Why I do what I do…

My mum was born illegitimate in rural Northern Ireland in April 1945. Her mother was not a naive waif, but a 27 year old woman who had her baby in a Salvation Army home for unmarried mothers and then left her there and went back to her village.

The woman’s parents, the child’s grandparents, decided that she wouldn’t be left to the mercy of strangers and claimed her as their own, to be raised by them, in the same home as her mother, who was now deemed her sister.

My Mum’s aunts all became her much older sisters too. And although their true relationship was never, never spoken aloud, everybody knew, everyone felt it, like a dark heavy cloak of shame they all wore, especially the little girl. Because back then, the child wore the shame of her birth, not the mother although she would carry some of it and never the father.

Mum told me she was called names at school, you can imagine. Things weren’t great at home either where she was forced to hide by her ‘sisters when their boyfriends came to call. The living embodiment of the family’s shame too much for their sensitive souls.

She always hoped for a mother/daughter relationship with her real mum, but the relationship was never acknowledged even between the two of them. And then her mother met a widowed farmer who asked her to marry him and be mother to his two motherless children. There was no invitation extended to her own child, the evidence of his wife-to-be’s previous sexual experience was not to be tolerated in his home.

Everyone was happy pretending Mum wasn’t who she really was, and yet bullying her and shaming her for it at the same time – Ulster Protestantism at its finest – all blame for the child, the woman but never the man. Christianity is not what that religion is about.

Mum grew up in this fundamentalist household, where she was daily reminded how lucky she though she never felt very lucky. Regularly reminded how her existence had blighted their good name.

There were other horrors but I cannot confirm them, as I didn’t hear them directly from her, so I won’t share what I’ve been told.

She wanted to stay on at school, to gain the qualifications necessary to go and train as a nurse. That was her driving ambition, to be a nurse. Instead, she was forced to leave school at fourteen without any qualifications to go work in the local factory and ‘pay her way’ at home.

Coming from such a conservative, fundamentalist religious household, is it any wonder she ran away at 17 to get married to a handsome sailor, who was wild and rode a motor bike and was exciting and strong and took no shit from no-one.

And so Mum ended up living in a two room shack without running water or an inside toilet, 5 miles out of the village in the middle of nowhere. Mostly alone all the time because, as a sailor, he was always away at sea.

She was able to get into her work everyday because the factory had buses travelling through the country lanes picking up girls from all over. Meant she had to start earlier and end her days later than most but still, it was better than what she’d left behind. And she loved the handsome merchant navy man, who was away far more than he was at home, but she was a wife at 17 and that made her feel special, wanted. Like she was someone. Someone she belonged to, she had been claimed by. You can understand why that was important to her.

Madly in love and that would never change no matter the insults and injury to come.

3 years later, she finally had company in that isolated shack, her baby boy. I followed 13 months later and we were all still in a 2 room shack, just not the same one, although the amenities or lack of was the same. This new shack just happened to be closer to the village, a single mile’s walk instead of 5. And she still loved her man and he was still away more often than he was at home.

When the third child came, my younger sister, finally we got a council house in the village. Now she could be amongst people again, have friends, people to talk to. And of course, running water, hot and cold and inside toilet and washing facilities.

I can only imagine how hard the isolation of the first years of marriage were on her as my Mum hated to be alone, hated silence, or maybe those years alone are why. The radio or tv were always on in our house so she heard talking, it kept her company when no-one else was around.

Finally the handsome man left the Merchant Navy and he found a job in Belfast, so we all moved again. This would be the sixth move of her married life, and in this new place, after another three years Mum had her last child, my baby brother. She adored this boy, he stayed her baby for the rest of her life.

Mostly because she couldn’t have any more children, it had been a difficult birth and the consultant and my father decided she’s had enough children and made sure there would be no more babies for her to love.

No-one asked her or if they did, they didn’t take what she wanted into consideration. She cried about this for years afterwards. I remember her telling me about it, how she would have loved more children, how they took her choice away from her. And still she loved her husband, loved being his wife.

But this was when things started changing.

Mum was probably suffering from postpartum depression, depression was certainly diagnosed, she was prescribed lots of ridiculously dangerous addictive tranquillisers, sleeping pills and pills to help her wake up, gain energy. She put on a lot of weight, ate things like sugar white bread sandwiches and just seemed to lose herself even more.

