to experience went towards the carpentry he had by turns admired and attacked in public, and tried to emulate in private. As a child I would hear the bitter music of hammer and saw in the toolshed which was his domain. In there he was doing what he did best: driving home the nails, making that wood outdo itself with the chairs and shelves he would carry into the house.

  He had built the house we’d been raised in brick by brick and had left the imprint of his hands on window frames and doors. The scrubbed table in the kitchen – rock-steady and functional – spoke of the life he’d always wanted. The life of the woodworker, before his wife and children had got in the way.

  I can still hear the disenchantment in his voice, like the rasp of an unoiled hinge.

  I can still see him in the fields, bent and wordless over a shovel, slicing into tubers, sinking all that anger and regret deep into the soil. The injustice that he felt was never of his making; it was we, his family, who’d snatched his dream away.

  When I wept at my father’s graveside I shed tears that were not of sorrow for the father I would miss, but rather tears of sadness for the father he could have been.

  It was otherwise with Uncle Robert, the schoolmaster, keeper of the family fortune. Robert, in whose lifetime pleasure sank and hardship rose, who was always careful never to get carried away on the crest of things. He made a sudden exit one morning after his daily jaunt to Draperstown. Edward found him in the musty parlour, slumped at his desk, with the Irish News spread out before him, opened, significantly, at the obituaries column.

  The millionaire died in his grey raincoat in a house without electricity or running water. His final view was through a grimy window overlooking the yard where sat his one extravagance: the Ford Anglia. In the bank sat the fortune he’d amassed and guarded throughout his adult life, swelling with the interest Robert would never enjoy.

  And James? James was paralysed by a stroke. All that movement of arm-flapping and indecision was arrested on a chilly day, the thirteenth day of November, on the thirteenth anniversary of my mother’s death. James, who had grasped the meaning of land and money but never the meaning of life, endured a stalled existence in a disconnected world for the final eight years of his life. Like father, he remained steadfastly unrepentant to the end.

  Edward, the occasional drinker, the underdog, had the happiest departure of all. He smiled and called for his harmonica to serenade himself into eternity.

  It could be said that each of the brothers had died at 25 and was buried between the ages of 70 and 83. They spent their lives preparing for life instead of living it, and each left the planet never having known the meaning of love and happiness.

  My uncles Dan and John by contrast died in the midst of ‘living’, John Henry after completing another hectic day at the Sacramento Bee, Dan while engaged in the humble task of bringing in fuel for the fire.

  They all went in time, those people of Ballinascreen who had populated and shaped my childhood, the gentle and the vain. Down the funnel of time I can see ‘Aunt’ Margaret sitting in a tweed chair by a hospital bed. Her stomach swollen with cancer. Margaret – nearing the end of a life sprung from loneliness and longing, who’d never heard the music that had beckoned her to dance – wearing that same distracted look, still questing for answers, still wondering what it was all about. The urge to hug her was strong, to let her know that she’d always belonged, but I knew that such an alien gesture would confirm for her what she didn’t want to know. That she indeed was dying. So for her sake I tearfully turned away, taking with me t
he Judas kiss and the last embrace that would have both delivered and betrayed me.

  My mother’s true and dear friend Helen died five years after mother’s passing. She was 52, too young and too good to have gone so early. She took with her a reservoir of my mother’s confidences, audaciously purified throughout all their years of friendship. With her going she broke the final link that held me to my mother but in her wake left such beautiful recollections that forever stir and caress my memory, like remnants of silk in a breeze.

  Both my primary schoolteachers, the unassuming Miss McKeague and the unpredictable Master Bradley, took very different routes into that everlasting light. Miss died happily and peacefully as she slept, and the Master by his own hand.

