My mother died when I was young. Now I realise we were both young

‘Follow your most intense obsession mercilessly.’ - Franz Kafka.

When I began to work on Watching for the Hawk, I had no idea that every poem would concern my mother, nor did I realise how much I’d learn about her.

Her life was short. She developed a malignant brain tumour when she was 47. I used to say she died when I was young – I was only 14. When I reached mid-life, I realised she died when she was young. Now, in my sixties, I understand: we were both young.

The few memories I have of my mother are precious. As I sat with them, I felt a profound curiosity stir, as though some other thing lurked underneath the sensations I had shared with her – driving through the west of Ireland landscape; the warm, earthy scent of turf smoke that filled her homeplace; the taste of soda bread, fresh and crusty from the oven; the soft click of her knitting needles.

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In poems about travelling from Co Limerick to her childhood home in Co Galway, a place embodied by my grandmother’s kitchen and back kitchen, I uncovered my first understanding of my mother. I realised that my mother missed her old life on a farm, and she regretted the loss of the traditions of that time – churning butter, slaughtering the pig – a harsh, beautiful, primal way of life. It was hard to revisit those memories through the lens of art and uncover uncomfortable truths, but they enabled me to see my mother more fully and complexly. I learned that closeness did not define my bond with my mother – though a child loves until taught otherwise. I had to continue writing to learn more about our relationship.

My mother left rural Galway and never felt at home in rural Limerick, where I grew up. Customs were changing, and forming bonds with new, scattered neighbours was harder. I saw my mother as an outsider in both Galway and Limerick, and my homeplace was not her place. Poems that began as celebrations of landscape led to poems that show me being uneasy in her landscape, and she alienated in mine.

We watch the collies puff sheep

through a stone gap in the mountain field.

Its name ingrained for generations.

I want to say, It’s only a hill,

but my palm is warm in hers, and her language

of landscape, words from hand-me-down memory,

can never be mine.

The writing led me into the heart not just of my mother but also her era, her relationship with my father, with change and how she and my father were unprepared, or unwilling or unable to adapt to the tremendous social change that Ireland underwent in the 60s.

Their wedding photo is the first poem where my parents appear together; the title is On The Run In Dreary Eden. They resemble gangsters from a black-and-white film, an image that contrasts their culture with mine, influenced by American TV shows. My mother wore a suit. They married in 50s Ireland, a repressive and insular place where sex was sinful. I felt sorry for them, their young lives and bodies, and their ‘safe period’ game that I didn’t understand – some nights she slept with me, some nights with him. She sneaked into his room like a criminal, leaving me alone and feeling betrayed. In that poem, I compare them to Bonnie and Clyde, born to live the half-life of delinquents.

I remembered snatches of conversations where my mother and her sister discussed men. But they weren’t discussing men. They were discussing sex. I learned that sex was something a woman had to endure rather than enjoy. Sex was a cause of anxiety, and from the discord between my parents, often over trivial things, I understood that sexual frustration was part of their unhappiness. My Parents’ First Night, 1955 is a poem where I imagine their first sexual encounter:

her hands trailed down the tapered camber of his waist

to the marvel of his backside, cool flesh balloon-soft.

The air around them simmered with animal odour;

their skin popping apart in licks of sweat as they slid

over each other – and then. Then, how he rocked

A way of life was ending. The meitheal, the stations mass, faded away. Mr Ed and The Fugitive arrived, and so did the distance between neighbours that television brought. As the lives of rural, working-class men like my father changed (he went from being a farm labourer to a builder’s labourer), so did the lives of our mothers. One of the most significant changes for my mother was having her last child in a hospital; my other siblings and I were born at home. My mother used to tell me how Mrs Hayes from over the road helped with my birth. What I recall of her last birth was the district nurse’s visit, a stressful ordeal for my mother that left her feeling more alone. It was heart-rending for me to understand that my mother’s sense of belonging was eroded on many fronts:

She talks and talks, stares long into Nurse Begley’s face,

her eyes wide as a swimmer’s who realises

they’re out too far. I worry she’ll choke mid-word,

will clutch Nurse Begley and pull her down, curl into her

like a child, in the cooling rays of the sun.

The collection opens with a quote from Sharon Olds, ‘Family is a mystery’. So is love, especially the love within family. The last poem I wrote for the collection, which had become a sequence of poems, was the hardest one to face – when I saw my mother in the hospital on her final day. As I said earlier, we weren’t close. I remember the unease that overcame me that day: I just had to see her. No one had told me she was terminally ill. Working on that poem revealed something amazing to me. I had found what I was looking for. I understood the familial connectedness we can’t ignore, and the simple, pure love alive in our presence:

I tilt over and kiss her forehead. I’d never kissed her

in my life, she wasn’t that sort of mother.

What I recall now is not her face,

or her breath’s measure, but the shadow

I cast, its form like a cloak that broadened

as I moved into a slot that held us both – her tribe

clamouring through molecules of smell from my glands,

enveloping her in love for the journey.

Watching for the Hawk is the title of Breda Spaight’s debut collection of poems, published by Arlen House in 2023. The Co Limerick poet explores themes of family and social change in her work. Her poem The Curse, first published in Southword 42, is a finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. To buy her book, follow this link - purchase here.