I invited the noted author and actress Angela Keogh to write a letter to her mother.
Kilkenny and then Carlow
Dear Mam,
From this remove, you in your seventies and me in my forties, it’s hard to see the holes we tore in this garment called relationship. We’ve had the privilege, denied to so many, of living long enough to darn the worst of the damage and create some new attire that no longer has the kind of tautness that can snap at any moment. We are made of softer things now.
Thank you for your care. You were always a practical woman, someone who came to motherhood with years of farming and nursing behind you. Thank you for clothing me (sorry about the rows, especially about the purple boots, the ones you got at the market; on reflection, they were really lovely, and you were right to give Marian the navy ones, after all they were in her size and would have been too big for me). Thanks for the steady routine when you worked split shifts at the hospital, cycling home to cook a dinner and light the fire and then racing back again to work – a place where, unlike home, you cared for those who couldn’t do it for themselves.
Thanks for not dividing work according to gender, although little brother Micheál probably regrets this. He’d have been able to put his feet up. There’s an apology due, too, for the way I treated my big sister, Teresa, who was often in loco parentis. I didn’t get the gravity of her job, she being just three years older than me, and I made it hard for her and probably you because of that. (I won’t go into the pencil-stabbing or stapling incidents, which by the way were unintentional.) I really should have done more to help.
Thanks for supporting me at rowing regattas. Back then young people were generally left to get on with the business of their own lives; parents were not expected to stand on the bank and I’m grateful for Dad’s and your support, it was a tradition you’ve kept up and continued into the lives of your grandchildren. Your presence, along with my coaches and crew, kept my smoking to a minimum.
Thanks for your unfailing support and constant interest in my life and in the lives of my daughters. It really is a blessing to know that I can talk over problems – especially parenting ones. I’m thinking of the time that Katie was caught sneaking out and was grounded. She was almost stopped from going to the USA with her dad. I think that was the moment I realised that you were far wiser than I had given you credit for. The trip to her aunt was exactly what was needed.
When I went to London to do my nurse training, you were right to have been worried and I’m sorry for the months that I let go by without making contact. I’m sorry, too, that when I did visit you, I spent as much of that time as I could in the pub. It wasn’t because I didn’t love you, it was because I couldn’t break away from alcohol. I was a 1990s raver, a hardcore clubber and it was by the grace of God that life gave me two children that brought my partying days to a halt.
I’m sorry for the pain I caused you when, unmarried, I became pregnant twice in the same year. You were still paralysed with the fear that surrounded pregnancy outside marriage. I know now that the fear was in the very air you breathed growing up in Ireland and it was unavoidable in a strong Catholic household. Thanks for the help you gave me with Katie and Mairenn, I couldn’t have managed without you.
The woman who was my mother through the 1980s and 1990s has changed and so have I. I’m no longer the wayward daughter I was back then and I’m delighted and so very grateful that we are still growing together.
In love and admiration,
Angela