Falling in love with priests

‘Down down down,’ the headlines read.
‘The newspapers shit me,’ I say to my husband after he has peeled off the gladwrap that protects said newspaper from the rain.
‘It’s starting to shit everyone, I think,’ he says and walks back to the bedroom to read the details.

I cannot be bothered with the details. All this doom and gloom and soon we will be ruined. Endless talk of disaster in the economy. The newspapers perpetuate it and feed on it and feed it back to us as if to guarantee a spirit of hopelessness and despair that might or might not sell newspapers.

It is easy to get caught up in the generalised anxiety but for a long time I have told myself it is better to worry – if indeed I must worry – about things that I can improve or at least have some impact on. I can do nothing about the Dow Jones Index.

I am now more than half way through the Ballykissangel series and my heart has gone out of it.

Assumpta Fitzgerald is dead and her would be lover the priest, Peter Clifford, has disappeared in his grief.

The scriptwriters decided to electrocute Assumpta just at the point where she and Peter Clifford are ready to acknowledge their shared love for one another, just at the point where a romance might be possible, between Assumpta, a married woman, and Peter, a Catholic priest.

What of it? All these transgressions then tragedy strikes.

I had to keep telling myself after the end of the third series that this is just a story. There is no actual Assumpta Fitzgerald. Even so I kept wanting to bring her back to life.

I Googled the actor who plays the part and reading about the real life Dervla Kirwan helped ameliorate some of the pain.

I had a similar experience reading AS Byatt’s Still Life. Byatt also kills off one of her central characters, a young woman who has not long earlier give birth to her first daughter. Byatt also destroys her character’s life through electrocution. I could not bear it any more than I could bear the pain of Assumpta’s accidental death by electrocution and the town’s grief, but most of all, I could not bear Peter Clifford’s grief.

And then I read through Google that the man who plays Peter Clifford, an English actor Stephen Tomkinson, was once engaged to the woman who plays Assumpta, Dervla Kirwan.

Maybe sparks flew while they were filming. It seems to happen: actors who play lovers on the screen become real life lovers, at least for a while. Dervla Kirwan married someone else in the end as did Tomkinson.

I find this double identity difficult to deal with. I so want to lose myself in the story as if it is real. The knowledge that a certain actor plays the part spoils the illusion.

Maybe it’s my way of escaping from the ‘Down down down’ of the Dow Jones when I enter whole other worlds in which I have no care and no responsibility.

And then I find an entire blog dedicated to Assumpta Fitzgerald. An Australian, I might add, named Sarah Turner has written about Assumpta Fitzgerald almost as if she were real, and she is real in our imaginations.

If you’re interested she tells the story. And so I’m cleary not the only one hooked into this story.

My sisters and I have a long history of falling in love with priests. You could call it Oedipal if you like. Attraction to the unattainable one. The forbidden one.

The priests, the young priests at least, the ones straight out of the seminary exuded an innocence and charm that set my heart racing as a young adolescent.

The three of us, my older sister and my younger sister competed for their affections or so it seemed to me. My older sister had the best chance with them. She was the oldest and therefore most endowed with womanly attributes, although my younger sister worked hard to be attractive – and she was – she remained too youthful I imagine to stir the hearts of the local curates, but my older sister drew him in.

This was in the days when we lived in Cheltenham and attended Our Lady of the Assumption. The then curate came from a large family of boys, several of whom were significant in public life, one a renowned barrister, another a journalist and this youngest was the priest.

But he was a larrikin. I sensed it always and he flirted with the young girls from the YCW. In the end he married one of them, but not before he enchanted my older sister who at that time was also being courted by the priest from our old parish, the one we called Father Willie. He was Irish, like Father Clifford.

I am struck by my deep desire for Assumpta Fitzgerald and Peter Clifford to get together even as I know such a liaison would most likely be doomed to failure, though not necessarily.

There have been successful marriages between ex priests and women over the years. I think of Greg Dening who married out of the priesthood, but I also think of my oldest brother, admittedly only in training to be a priest but some way down the track when he met and married his first wife. Their marriage lasted only a year.

I suspect my brother stayed priest-like in his manners. The story goes he continued to welcome homeless and desperate people into their home and his new wife could not take it any more.

And then there is my sister who married a priest. Her marriage lasted the length of five children but in the end he strayed off with another parishioner. My sister has stayed faithful to the church in a manner of speaking. My brother I believe has not.

Before they married, my once brother in law needed to get a dispensation from Rome and to do so he was told to think long and hard about his calling and his behaviour. By then my sister was pregnant with their first child, even as her husband to be, fresh out of the seminary and newly ordained, continued to say Mass and hear confessions.

My sister went into labour with toxaemia at seven months and lost the first baby, which my mother saw as a sign from God that my sister and the priest should desist, but it did not stop them.

My sister was again pregnant within a year and all this before any dispensation had been granted. All this in the days when single motherhood especially within the Catholic church was frowned upon.