She was working in a factory full time, looking after her husband, 4 kids and the house, as well as being on drugs that wiped her out. These medications were handed out like sweeties in the 70s. People used to give each other valium to calm their nerves. I remember seeing these pills rolling around the bottom of my Mum’s handbag like tic tacs.

And her stressed state showed in her short temper, lashing out when we didn’t do exactly as she said when she said it. And threatening us with ‘wait til your father gets home’ and we would beg her then not to tell because while she might smack us in the heat of the moment, his punishments were brutal, red leather belt snaked across our skinny little child’s legs. And still she idealised him, his word was law in our house and we all waited on his word like good little soldiers. seen and not heard.

And thing started changing between them at this time too. This is when he had his first serious affair, when Mum was in hospital giving birth to my baby brother, he was having it off with the receptionist at work.

Although she never knew, she trusted him completely. We only found out much later, when things fell apart.

I have always thought, when I look back at this time, that if he’d left then, we’d all have been better off. But he didn’t and so the trauma of living with a man who had control over every aspect of how we lived every aspect of our lives continued.

Did the fact that my Mum had known such control when she was a child mean she saw this as normal? That she had been denigrated, made feel less than and insulted her whole life meant she accepted it as an adult in this relationship with her husband? I can’t answer, but I know childhood patterns repeat in adulthood so maybe.

And then he got a promotion, we were moving back to Derry. We moved to another place, another council house, same as the others. So many moves in such a short space of time and more to come. Only living in this one nine months before they bought their first house, a nice neighbourhood, other women, wives she could be friends with and finally a job she loved.

Working as a care assistant in an old people’s home, as close to a nurse as she could get. She loved this work, even with the most demanding of her patients, she finally felt fulfilled in a way she’d never done before. And she made true friends, the closest, strongest friendships with 3 women who would be there for her forever, her ‘ride or die’ friends.

This was something Mum modeled for me, how important close female friends are to us women. Its stuck with me and is something I unconsciously created for myself through my whole life.

Of course, the handsome man didn’t like these women, or rather he didn’t like that she had friendships he had no part of. But she worked with them, they couldn’t be avoided, although he tried.Their friendship was one of the few things she didn’t allow him to take from her.

And she was still taking all those heavy dosage pills and more were added all the time, a whole cupboard in the kitchen dedicated to her medication. So many pills to take in the morning, through the day and different ones at night time. And getting heavier. But she could still light up the room with her smile, and she she inspired the greatest loyalty from those who were her friends.

And what we thought of as the final move, they had a house built back in the village they had come from, the best of everything for the furnishings and fittings. One of the few times he spent money on the things she wanted, and god help us, they weren’t even personal but for a house.

And by this time, I’m a teenager, Mum is in her mid thirties and she sick, sore and tired, and still on all that medication. He is still the boss of the house, belittling and insulting her and she rushing to placate, to make nice when she should have been telling him to f*ck off.

And he still hits us, harder now since we’re older.

He never, ever hit her, but he tore her apart just the same.

We were in that house three years when it happened. I had met my first boyfriend and got the beating of my life the night I stayed out late talking to him. Mum thought he was going to kill me the way he was laying into me, she and my older brother pulled him off me.

And she was seeing her doctor regularly, because he was concerned about her fragile mental and emotional health. She spoke to her doctor about how her husband was coming to their bed covered in love bites on his stomach and thighs and she had never, not even when they were young done anything like that. He was telling that she had done it, didn’t she remember?

Her doctor asked them both to come in and when he finally agreed to give up some of his precious time and go with her, the doctor explained how he was concerned Mum might be experiencing fugue states, where she lost all sense of who she was and what she was doing. If this was the case, she was a danger to herself and others and he would have to recommend a stay in the psychiatric hospital.

Mum was hysterical, of course she didn’t want to go there, she wasn’t mad, this was crazy.

The doctor asked my Mum to wait outside and spoke to my father, ‘man to man,’ did he really get the love bites on his body from his wife or someone else? Did he want his wife committed to the psych unit?

And the handsome man told her doctor that maybe some time ‘away’ would do her good.

Two weeks later we were woken in the middle of the night by the phone. This was a big deal back then, nobody phoned your house after 8pm, it was considered rude to interrupt the evening, so a call in the early hours of the morning meant someone was dying, dead or worse.

