The white space

It has been weeks since i have written in my journal. Days pass and i notice - but not in the same way i used to notice them passing. They are now marked with the increaing alertness of Ghin and the incredible charm of Oisin. Parents love to boast about their children, it's only natural. They fall in love with them. I have deeply fallen for my two sons and each day brings a special moment - many special moments, like some untiring gifting.

Over the last three days, we have had plenty of time to think about family. With Peter's mother's passing, we have individually been able to think about those closest to us and what we value most in our lives. There is no question in mine what i value. I fight hard to hold on to these. It isn't always easy. Ghin's crying can try the limits of anyone's patience - and his refusal to go to anyone else makes it physically exhausting. Not to mention my now taking to buses and no longer putting him in prams. He must be carried at all times. You've got to break him in, says one of Peter's rellys, as a joke, although i'm sure she wasn't really kidding. I can't bear his crying i said. Well i could. Good for you, i thought. I can't do it. I can't. I will not teach my son that his crying means that nothing to anyone. When he cries, he is heard.

Already, he's is calmer. At least i imagine he's calmer. He spends far more time smiling an plying with me now. But only with me. And Oisin. With everyone else, it is brief, as desert blossoms are. They get a glimpse of his sweet nature and then, it is gone. Perhaps all the more wonderful for only being a whisper in time.

I am soooo tired. I thought that i'd write a tribute to Anna, but i just don't have the wherewithal right now. My neck and shoulders are permanently contracted due to the carrying and my mind is just not there right now. Plus i have given up on the diet. I found that it was making me very weak. I'm just eating normally right now, but even now i'm paying the price for those few days of petintence to the gods of vanity. I'll diet when i finish with the full time breast feeding. It makes the most sense.

I'll try about Anna. It ws remarkable, that everyone had so many good things to say about her. And in the final analysis, that is true. She was one of the women who just got on with life, no matter how hard it was. She adopted five children, was the main carer for Tony's mother even if he had so many sisters, and then she cared for her very sick mother and brother till they passed away. Being a mother at the time of the Troubles in Republican Creggan with four growing sons would sense anyone to the wall, and yet she shouldered on intrepidly. Tony was unemployed at a very young age - as most men were at that time - and in addition to the family, she also took on a job cleaning in the school.

When i look back at women like Anna, i think that we are weedy little saplings, compared to those impossible clossal giantesses. She washed all the laundry by hand, for instance. Imagine washing the laundry of eight people by hand. She didn't have any awful lot of help either. The chldren she raised were sons and till this day Peter still doesn't know how to do his laundry properly.

I watched Angela, her only daughter and Sean, the son who stayed with her, say good bye, just before they closed the coffin. We shall never see her in this form again. I firmly believe that our spirits join the slipstream of life and nothing is ever lost, but it was impossible to not mourn her body. Not wish that she was there, in front of the TV, drinking out of her teacup and watching channel 3. Impossible to not feel a pang when you thought when we visit Derry, we shall never come to this house and see here again. It's like part of your heart has been erased. Part of your map eradicated, blanked over, and in its place - nothing. A white space filled with aching, longing, regrets, wishes, desires. Some justified, others entirely irrational. But all equally valid.

You know we can try and plaster it up, fill it with as many poem by Emily Dickinson and readings from John O'Donahue as you want, but it will never rationalise the tears that brim and long to breakthrough. Tears that you wish would turn into an ocean whcih you could sail to bring you to a land where we are reunited for those final words, for the joyful foreverness of youth. But nothing reaches past that space, there is no bridge we can build to walk across. We may send rockets to the moon, but it is all ultimately futile. The journey can only be made by yourself and when that happens it will be irrevocable. So make the most of it here. Love each other. Cherish all the time we have and never waste a single moment in doing that which you never want or need to do.