Our Seat at the Table

To anyone peering through the kitchen window, ours would seem an ordinary family breakfast. Yet beneath the clatter of plates and the easy rhythm of conversation, something restless stirs within me. The old serpent, quiet for so long, shifts in his sleep and opens one watchful eye.

"Shit."

In my love affair with the written word, I've forgotten my morning tablets. I fill a glass of water, grab the blister pack, and break the seal on Sunday morning. The tablets disappear in one shot, chased by a mouthful of water. The old serpent blinks, hisses his disappointment, and rolls over once more.

 

I stare at the orange, blue, green, and red of morning, afternoon, evening, and night for the week ahead. Each compartment holds a tablet or cluster of tablets, small sentinels guarding head and heart, while others stand watch against the return of cancer. They say cancer never forgets a body. Perhaps that is true. Yet I hope it finds little worth remembering in mine, because one battle with it was enough for any family.

 

I wonder when I became like my parents, swallowing pills to climb the hill of another day. Their assortment was less organised than mine. Brown plastic bottles rattled inside an old USA biscuit tin, emptied one Christmas by their eight children before becoming the keeper of tablets and remedies.

 

As I search my brain for a timeline on my dependence, a Facebook memory appears as if sent from above: a photograph from fifteen years ago, taken on the day of my eldest daughter's First Holy Communion. I look pretty fabulous, though I remember being self-conscious about my weight at the time, convinced I was still carrying a little leftover baby fat.

 

Looking at the photograph now, I can't help but smile. The woman staring back at me had no idea what lay ahead—the battles to be fought, and fought, and fought again. She was too busy counting her flaws. The woman I see today is different. She sees youth, strength, and those lush chestnut waves tumbling over her shoulders as she holds her one-year-old son, blissfully unaware of the storms still beyond the horizon.

 

My son was something of a miracle in self. According to family lore, my husband's side produced children in batches: all girls or all boys, never a mixture. We already had two beautiful daughters, which delighted my husband. Having grown up without sisters, he relished life in a house full of women, especially the little women. Fathers and their daughters, am I right? Still, when our son arrived, he brought a different kind of joy. Not a greater joy, just a different one, completing our family in a way none of us had expected. And he came with a bang. I will never forget the excruciating pain of that one-hour labour. There was no epidural; it was too late—he was coming. He was born at dawn, seven o'clock on Easter Sunday, the fourth of the fourth, 2010. Trust my son to make an entrance like a new-born king.

 

After putting me through hell and back, I saw the bright white light of death—or so it felt—and then I heard the words: "It's a boy."

 

I turned to my husband, Joseph.

"Go and check he has a willy," I told him.

 

After everything I'd been through to get him here, I wasn't taking anyone's word but my husband.

 

My eldest daughter had placed a bet with her aunt—my sister, who was married to my husband's brother. It sounds a little inbred when I put it like that, but I assure you we're not. She bet on baby blue and, against all odds, won. It's funny how colours change their loyalties over time. Once upon a time, blue was considered the colour for girls—after all, Mary is almost always depicted in blue. Pink, being the stronger and more assertive colour, was thought more suitable for boys. Then somewhere along the line the women claimed it for themselves. These days, of course, real men wear pink, and bright colours are no longer confined to the ladies' section of the shop. I guess fashions, like everything else in life, goes around in circles, always finding their way home again.

 

"Mam, what happened to your rule of no phones at the table?"

 

"I know, I know. Sorry, love. It's month-end and I'm waiting on a WhatsApp from the boss about a payment."

 

"Well, what's good for the goose and all that..."

 

My second daughter wastes no time seizing the opportunity. Out comes her phone, and she abandons the table for the sofa, where she settles into her usual nest—legs tucked under her bum—as she disappears into the world of Snapchat, where conversations vanish almost as quickly as they're written. One by one, the rest of the family follow suit, abandoning the table and making the short journey across the great divide of the kitchen-cum-sitting room to the sofa beyond, leaving me behind with the clearing and the cleaning. Being a mother is a twenty-four-seven job; the work simply changes shape as the day goes on. The pay, however, remains the same: it sucks to the high heavens. If I can't beat them, I might as well join them. The dishes will still be there in half an hour. It is a day of rest, after all. Sunday Mass has gone out the window in our house. My mother would be turning in her grave. But the way I see it, God is with us regardless of the four walls of a church.

I make a coffee and join the rest of the family on the sofa to read my horoscope, a habit inherited from my mother. In her day, she read all our signs from Mystic Meg in the newspaper, announcing our fortunes with more conviction than Father delivering her sermon from the pulpit to a fast-dwindling congregation.

 

"Leo, you can achieve a lot today if you're willing to work behind the scenes. You've got your sights set on the finish line....

Typical horoscope nonsense. Vague enough to apply to anyone and everyone. Yet the words trigger a thought. Behind the scenes is where mothers live, quietly carrying the weight of the world. And here am I, another mother, ushering Mary back into the shadows. Perhaps she belongs there. Or perhaps it is I who am more comfortable keeping her out of the light. My husband pulls me back to reality with news of who's died in the village. Reading the RIP notices is a ritual of his, much like our parents listening for the death notices on the radio years ago. The technology has changed, but the message remains stubbornly familiar: another name, another life, another reminder that none of us stays forever.

 

"Mrs Doyle from Gurteen passed yesterday."

"Jayus, she must have been a good age. I remember her being an old lady when I was a lad."

 

"I wouldn't know her" I say.

 

"Ah, you would. She's always pottering around with her roses in the front garden."

"Oh yes, Mrs Doyle. Do we need to go to that funeral?"

"Nah, we didn't know her that well"

 

Truth be told, I never really knew many of the locals, alive or dead. Being a blow-in, originally from the county of champion hurlers—up the Cats! —I always felt a little bit like sn outsider. Then again, after spending the guts of eighteen years abroad, five in London and thirteen in San Francisco, where I met my hubby one Sunday afternoon in Molly Malone's bar on the corner of Nineteenth and Sunset, perhaps keeping to oneself becomes a bot of a habit because loving thy neighbour in the big city is not quite a thing.

 

Twenty years after our return to Ireland to buy a home and rear our children in my husband's hometown—village, really—and I'm still not entirely sure I've put down proper roots. Which is odd when you consider that the village itself is named after two ladies, Rose, and Alice. Or was it three? Rose, Ann, and Alice. Around here, even the origins of place names csn get lost in translation over time.

 

Talking of things lost in translation, there is something that still niggles at me. A verse from Genesis 3:15, the Covenant of Grace. After the apple eating incident, God puts enmity between the woman and the serpent and promises that one day she will crush his head while he will strike her heel. Simple enough, you would think except somewhere along the line, Christianity has stolen woman's chance to set the record straight. One must wonder—has the Almighty forgotten the covenant, or has God allowed man to believe in his version of its fulfillment while the true promise waits in reserve like a contingency plan.

 

Perhaps that is what niggles at me. Not the serpent himself, but God refusing to show our hand, and the part of me—of all women—that is expected to remain quiet behind the scenes.

For years I have kept him contained.

The serpent stirs.

For now, he remains my secret.