  In retrospect the Master’s manner of exit should not have surprised us. One September morning, shortly after I’d left Lisnamuck school, he decided he’d had enough and drove many miles up the Antrim coast to the Giant’s Causeway. He did not, however, stop at this much frequented beauty spot but continued for seven more miles along the coast until he arrived at Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. Every year the local salmon fishermen sling this precarious bridge across the 60-foot wide and 80-foot deep chasm that separates the mainland from the islet of Carrick-a-Rede. But Master Bradley had not come to admire the scenery on that fateful morning. He stepped out onto the bridge, ventured halfway across, and flung himself off into the surging breakers.

  I attended his funeral and stood with other past-pupils at the graveside. There were no tears. As his coffin was lowered I was aware that some kind of blemished justice had come to my classmates and me, and to every trembling child who’d sat before him down all the years. A class full of children had waited for his arrival on the morning of his suicide and I could not help thinking of them. They’d waited and prayed with Miss on that sunny September morning – just as I had done so many times. Were they, I wondered, struck by a bolt of pure joy on learning that they’d never see him again? An era of suffering had ended, because Master Bradley had decided to kill the suffering within himself.

  FROM FEAR TO LOVE

  Though I did not know it at the time, those who made me suffer were in far greater pain than I was. As I grew up I began to realise that there was a valuable lesson to be learned: I saw how negativity garnered nothing but unhappiness in a person’s life, and this made me want to look for more positive alternatives. I was beginning to see that by understanding the meaning behind the chaos I could learn from it, rather than repeat the same negative patterns. I began to see that it is not the events of our lives that shape us but our understanding of what those events signify.

  My father, like his brothers, was totally opposed to change. Had our mother not been there to cajole him then life would have been unbearable. There’d have been no birthday cards or Christmas presents, and no annual day trip to Portstewart. These snatches of happiness rescued us; it was her love that gave us hope.

  Father lived his entire life looking to the past – never mind that this past was a far from happy one. The old ways were the only ways he allowed to guide him, and therefore were the ‘best’ in his opinion. So opposed to change was he that he’d ‘taken on the job of stopping the world’. This fixed reality, quite naturally, never brought him happiness. It brings happiness to nobody.

  Beliefs can be either empowering or destructive. We choose the tenets which matter to us and live according to them. My father and his family adhered to a set of limiting beliefs about the world; it was as though they were swallowing a small amount of poison every day, until finally they’d ingested so many toxins that the build-up was fatal. With each unquestioned negative their spirits died a little more.

  Courage unused, diminishes,

  Commitment, unexercised waves.

  Love unshared dissipates.

  With my father there was little growth or evolution; since we use our minds to evolve it follows that a closed mind cannot do so.

  It was the simple, basic, rural pastimes that shaped his life: playing those IRA songs on that green record-player, listening to GAA matches on the wireless and scanning the Sunday Press before falling asleep on a Sunday afternoon. He farmed the land according to the monotonous dictates of the calendar and expressed himself within confines of his own making. Such unchanging activities and circumstances could hardly produce creative thought. To change is to grow; the more varied our experiences, the more knowledge we accumulate about ourselves and the world.

  Even from an early age I suspected there was something very skewed about the way he looked at life. His conversations usually started out with bland comments on the weather or the farm and ended with the defamation of someone’s character. No one was ever good enough – for the simple reason that he did not feel he himself was good enough. When we’re unhappy with ourselves, when we are fearful, we perceive others as flawed. It is easier to judge them than to look at ourselves objectively, and perhaps make the necessary adjustments. It was impossible to escape the fallout from this warped thinking. I grew up believing that to be critical and judgemental of others was the norm. I absorbed all this negativity and became a fearful child and for many years an unhappy adult.

  It is a terrible indictment of the human animal that when a person of low self-esteem is given power over another his first thoughts turn to how he can set about torturing that other. History proves this time and again. My father had no power in his life until he married and had children. Being himself the product of a loveless marriage, he felt that the only way to deal with the awfulness of those early years, and ‘right’ the wrongs done to him, was to repeat the same pattern with us. He withheld love from us in order that we might experience the pain of his childhood. This prolonged act of vengeance never brought him happiness, however.

