And in that moment, he wasn’t a strong and independent 19 year old, who was half way through his university degree, had a car licence, ready to take on the world, regularly razzing me for my (lack of) driving skills, and the way I didn’t straighten my wheel when I parked. He was my baby, shuffling down the hospital corridor in a blue gown, white compression stockings up to his knees and hesitant lips, worried eyes and as he glanced back at me all I could do was give him an encouraging nod and turn away before my eyes betrayed the brave face I was trying to hold for him.
I started writing this piece as I was sitting in the cafeteria of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital after dropping Eamon off for surgery. I thought I could entertain myself by doing some work on my laptop while sipping a hot chocolate. But I was distracted. I wasn’t just distracted by the television blaring morning news, or the sound of the coffee machine running hot, or the doctors and nurses chatter about their shift, or orders of egg and bacon rolls. I was genuinely bereft. It was the first time I had ever dropped my son at a surgical door without accompanying him all the way through. He was in the adult system now, and unlike the children’s hospital, he had to go it solo. And what that meant was, I also had to grow up, and go it alone, too. I don’t know who the bigger baby was – well, I do, but I am not sure I want to admit it.
As I sat here, trying to block out the ridiculous morning tv (does anyone actually watch Sunrise?), and my worry for Eamon and his health, my mind kept thinking of my grandmother. My grandmother was the closest thing I had to a mother when I was really little. My earliest and most treasured memories of her are simple. They are of laying in her lap while she stroked my hair and twirled my curls around her finger. Of her deep frying me hot chips she had lovingly cut by hand. Memories of her putting her Christmas cards on display, her straightening out her bedspread and daring any of us to sit on it with her warning eyes. I remember without too much clarity but with my heart her perfume, the softness of her cheeks, and the pride she took in her appearance. She was a proud woman, and a strong woman, too. Nothing got by her. She could be contrary, she could be petty, and hell, she could hold a grudge. I loved every single molecule of her. I even loved the way she hated anyone shortening my name (or hers, for that matter). She insisted I was called Tabitha, not Tabs. Which is funny really, because since her passing, I am rarely called Tabitha at all.
Anyway, I digress. Because I wasn’t thinking about any of that, that day.
My grandmother had a theory. It wasn’t kooky, or strange, and she certainly had her reasons. Reasons beyond being Welsh and having lived a time in Cornwall where believing in faeries and folklore and magic was not uncommon.
She believed that our family was cursed.
I am not absolutely clear on all of the evidence she had stacked up to form that very firm opinion, but I guessed that my mother’s death, and that of my cousin’s was just the tipping point, because she came to this conclusion long before my life became a dumpster fire.
I have dwelled on my grandmother’s ‘curse’ theory at various times since her passing, and at multiple moments in my life, particularly at those junctures where my life has been at its lowest points. Was our family, indeed, cursed? Was I cursed? And if so, what could I do about it?
It's no secret that a lot of bad things have happened in my life. In fact, I have barely kept my head above water for the last few years. It’s felt like one blow after another. I have tip toed the edge of reason a million times and spent many mornings feeling like I didn’t deserve the sunshine’s rays. I have lit fires across my skin to back burn the regret that has crawled across my body, and I have worked hard to alchemise my pain into power. But in the darkest of nights when my mind has chased the little white rabbit down wonderland’s holes I have obsessed over this curse. I have wondered whether it was true, and we were just destined to endure tragedy until the end of our days, or whether my grandmother was wrong, and it was just a case of “bad things happen to good people”, and my family was, in fact, just full of good people. But then my mind starts spiralling, and by now, I would have had at least a week of sleepless nights, and delirium would have set in (I have always preferred delirium to reality), and I start to obsess over my mother’s death. I mean, I have very few details about it, but with what I do know, I start wondering whether she bargained her young life for mine. Whether she said, ‘spare her, take me instead.’ Was I destined to die that fateful day? Is that why so many bad things kept happening? Did I cheat death by virtue of her sacrificing her life for mine? The world was just righting a wrong. In my bed I imagine my mother laying there in my father’s arms, with her carotid artery spilling crimson onto bitumen, her life force draining away, me as an infant laying by her side crying, and her eyes focussed skyward pledging her life for mine.
When I think about all of this: when I think about her life, her death and sacrifice. I think about notions of motherhood, what it means to be a mother and what it looks and feels like to mother. The reality is that I don’t know a lot about how to be a mother. I haven’t really got much to model motherhood on or from. However, after having three children who I love with every fibre of my being, what I do know is that I would lay down and die for them. If I was on a lonely highway, I would absolutely bargain my life away for theirs. I would give up every ounce of my blood to spare a single drop of theirs. And in that cafeteria as I waited for the nurse to call me to say my son was out of surgery, I found myself uttering much the same; bargaining to some mythical creature in the sky, to some distant universe to keep my son safe. I found myself calling on all that was holy, and trading my soul to all that was unholy. And I reasoned that was motherhood. It was in the sacrifice. It was in the devotion and in the laying down and dying. But it was also in the living and the loving and the persisting and insisting. It was in the survival – and in surviving together.
And just like that, your kid will walk back down a hospital hallway with a sleepy look on their face, white compression stockings up to their knees. They’ll act like the whole ordeal was nothing, not even realising that for the past three hours your heart was literally beating outside your body. You’ll bundle them into your car, and as they doze off still sleepy from the anaesthetic you’ll glance over and say a quiet ‘thanks’ to the universe, and you’ll go back to your life, one eye looking over your shoulder, waiting for the curse to catch you up, and bring you back down again.
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