Page 59 of A Miracle on Hope Street
She takes a deep breath.
‘Oh baby, it seemed like a good idea at the time,’ she says, choosing her words carefully. ‘I didn’t want you to see me in such a fragile state. I was so afraid of frightening you more so I told your dad to give me time to get better. I really thought I’d get better sooner than I did.’
I do the math in my head. So, we saw her on and off for about two years after she left the family home, then on birthdays and if possible a week before Christmas for a while after that, then it turned to phone calls, then they faded out and if we’d call we’d get no answer until she finally became the enemy, the one who no longer wanted us. So for about ten of the years in between her return to independent living and since her contact became so minimal, she has been in and out of a psychiatric unit. My God.
‘Oh, Mum,’ is all I can say and I put my head in my hands, feeling my breathing mount to a crescendo where I’m afraid I’m going to really cry, not weep like I have been doing on and off since I set eyes on her, but proper, big, gaspy, loud crying for her and for all our wasted years and for my father who only ever did what they both thought was best before time ran out on him.
‘And are you . . . are you okay now?’
The marks on her arms, the tired look in her eyes, the joy when she smiled when she first saw me out on the pier. The very thought of what she’s been through is crushing my heart into pieces and it hurts even more than all that feeling of abandonment that had taken over my life until now.
‘I should have come looking for you,’ I say, those big heavy sobs becoming more and more real now. ‘I shouldn’t have waited all this time, being so bloody stubborn, wanting to punish you and make you wait just like you’d made us wait for so long.’
Her lip trembles when she sees how upset I am and she reaches her hands across the table towards mine. I grab hers, desperate for her touch and I bring them up to my face, leaning her tiny hands on my cheek and wishing I could take all of her pain away.
‘I have clinical depression,’ she says, behind her tears. ‘I’ve had numerous breakdowns but I’ve been looked after very well in my own country where I went for most of my treatment eventually, so please don’t worry about me. You don’t need to worry about me at all. I’m much, much better now, I promise.’
‘I’m crying for Dad too,’ I say to her, letting her hands go. ‘I’m crying for all the times I heard him cry for you. He was probably crying in hope that you would get better. I can’t believe he took all that to his grave.’
Now I understand why he sometimes resented me caring for him so much, even though he needed me so badly.
‘Your dad and I were at great peace,’ my mother explains, easing my fears a little. ‘He knew I had made immense progress and he knew the time was almost right for me to try and come back into your lives. We agreed as much when we met not that long ago.’
‘What?’ I ask her. ‘You met with him?’
She nods, sniffles a bit and her eyes wander at the memory.
‘I met with him in Dublin the week before he had the stroke,’ she whispers. ‘We agreed that he’d tell both of you soon afterwards, when he felt the time was right, but then he got sick and . . . well, you know the rest. I wrote to you after the funeral. It was all I could think of to do.’
She takes a deep breath. So do I.
‘No,’ I say to her. ‘You shouldn’t have kept this from us for so long! We could have coped with your illness had we known. Anything would have been better than how we thought you’d rejected us. Anything!’
I am fidgeting now. I have so many words swirling round in my head that I’d love to get out if I could only string them together. I get flashbacks of her rejection, plunging pains in my stomach of how I’d lie awake at night and blame myself; my heart breaks into pieces when I remember the days at school when I’d sit in the bathrooms behind a closed cubicle door just crying and crying and begging her to come home or the days when I’d look at my father coming out of his room, his eyes red and sodden and I’d curse her as to how she could ever put us all through this living nightmare of not knowing when she would come back.
I must stay focused. I try to breathe evenly.
‘We are all adults now and have been for some time,’ I remind her, in a bout of frustration. ‘You didn’t need to go through Dad to get to us! Why on earth didn’t you just lift the phone to me or Ally? Why did you have to go through Dad in the first place when you came back here two years ago?’
She takes my hand again and lets out a deep sigh. She is calm while I am the storm.
‘I asked someone what I should do,’ she explains, ‘and they told me that perhaps a way to gently come back into your lives would be through your father, so I met with him and he told me that he would talk to you both and let you decide when.’
‘Youaskedsomeone? Who?’
I am angry now. I am angry that we weren’t ever given the choice to either live with her illness or live as we did without it. Our father, old school and as educated as he was, so afraid of the stigma of severe mental illness that he didn’t want to tell us our mother was in ‘the nuthouse’ because her mind was too unstable to look after us. All those years of thinking it was our fault. All those years of imagining her having run off for some fun and romance when all she has been doing was trying to get better..
‘The person who told me to do that was someone whose opinion I valued greatly, so I did what she said.’
She looks directly at me.
‘Go on?’
‘That person was you, Ruth, when you replied to me as Bernadette. You told me to go through your father first.’
I stare at the table. I think hard of all the hundreds of letters and emails that I’ve corresponded with.
‘But I didn’t know it was you!’
