I remember the precise moment I realised my father was a human being. I was about 20, which would make him about 50. We were in the car on Beach Road in Sandymount. He was driving, and I was in the passenger seat. Whatever it was that he said I have long since forgotten, but I remember the shocking clarity of understanding for the first time that his use of the first person singular was his alone, that he viewed the world from his eyes, not mine, that he was on his own journey from birth to death. As young people would say now, my dad was the main character in his own life.
When I came to write my new novel, I had that moment in mind. I was interested in the highly egocentric view a child has of a parent and how that view changes over time, as the child becomes an adult. In the case of the fictional characters I created – siblings Cassie and Christo – the mother is long dead and can no longer speak for herself. There is no first-person account of her life, only friends whose memories of her are 20 years old and may or may not be reliable. The most unreliable witnesses of all are her children, who remember her imperfectly and differently.
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In writing the novel, I was asking the question every mother sooner or later asks, and that is how will your children remember you? When my daughters were small, I was working as a news reporter and often returned home long after they’d gone to bed. Getting them up the next morning for school, I would make their breakfast down in the kitchen and carry it up to my bedroom, serving it to them on the floor, so I could have another 20 minutes in bed. I wonder now, will they remember the happy picnics on the bedroom floor or the negligent mother? Such is the kaleidoscopic nature of memory, something that turns on different perspectives and reveals itself in different colours.
It’s as if all the happy memories dissolved while the unhappy ones scabbed and formed a scar
What I remember are the small bars of Dairy Milk my own mum slipped into our school lunches when we were children. I remember the nicknames she so lovingly fashioned for us. I remember her waiting patiently in the car at the schoolbus stop on rainy days. All of these serve as evidence of her love, but I’m troubled nonetheless by the gaps in my memory. I don’t remember her kissing me, don’t remember sitting on her knee or being tucked into bed by her, and I wonder, is that because those things didn’t happen? It seems unfair to her that I can recall no explicit expression of her love, unfair of me to doubt it for the lack of those memories.
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My childhood was a tremendously happy one, but I can remember very few specifics. I know there were holidays in Connemara and long summer days with my grandparents on their farm in Meath. In winter we made day trips to the Dublin mountains to build dams, with crisps and red lemonade in the pub afterwards. These things all form a happy haze, but there’s no single instance that I can clearly recall. It’s as if all the happy memories dissolved while the unhappy ones scabbed and formed a scar. What stands out is the time I raided a box of liqueur chocolates and vomited. As clear as yesterday is the day my dad put me out of the car for fighting with my brother and drove off. I remember and cannot forget the one time my mother slapped me, when I spilt a carton of cream that she’d begged me not to open. That episode was known forever after in our house as The Cream, a black mark against her as a mother that she very much regretted.
There’s only one scene in the novel that’s autobiographical, set in the Gothic Chapel in Kylemore Abbey. It was summertime, about 10 years ago, and I was visiting Kylemore in memory of my mum, who had recently died. Kylemore was significant in her life, because she’d spent several unhappy years there as a boarder, but she liked to go back every summer, hopping over the fence to avoid paying the entrance fee. I remember sitting in the beautiful Gothic chapel by the lake and hearing the sound of women’s voices singing. I couldn’t tell where the voices were coming from, but I was moved by them. I was thinking of all my mum’s ups and downs, which had affected me disproportionately, as every parent’s ups and downs affect their children. That’s when I realised, in a moment of great clarity and peace, that they were all just the stuff of her life and her life was now over. None of it had anything to do with me.
The Home Scar by Kathleen MacMahon is published by Penguin Sandycove
