THE WOMAN sat down and wrote me a letter. She put it in a brown envelope and wrote out the address of this newspaper and stuck two stamps on the top right hand corner. She put the letter in the post.
Perhaps she let it hover over the mouth of the postbox before dropping it in.
I can only guess at what she was thinking. Did it feel like some kind of temporary release when she let the letter go or did she experience a pang of regret wishing she could reach back in and pull it out again?
I would like to peer behind the curtain of her life, to see her eyes, the colour of her hair, the lines on her face, the set of her mouth. She signed herself A. Mother.
Sometimes these anonymous letters come in and you wonder how to respond or whether to respond at all because there is no way of checking with the person or checking the facts. You go by instinct. You decide it is worth sharing. You turn the letter over in your hands. You cry.
In the first line of the letter, A. Mother apologised for writing and she apologised for the paper which was lined and torn from a notebook as if that was something to apologise for. As if it mattered. But it’s funny the irrelevant things you think of when you are divulging the unthinkable events of your life.
She was writing on a lined page to “steady her hand” she explained. I close my eyes now and imagine her at a tidy desk, tear-soaked tissues in the bin beside her and in my imaginings, I reach out and take hold of her hand.
This woman wrote to me to talk about the things that had been happening to her three-year-old daughter. I think she thought that because I am a parent of two three-year-old daughters I might feel her pain. But if it happened how she tells, you don’t have to be the parent of a three-year-old or a parent of anybody for that matter to feel the pain of the woman who wrote this letter. You only have to have a heart.
She told me she is a single mother and that some time ago the father of her child came back into her life. A custody order was put in place and so, for the past year, every Saturday her daughter has gone off to spend the day with her father.
Last month her child started to talk about some unspeakable things that were happening in her father’s house. The details the woman shared do not need to be included here.
The child has been interviewed by a police officer and a social worker and as she wrote the letter, this mother was waiting for the phone to ring so somebody could tell her the time of the appointment for her daughter’s medical examination.
The woman works in education. She looks at all the academic books on her shelves and all the policy documents hoping for answers she knows she wont find. Her heart is broken.
She doesn’t know where she will find the courage to carry on but she says she will find it from somewhere. The courage to smile when she picks her daughter up from nursery school. The courage to praise her for being so brave at the medical exam. The courage to put one foot in front of the other foot and the other foot in front of that one and whatever else it takes to learn how to walk through this new world.
The courage to travel from here to another place where all that is important is that her little girl loves Peppa Pig and In The Night Garden and all your average three-year-old stuff.
If she can find that kind of courage then maybe, just maybe, she thinks she can guide herself and her daughter through this horror.
“Róisín, I’m so sorry,” wrote this woman who has exactly nothing to apologise for. “Sorry that Saturday after Saturday, despite her tears and her upset, I put her into her daddy’s car and told her to be a good girl. I am so sorry I didn’t know. I know now and I will pray. I will throw up and I will weep but I am not sure I will ever, ever understand . . . how does one stay grounded in a place so repugnant?”
The letter has sat on my kitchen window sill for a few weeks now. Every morning I look at the letter and wonder how this little family are and whether A. Mother can smile without faking it yet or whether that will take weeks or months or years.
I hope she and her daughter are getting all the help they need. I hope that even if she can’t see it now she can at least sense that there is the possibility of healing somewhere along the road. I hope she has people close to her that she can talk to and that she talks to them often.
You see, you get letters like this and it’s difficult to know what to do or whether to do anything at all and they sit and haunt you from your windowsill.
In other news . . . Co Dublins Mountains to Sea Book Festival is in full swing and today at 2.30pm, Ill be at a talk by authors Pauline McLynn and Anna McPartlin who are appearing at the Assembly Rooms, County Hall, Dún Laoghaire. Admission €10/€8. mountainstosea.ie