And pregnancy to a priest, well …

The shame of shitting

My seventeen year old slept overnight at school last night with a group of forty other senior school girls in a gesture of solidarity with the homeless. It was intended as a fund raiser but my daughter is a little sceptical about the value of such exercises when it comes to making a real difference to homelessness.

‘Better to join a soup kitchen,’ her boyfriend had suggested. I’m inclined to agree.

I bought my daughter a padded mat from Kathmandu to avoid sleeping on the bricks of the school’s breezeway and despite the fact that such a ‘mattress’ does not exactly emulate the plight of the homeless my daughter agreed to use it.

Now we have to figure out how to deflate this amazing piece of padding. It is self inflating and operates by opening and closing the nozzle. Every time I open the nozzle though I cannot be sure whether it is inflating or deflating.

Perhaps, as my husband says, we should read the instructions first.

I tend to by pass written instructions. I like to figure out things for myself and invariably as with this inflatable self inflating sleeping bag I find myself in trouble.

It’s a type of laziness I expect, the voice within that says ‘let me at it’. I can figure it out, only to be stymied at the first obstacle.

I have been reading about shame these last few weeks, shame and the way it links to grief and death. Jeffrey Kauffman’s series of essays on The shame of Death grief and trauma I had never thought of shame like this before, I had never considered that the essence of shame lies in our bodies and our vulnerabilities and how difficult we find it to accept the limitations of our bodies, especially when it comes to illness and death.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I hesitate to go through the process of having a colonoscopy. I even shudder to write the word. I expect you all know the procedure.

For some reason that I cannot fathom I have always held a morbid fear of getting bowel cancer. There is no history of bowel cancer in my family, not as far as I know.

I’m not sure how to put this. I wonder whether it has to do with that part of the body, the hidden part that ends in the anus and is so closely related to the toilet. I suspect part of my fear and my deep shame goes back to some childhood anxiety about bottoms and poos and all those secret bits of bodies that go on underneath.

When I was little I imagined that my soul which was meant to stay pure and white was located in my bottom close to my poo hole. I do not know where this idea came from but it has long stayed with me. The idea that centre of my soul on which all sins were marked as dark stains was located so close to the dirtiest part of me.

Maybe my adult fear of bowel cancer harks back to this. And perhaps for this reason I have long resisted the idea that I should endure a colonoscopy if only as a screening procedure to rule out any polyps or precancerous cells.

Shame and the body. If I put those two things together, the first thing I think about is the shame of shitting, then I think of the shame of sex and then I think of the shame of illness generally and finally I think of the shame of dirt, as in a dirty house and of getting things wrong in areas where I think I should get them right.

I’m not too ashamed of being unable to deflate the Kathmandu bed mat. I don’t expect that of myself, but there are areas where I do expect more of myself and it is in these areas where I suffer the most.

In an effort to break up the text and to illustrate some aspect of my earlier shame I include a picture here from my childhood, one that demonstrates the clutter in which we once lived. I’m the headless one on the bed.

And in this photo, I’m the one on the left with long fair hair. The girl facing the camera was a visitor. The other two are siblings. In black and white the room may not look quite so bad as I once imagined, the mess and the clutter that is, but in my memory it is.

And did you know that shame and pride are close cousins? Pride to cover over our shame. I think often about my mother’s pride and how much I have soaked it in.

These days I sit with my mother in her retirement village room and listen yet again as she boasts about her age.
‘I’m 91 years old. I don’t get sick, It’s amazing. Other people here, all the other people here are coughing and spluttering. So many have the flu, but me not a sniffle.’

‘That’s good’ I say. ‘But if you get so much as a sniffle, or a tickle in your throat you must tell the doctor straight away.’

It feels like a threat. My mother towards the end of her life refuses to recognise the possibility of her death any day now, and I’m not far behind reluctant to acknowledge the same about my own.

In my family we boast about our good health, our genes, our immunity.

I spread the sorbolene cream over my mother’s legs and pull back once again at the stale smell that wafts over me whenever I take off her slippers. They are all she wears on her feet these days, special slippers, with Velcro strips that adhere together to make for easy wearing. She cannot otherwise get her slippers on and off. They smell of the vinegar of old age and dead skin.

She knows it, I suspect. My mother knows that her feet let off this sad stale smell but she says nothing.

I say nothing but spread the white smooth cream up and down her ankles and calves as if they are my own.

There’s a dark spot like a blood blister that I had not noticed before. I rub it with the tip of my finger. It’s smooth to touch.

‘I noticed that too, my mother says. It wasn’t there before.’
‘The mark of death,’ I want to say. ‘Your skin is breaking down.’

But no. ‘It’s probably just a blood blister,’ I say. ‘I get them all the time, ever since I had babies.’

‘Nothing to worry about then,’ my mother says.

‘Maybe mention it to the doctor next time you see him.’

All this emphasis on our bodies. All this effort to reduce our skin and bones into efficient machines that might go on forever, if only to keep out the cold and the shame.