It was worse. Usually my mother always answers the phone in our house, my father doesn’t deign to go to the phone unless its for him but this time he tried to get to it before her. He didn’t. Hello?

A man on the other end of the phone, ‘Did you know your husband is screwing my wife?’

The bottom fell out of Mum’s world. Sobbing, crying, begging for explanations, hoping for apologies and assurances that it was over. forgotten and would never happen again. None of those were forthcoming from the man who she could never see fault in.

He left soon after.

Divorce, ugly protracted fighting, he kept refusing to pay the mortgage and child maintenance, eventually he forced her out of the house they’d built together.

She stopped taking the drugs, all of them. Lost 8 dress sizes in a matter of months, thought about suicide daily, but that could have been a side effect of coming of those depression pills, its a well known and admitted effect of withdrawal. But she got up every day and got on with the business of living, just existing maybe.

She bought a 3 bed house in a quiet estate closer to town and we all moved with her and she got a job.

She grew harder, the loss she’d borne so great she didn’t know how to heal without building a wall around her heart. She had been Mrs Curry, a wife, she had a husband, that was her whole identity. Now who was she?

Slowly, after two years of just getting through the days, she started to build a new identity, or I think she actually reclaimed one. One she never really had a chance to live in. Herself.

Funny, bright, cheerful, flirty, sunny, light, smiling. She often said she felt like she was 17 at heart. But now she was out of the restrictive family home and she hadn’t jumped into the restrictive marriage.

She started having fun, going out several nights a week, men phoning to speak to my Mum who were probably more age appropriate for me. I was delighted for her, I loved how much fun she was having.

And then she met someone, she liked him, they got serious and life was good.

But from the divorce onwards, she had started having awful stomach pains. IBS, her doctor said. You’ll be fine, change your diet.

But she never got better, got worse until she started hemorrhaging. We rushed her to hospital. It was Christmas time, she needed to have exploratory surgery. In ICU over New Year’s, and its cancer, Non Hodgkins Lymphoma. If its in your lymph then its everywhere but I didn’t know that at the time.

Transfer to Belfast by ambulance for aggressive chemotherapy, didn’t have the facilities back then at our local hospital.

Mum and I were waiting for the ambulance, my Uncle Ronnie driving so she would be in safe hands. The nurse came into the room, we knew she wasn’t allowed any visitors except immediate family. My younger brother and sister were in England, older brother working. Who was it?

She says she’s your mother.

Me and my Mum share a startled glance. My Mum had kept her family secret her whole life, the only reason I knew was because my father had told me all about it to hurt her, he knew it would humiliate her, us knowing that her Mother was really our Aunt May or rather Aunt May was really her Mother.

The door opened, we were expecting Reta, my father’s sister, one of Mum’s closest friends.

Aunt May and Uncle Robert stood in the doorway. I can’t imagine what it cost her to have him bring her to the hospital, to acknowledge her child in public for the first time ever.

Mum was her usual kind, gracious self, never made a thing about the ‘Mother’ claim.

The one and only time her mother had ever said she was her child and she was a woman of 46 just about to go into the fight of her life.

She’d lived her whole life never knowing who her father was.

Trauma after trauma after trauma.

Her sense of self, her identity never allowed to form.

Instead, my Mum spent her whole life being shaped by her relationships to other people. Someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, our Mum.

She is why I do what I do.

Five short months later, most of that spent in hospital suffering the effects of the chemo as much as the cancer she died. She’d just turned 47.

I can’t stop cancer. I can’t say nobody’s going to die young.

But I can help women recover from trauma.

I can guide women into discovering their soul identity and not the personality forced on them by family, husbands, society.

My Mum is why I do what I do. Because she deserved better.

Because we all deserve to live as we truly are and not be confined by circumstance of birth, marriage or location. Circumstance shouldn’t dictate who you are or what you can achive.

You decide.

I want everyone to know that and have the tools to be who they want to be.

She is why I do what I do.

Thank you for reading this through to the end. I appreciate you so much for that.

May 19th is the 30th anniversary of my Mum’s death. Please say a prayer for those of us who have had to live without her.

Love,

Cynthia xx

And PS, here’s my soul work, guided by her. Pm if you’re interested in working with me.

And its on Zoom so the where is wherever you’re at!