Mothers Mind

Mothers Mind

I wake early to have a shower and see the clothes hanging over the back of the door.

Apparently, I had placed them there the night before in some out of body space, where I have to remind myself to be present, to be here.

They are all wrong, of course,

 and so contrived and outrageous that I look like a caricature of a middle aged spinster,

 the full skirt too long, the layers too much, the scarves trailing.

“Will you look at the get up of the one?” I imagine them saying in the churchyard as they park their cars. The more I try to blend, to fade into the background, the more like a ragged bird of paradise I become.

I wear them only because they are dry and ready and I do not want to have to tackle the hotpress.

Again.  

I share the car space with 3 men, the child in the back, the flowers on my lap. The Father is driving, The  Brother beside him, and Hewhomustnotbenamed stares out the window at the dappled fields in the biting cold.

We have all lost a Mother once.

In the churchyard I stumble across to the soft brown grave carrying the heavy arrangement that is in an old wrought iron jug, the white one with the navy trim, which for some ungodly reason has been spray painted metallic grey and the purple tulips stand out frieze like, as if I am advancing on Burnham Wood behind their rigid heads.

“There’s water in that” says Hewhomustnotbenamed when he hears it sloshing around in the back of the car.

Well, obviously.

I put it in there.

Along with the brown spotted rain beaten daffodils I have plucked from the Friary door, from the church where my Mother knelt in the quiet basilica of St Anthony and prayed for lost things.

A lost daughter.

As the wind sharpens  the people hold their coats closed, and I press my hand to my hat to keep it on the mess of  tangled wet curls and proffer the small book of yellow  post- its and the blue gel pen to the mourners and ask them to write a message to Siobhán, on Mother’s Day.   

They look at me askance.

And then I tell them they can seal them with the sticky side and the words will only be between them, and I imagine the small yellow flags fluttering in the breeze, like prayer flags on mountains and high rocky places, attached with the tiny pink pegs in the glass bottle that someone gave me once.

The bell tolls from the doorway, the deep red black studded archway that I am so familiar with from their wedding photograph, and the bell that married her, then called her home, now beckons us from the graveside, with the flickering lemon leaves.

I sit beside my Father and Brother, and notice the height difference as we are  kneeling,  going through the motions of a mass  I don’t have to speak at. And I can let my mind and gaze wander to the heights of the pillared ceiling and see the butterfly in the captured light from the cantilevered stained glass window, flitting in the sparkling sun.

Butterfly. Flutter by.

We are not in the front row this time.

In front of us is a family of ringleted children,  relics of aul dacency  belted coats, fancy tights and patent shoes, and at the blessing for Mothers, the smallest one leans into hers and whispers into her ear, her small dimpled hand around her neck, and the Mother whispers back into the ringlets and they smile.

One minute I am visiting my Mother, and the next I am eating roast beef at her funeral.

“We offer this Mass as the Month’s Mind for the repose of the soul of Siobhán” says the Priest through his Garth Brooks mike.

And he tells us the responsorial psalm,

The congregation taking up the refrain,  

hesitant and unsure until it is repeated by the crowd and they fall in alongside.

“Oh, let my tongue cleave to my mouth if I remember you not”

Oh, let my tongue cleave to my mouth if I remember you not.

And I think of the small silent woman slumped in the Stephen Hawking chair, the one who suffered a decade of the ravages of dementia, and whose voice I can only recall from dreams, the woman who was bound by cords of love like steel ropes to her sentinel, and who stayed long enough to teach us how to let her go.

And I think of the small curly headed child I once was, who knelt beside her in the Basilica and read the prayer to the Saint with the curls, asking too for the gift of lost faith to be restored, and remember that it never left.

My Father - looking  at me with red rimmed eyes from a pale face hands me his paper with the words facing up, unsealed.

And God help me, I read it.

And the bright yellow papers flutter goodbye to us as we drive away.

Flutter by, Butterfly.

MDM March 2015