I’ve Come Home to You
By Saoirse E. Doyle
I have not been home to Ireland in over twenty-one years. I am undocumented.
Come home soon, the words with which my mother ends most calls.
Maybe that is why, last night, I hugged her in my dreams. My 85-year-old mother who still lives in that stone house of my childhood. That two story pebbledash right on the village corner where, last night, Mamma stood upon the threshold and watched as I glided up the lane from the main road. Her eagerness, like a rope, pulling me to shore. Impatience etched into her every feature, excitement coursing through my entire circuitry, such palpable hope that it lasted long after I awoke. Mamma’s yearning surely born within my own subconscious, yet, last night, such longing belonged to us both.
If I leave America, I lose my place here. I will be turned back at the gates when I try to return. Turned away from a place I now love as much as the land I left behind. It is a repeated exile I cannot imagine. I have already lived one such separation of two decades. It has made me, by choice and by design, a woman who is no longer fully Irish. To be mothered by America is to become her beloved offspring. It is inevitable. In my heart, I am now American. But in the eyes of those who matter, I am not yet anyone at all.
Still, I am both Irish and American to the bone. If I go back, I am not ever fully home again but in a place that has passed a full generation and more between its fingertips since I last set foot there. It is home, only in the way a tiny village imprints upon our soul the love of those roots from which we branched into more. But that very life into which we grew can take us elsewhere, maybe for reasons economic or pure escape, the word lesbian enough to make of us in that rural parish a fallen angel. There is no going back. Not when we tread down that narrow lane to the main road to find another life and spend the next twenty years laboring the long hours and weeks and years of making new home, new meaning. And how many exiles can one soul endure? I am asking and I know not the answer. Even before I left that village and spoke that dreaded word lesbian, I had moved out among the stars, my girl’s body the sexual plaything of a neighbor. You could say my childhood turned the pages of exile from one day to the next to the next. Right up until I left.
My mother and I never hugged growing up. I cannot recall sitting on my mother’s lap, though I am sure, when I was a toddler, there were many occasions. Maybe for a nappy change. Or a bottle feed. Or a bout of colic. Or to brush my curly blonde hair, its thickness which my mother cherished, her own hair thinning with every pregnancy and no-one to feed her a good tonic or some bone marrow. She would have held me then, while she clipped my tiny fingernails, or ran a soapy cloth over grimy cheeks. I imagine we held one another then. Of that, I’m fairly certain. I wish her no lie in her efforts. None.
She gave birth to seven children. Lost her first daughter before she was six months old. Reared the rest pretty much alone after my father’s first of several massive heart attacks. She did so in a village where she was treated as an English-speaking blow-in. Hated by her mother-in-law. Unprotected by her new husband. A man almost double her age, handsome, well-spoken, well-educated who may have seemed to her like a prayer answered, who brought her to a place she was certain would be her independence from her own tough upbringing. Instead, she lost all her freedom. Two hundred miles from her hometown enough to make her an exile. Marriage its own foreign land from which no decent Catholic woman could return unless widowed.
What do I offer that young woman who was my mother? That girl really. She who left school at fourteen. She who fainted from hunger as a child on her way to Mass. Laughed about it when she shared that story with her offspring. As though her hardship was humor. Her suffering as commonplace as the churned butter from spring milk, and the bleating of lambs across the fertile pastures of her east coast farmhouse.
What do I offer of compassion when speaking of touch to this woman who had likely never been properly held herself? The second youngest of ten. Forever starved in her own rearview. Too many mouths to feed the credo of her childhood. What to say that casts no aspersions on her childrearing? How to speak to affection and its absence and still lavish upon her the love she longed for? How to speak truth to fact about her lack, and mine too?
Here is what I know.
Mamma always had a way with babies. Could tell a summer visitor their child had the look of a fever. Or needed winding to ease the belly gas evident only to my mother’s keen eye. By the time I was three, another baby had just come along, and the four siblings above me ranged in steps of the stairs from six to eleven. Meals constantly on the go. Turf to be fed into the range. Ware to be washed in the scullery. Kettles to be filled before the arse scalded out of them. Floors to be brushed before the priest came to visit the headmaster and have him met with a ball of fluff the size of a small donkey.
Who had time for hugs in that chaos? As a child, I did. But my mother didn’t. Already worked to the bone. And by that, I mean her ankles bloomed purple and black from ulcerated flesh that had been stripped raw by broken bottles lined up outside our backyard wall. Years of imbibement from christenings and wakes and station masses past. Stout bottles, once brown, now crowned with sludge. Whisky bottles, their thin spouts like lost oracles. Milk bottles tossed aside once the poitín had offered its last delirium of fermented potato turned gut-rot. All lined up in neat and half buried rows outside the back yard wall.
Let the land take it all back, this, the rural practice of garbage disposal. Let the grass overgrow with downpours. Let the sod birth lakes of fresh muck. Elevate the land past its old sorrows. Cover everything over with nettles and daisies. Let the whole damn lot—bottles, shovels, prams, mistakes, bikes, Morris Minors—get swallowed. What it swallowed too was my mother’s young ankles. Both her ankles lacerated when, as a newlywed, she swung those young, fresh legs out over the wall with a load of washing. And from one moment to the next, all walking comfort was taken from her.
When I was five and six and seven, I sat on the footstool, Mamma’s feet in my lap, wrapping and unwrapping those scarred ankles. Each time the bandage came undone from my spooling, I longed to see pink flesh instead of purple. To find smooth skin, not crumpled.