  We children were his opportunity to experience the love he’d been denied. Ignoring this fact simply created more resistance in his life. He had nine offspring and several decades to figure out what it was he was doing wrong. It saddens me that he died never having experienced all the love that was there for the giving and receiving. Love is our greatest miracle. To love unselfishly surely is our highest calling; it’s our only antidote to fear, and with this recognition comes understanding, tolerance, open-mindedness and peace.

  I wish that he and his brothers could have come to this realisation, this appreciation of the essence of life. Sadly they did not. Life was something that happened to others while they sat contemplating the land and money that would one day be theirs. When the oldest of them, Robert, died and the golden prize was in sight, all the happiness they’d postponed since youth did not suddenly erupt like struck oil into their lives. By the time it arrived they were too old and embittered; the long wait had made them so. Whatever illusions they might have had as young men lay collapsed and broken like the decaying barns in the yard, the nettles and briars of those neglected dreams growing up to choke out the light.

  People do not grow old, someone once remarked; when they cease to grow they become old.

  Along with those limited belief systems I also received religion of a sort. In my youth I witnessed a dedication to the Church which, seen at close quarters, turned out to be hypocrisy. It served to distance me from churchgoers in general as I gained control of my own life. Christian teaching did not seem to figure much in the day-to-day lives of those around me; I suspected that prayer was otherwise than the empty words I encountered during the celebration of the sacraments. There were definite echoes of Shakespeare’s King Claudius:

  My words go up, my thoughts remain below.

  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

  I saw also that the nature of God was open to all sorts of misinterpretation. That supernatural event following my great-aunt’s death had proved to me not only the existence of a supreme being but also the reality of a parallel and invisible universe where the dead lived on in spirit.

  I watched as mass and confession were attended on a regular basis, sins were forgiven and communion received;
I saw a ‘huge remembering’ of the importance of God for a half-hour on a Sunday or when someone died – ‘God, it’s too bad wee Barney’s gone … suppose it comes to us all’ – then it would be back to the anger and resentment, the scheming and prejudging.

  On most evenings there’d be my mother’s order: ‘All down on your knees for the rosary this minute.’ And on each occasion my mind was duly numbed by the rambling decades of petitioning prayers. I prayed without conviction because the idea of God sold to me as a child was an abstract one I could neither relate to nor understand. I gained little solace from weekly attendance at mass and the fortnightly visits to the confessional. Those sacraments only served to induce great fear and give me an exaggerated sense of my own inferiority. If believing in a god was supposed to make me a better person then why did I not feel better, why was I not experiencing all the ‘love and peace’ that were on offer?

  I could see that my mother, for all her devotion, was not experiencing any of this love or peace either, so I could not learn it from her. The guardians of our morality – the priests and bishops – inhabited an elevated region that was so far above us laity that we felt we could never hope to breathe their rarified, incense-rich air. Miss McKeague, with all her well-intentioned pious wisdom, could not explain to me that I was ‘God’s success story’. Are not all of us worthy of this description, regardless of colour, creed or class? No one told me that this was so.

  Every year the ‘stations’ were performed in our home; mass was said by the local priest and the neighbours were invited to participate. The ceremony was rotated to ensure that the home of each family in the parish was thus honoured. In the wake of Great-aunt Rose’s haunting, our back bedroom became the place of celebration.

  The stations were conducted in early morning. I remember the tremendous effort my mother put into the preparations, akin to those preparations for the Yankees but with infinitely less colour and flounce attached. The best linen was taken out and she’d worry for weeks in advance about the priest’s breakfast. A humble egg was treated like the most exotic delicacy. Mother would try to second-guess the priest’s preferences: would he want it boiled, fried, scrambled or poached? All eating utensils, polished to perfection, lay in readiness in the kitchen. And oh, how that table sparkled! The china gleamed, the silver shone, the butter ‘curled’ and marmalade glittered in a crystal dish: a table fit for a king. And invariably the priest would spoil it all by announcing that he’d like, ‘a slice or two of toast and nothing else, thanks’.