For all that I disbelieved the power of miracles, my mother’s habit of lighting a candle, and plonking it in front of her statue of the Blessed Virgin charmed me every time I sat an exam in my final school year.
She was thinking about me, or so she said, not so much the Virgin Mary who might offer me help.
I’d lost my faith by then. My mother’s statue all the way from the Netherlands was sculpted in brown stoneware with a shine to the edges of the gown whenever it caught the glint of candlelight.
Mary’s plaster eyes down cast, her hands in prayer, was an icon of hope in face of everything that assailed my mother in my childhood home of mess and struggle.
I have taken to lighting a candle for my own children when they sit for major exams but add the proviso ‘metaphorically speaking’. I have no Blessed Virgin to whom I might pray, but the spirit of my mother’s wishes trickles down through the decades, a mother’s love for her children and hopes for their future.
What more can you do? But hold out hope for your children and their children in turn. Not the blind delusional hope my mother clung to, one bordering on denial, her belief in miracles resting tenuously there, but a different hope one to facilitate the taking up of courageous responses to the challenges we face.
It gets harder when children find themselves abused. As Billie Travalini writes:
For victims of abuse, the past and present bounce off each other like balls bouncing off the wall of a racquetball court: pain is buried and resurfaces, (often at the most awkward times) and being stubborn is a reaction to a society that shames victims and excuses their abusers. This is especially true of incest because talking about something as ugly as a father or mother having sex with their own child is too ugly for most folks to want to hear.
And so, a collective sigh of frustration hurls through my head when I traipse yet again into the familiar territory of the past and yet here it is again in my dreams.
Last night in a dream, I was waiting in front of my daughter’s house for my husband to drive past and collect me to drive us to another daughter’s house where I planned to look after the children while this daughter had other commitments.
I saw his car approaching along the street and noticed its fender pushed in. He’d been in an accident, a minor bingle in which he must have driven into the back of another car or pole. In his hands clutching the steering wheel, he held a piece of typed paper which I imagined as details of the crash, which must have only just happened causing the five-minute delay such he was running late.
In life, my husband is never late. A stickler for time. And as he reached my side, he took off again, not even slowing down as if he had changed his mind. And I realised in a flash it was too much for him to meet me and hear my response to this crash or whatever else was troubling him.
He drove up the road and turned into a T- section to travel back down behind the house where I stood. Then I saw his car at the end of the street from whence he had come, and he was travelling away from me.
I had left my bag behind thinking I wouldn’t need it. No phone, just me trying to catch up to the back of his car as he approached the next intersection headed away. By the time I reached the intersection breathless and disbelieving he would do this, he was out of sight.
I returned to my daughter’s house. She had gone by now and her husband was there trying to care for a group of children ranging in ages from ten or to infant. And he had enlisted the help of an older daughter in school uniform. I knelt to speak to my two babies feeling the weight of abandonment and rage towards my husband and I needed to address but feared after I took the telephone my son-in-law proffered and dialled his number my husband might not pick up.
I woke then fully convinced my dream was a reality and took an age to return to peaceful sleep again.
‘There’s never a happy ending for someone abused as a child,’ writes Neige Sinno. I’m inclined to agree though I’m not too sure I believe in happy endings. In any case, not for any of us. Our lives all end in one way or another. And much as movies portray death as happening in a heartbeat with family seated around the bed offering promises of eternal life to their dearly departed, the process of dying is not like this.
It’s slow and gruelling, except in cases of fatal accidents, where it might happen in a flash. I’ve sat at the bedside of two brothers in law as they died. It was not an easy vigil.
Though it was also a situation of great solemnity and honour. Both had been ill for some time with cancer. Both unmarried and childless. Both relying on their siblings to accompany them out of life.
Here I am again in gloomy territory. Childhood abuse and death but this is how it goes for me. When Zadie Smith writes about writing as psychodrama, she’s into it. For her ‘writing exists at the intersection of three precarious elements, language, the world and the self, and the world we imagine, the selves we cling to, and the language we use determines much of what comes from under out fingertips onto the page. In that delightfully precarious way.
Speaking of precarious, the other day caring for my six-year-old grandson along with his younger siblings and a cousin, he decided to build a monstrous tower of cushions. Up and up it went, a higgledy-piggledy construction which held fast for reasons that defy me. But soon before his parents arrived home at the end of day, I called to him that I would dis-assemble Mt Volupius, as he named his creation, to tidy at end of day.
By then he, his sister and cousin were destroying his bedroom to build their school. Soon after his parents returned, he realised Mr Volupius was gone and was distressed beyond measure, so I tried several times to help reconstruct it.
‘It’s too precarious,’ I told him each pillow unbalanced against the next.
‘What’s precarious?’ He asked through devastated tears. The disruption of his mountain was more than he could bear, and I was the villain for destroying it.
Life is precarious, eventually with the help of a chair and table we managed to get a construction that held for long enough to help dry his tears.
If only it were so simple at other times.