Leaned close with my childish whispers. Urged those legs to come back to their origins. This, the closest I came to holding Mamma. Not hugging, I know. But tell me this isn’t love. And tell me there weren’t times when I picked up those legs to say goodnight, and placed them gently on the cushion that tenderness didn’t blossom there between us. Tell me that when we shook hands to seal our nightly contract that Mamma didn’t whisper thank you in my ear as clear as any I love you.
Mamma and I never hugged once in those twenty eight years before I left Ireland. But can you tell me the difference between a hug and a handshake when some moments are so large, you could be undone by one small look of kindness. That is the look that passed between us in the dream. The realization we could now be kind again because life itself had been kind to us. Had finally brought me home. In the dream, I could not take my eyes off Mamma’s right hand, that arthritic and every-busy hand that shook mine every night in childhood, this our goodnight ritual into adulthood, a handshake and a kiss on the cheek. Formal yet full of promise. I’ll see you soon, the unwritten contract. Made more poignant by shaking hands each night with a father in heart failure for whom I’ll see you soon was more hope than trustworthy promise. All that hope that kept him going till I reached nineteen. And then, one morning, my father was gone. I’ll see you soon, a contract that had lasted far beyond any doctor’s imaginings.
In my dream last night, there Mamma stood, in that small front yard, that same vein-blackened hand outstretched, ready to welcome me home. Is this what every undocumented immigrant dreams of?
Home.
That one place on earth that will always feel like our corner, no matter where we go.
That special someone at the front door, someone we left behind in a fog of strife over two decades before. Now, all we want to do is hold them close. Let troubled waters fly under the bridge bedamned. Let the broken past and all its unsolved fragments remain firmly in our rearview even if it is still in someone else’s fixated present. Draw that loved one close anyway. Surprise them with our affection. Our brazen love. Even if we never held them in this exact way before we left. Squeeze them tight till not a rib of hair can pass through the gap between us. Let that inner judge and its inherited jury strike a match to shame’s embers still alive inside us. Remind us of the “proper” fondness we came from. Such blatant contact once taboo. Such silly carry-on the balderdash of that crowd in America who’d hug a lamppost for notice. Maybe that’s why, long ago, we had set our sights on foreign shores, ready to be in touch, as though with an unmet pen pal, with touch itself. Anxious to reside in our united state of affection outside handshakes and holy water.
Maybe that’s why, in my dream last night, I finally held Mamma close. America sufficiently within my immigrant DNA that even in theta-state, I was now, at the very least, a naturalized hugger. There we were, Mamma and I, in some interdimensional place where the segregated go, locked together in a bear hug. To be more accurate, it was me who threw my arms around Mamma. That too is not quite true. The choreography between us somewhat askance. Maybe another subconscious cue to our past as non-huggers. As such, I came at her sideways. Not fully in charge of my limbs, my right arm flinging itself awkwardly across Mamma’s chest, and then, the other arm, as though heavy with sleep and great distance, wrapping itself across her narrow back. In that moment, I knew what I had come here to do. I pulled her close. Joined my hands on her left shoulder, and fastened us there. I dropped low to her tiny height, disbelief now pumping through me. Pressed my cheek against hers.
Mamma, my only word.
Some primal delight taking flight in my dream-state. Some rapture of the reunified. And then, right alongside, some terrible devastation for all hearts divided from a loved one. In that moment, I could have cried for a fish without its shoal, a night without its morning. My whole body awash with prayers heard and finally answered. The shock of physical contact so real it became actual.
I whimpered. Woke slightly from my own cry. Refused to let Mamma go. Went straight back to that concrete yard of my childhood. Held Mamma close once more. And began to coo.
Some non-lingual trill that amounted to pure devotion. As though I had somehow given birth to this tiny woman in my arms, and could not conjure a language more fitting to lavish on this newborn. As though, finally, here she was, my beloved flesh and blood. This familiar of my longest known familiars—my own mother, who became, in that moment, utterly new.
It was as though I was seeing her afresh. Eyes unveiled from all history. Heart unchained from all hostility. Holding close this old woman. Short, frail, lovely. Someone who had earned this exact accolade. I could see her plainly. All she had endured and been through. All that had been stripped of her truth and security. All she had lost and not yet found.
I keep trying to stay alive for you, the message she conveyed.
I know, my reply. That too, unspoken.
Such posture of regard between us. Unfettered compassion. Such acknowledgment of her good that seemed, in the dream, so natural to me now. A mother tongue from within made of womb and wounding, estrangement and coming together. Rolling from my lips as birdsong.
I could have stayed that way a long time. Skin to skin. Taking her in.
Giving her all that was in me of this great and galloping devotion.
Home, I wanted to say. Mamma, I’ve come home to you.
END
Author Bio: Éanlaí Cronin's writing has appeared in Rattle, Delmarva Review, Sweet Tree Review, String Poet, Peregrine, Sinister Wisdom, Big Muddy, The Ignatian Literary Magazine, The Courage to Heal, Entropy Magazine, and The Magic of Memoir. She spent the last twenty years attending writing workshops across America. She was a Winner of the Eastern Iowa Review’s Lyric Essay Contest in 2018; and a Top Ten Finalist in the Fish Short Memoir Prize contest in 2018. An elementary school teacher for ten years, she is currently a writing workshop leader. She enjoys photography, searching for the elusive “perfect chair,” and public speaking. She writes under the pen name Saoirse E. Doyle.