Returning to the Motherland

Going back to Ireland has always been an unsettling experience. In fantasy, it is the Motherland I return home to, but in reality, it has never been home. Ireland rejected me when I was still in my teenage mother’s womb, and she was forced to travel to London alone and live in a Mother and Baby Home. For years, I rejected Ireland just as she had rejected me. I disavowed my Irishness in favor of an adoptive identity. But ever since I connected with my roots, that small rock in the Atlantic Ocean has had a magnetic pull akin to the seductive allure of an unpredictable, exciting but abusive partner or father figure. As much as I would like to conjure in memory the comforting sound of the waves at Fanad Head in Donegal, or the ancient standing stones of Newgrange, there is always something that blocks the sense of a nurturing homeland I long for. It dawns on me that I have come to associate my native land with dissolution, endings; a kind of death.

It is after nine p.m. and my partner and I have just driven from his parent’s home in County Antrim, via my birth mother’s house in County Cavan, to our new home in Waterford. It was the first time I had seen my birth mother for over eleven and a half years. We had lunch in her garden with her wife and their dying dog, and we looked around their vegetable garden. We talked about my birth mother’s mother, who has late-stage Alzheimer’s disease. My birth mother talks about losing her mother when she is still alive. It is like she is taken over, she says. Possessed. I recall spending time with her mother over twelve years previously, but I cannot remember the details. I did not know, for example, that she was a good driver, but her driving ability was one of the first cognitive skills she lost. I ask when her Alzheimer’s came on. My birth mother says she showed early signs in around 2008, not long after her father had had a heart attack. We were still in touch then, I think, and my focus drifts onto the journey down, when we were stuck behind a lorry with the word ‘Cronos’ painted on the back, which I had read as ‘Chronos’, a symbol of cyclical time.

I try to focus on my birth mother’s story about her mother’s deteriorating illness, thinking this could be the last time I see my mother, or hear her speak about her mother. But I am too aware of the passing of time to really be fully present. I am aware of their dog, who was due to be put to sleep the night before. And I am aware of the fragility of this moment; the fragility of my birth mother’s mother, and the fragility of all of us.

I look out over the stone wall, across the fields where the cows live, to the misty hills in the distance. My birth mother has silver hair now, but the last time I saw her, it was black. I prefer it like this. It makes her look softer, more like a mother.

She tells us about her mother’s madness, which is a symptom of her Alzheimer’s. She does an impression of her sitting at the table, running a necklace through her hands and staring at it, wide eyed, as though it were an egg timer. We have all just been living through the pandemic, and the lockdown has worsened her mother’s condition. She needs help, or she needs to be put into a home, but her father does not want to let her go.

My birth mother’s father is a proud man. He likes to be in charge; to fix and make things. He used to be a pilot. When I met him for the first time, he could barely look me in the eye. I was like the unfortunate stain on the family that had stubbornly reappeared after some of the furniture had been accidentally moved. That furniture got moved when I first asked the Catholic Crusade of Rescue about my medical records, and a nun had handed me a brown envelope with letters and photographs from my birth mother inside. It was like being given keys to the secret vault of my true identity, when until then I had only been performing somebody else’s role. I had not expected the tidal wave that burst through the delicate barriers of my psychic life, but then, tidal waves are often random and volatile. If I had known back then what I was looking for, I might never have gone in search of it, because it ruptured something deep inside which has never been repaired. Or perhaps it just exposed something that was already there. This ‘primal wound’, or even this fantasy of belonging and being held in my aliveness. That is probably why I associate Ireland with dissolution, and the idea of going home with a return to an inorganic state.

Is that where my maternal grandmother is now, in her dementia? I picture this grandmother sitting at her table, playing with a necklace with the wonder, frustration, and torment of an infant trying to grasp hold of an object when the world is all new and full of possibility and danger. I visualize my maternal grandmother sliding the golden chain through her fingers and watching it fall through her frail hands like sand in an egg timer. I watch my mother performing this motion, and I think about time, stasis, and impermanence.

I was in her womb, I think to myself. I passed out of her teenage body with the help of forceps, and the voices of nuns and Catholic social workers in her head telling her to hand me over.

Sometimes, my mad grandmother goes to the doctor only to sing to him. She makes no sense and it costs fifty euro for every appointment, but this is one of her repetitious rituals and she keeps going back for more. I visualize her singing to my grandfather in the kitchen, like a child looking for an audience. Underneath the childlike performance, there is anguish and pain, as the mother my birth mother knew has disappeared. Her body is here but her memory and essence is dissolving, leaving behind an uncanny recognizable figure who no longer recognizes her own children. My birth mother says if she ever develops Alzheimer’s, she would like her wife to take her into the garden and shoot her in the head. My thoughts return to the chain in my grandmother’s hands. The chains that bind us through the maternal line, and the attacks on linking that happened when the nuns took the baby away.

The Baby

Not long ago, my maternal grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table when she suddenly started screaming. My birth mother was caring for her and asked her what the matter was. Her mother looked terrified and demanded to know where the baby was. My birth mother tried to reassure her that they would check on the imaginary baby later and that it was fine, but her mother became delirious and repeated the words “Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby?”, over and over until the room was filled with the nightmare of her mother’s infant loss. As my maternal grandmother grew ever more hysterical over the disappearance of this fictional infant, my birth mother grew upset about the loss of her own baby – the baby that nobody helped to support her with because that baby was marked by sin. As her mother’s repetitive questions about the make-believe missing child merged with the memory of her own baby, the imaginary melted into the real and my birth mother cracked, replying “the baby’s dead, ma.” At this, her elderly father broke into roaring hysterical laughter, and her mother’s expression crumbled in despair. My birth mother quickly took the words back and reassured her by saying the baby had come back to life and was fine after all. This soothed her and within moments, she had forgotten about the baby altogether.

On 12 January 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the Irish government’s Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth published a report by the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, which reported the deaths of at least 9,000 babies, detailing ‘appalling’ violence against women and children enabled by a society that ‘embraced judgmental, moral certainty and perverse religious morality.’

Rather than provide a safe place for expectant mothers to be cared for, the ‘Homes’ were set up to subjugate and sadistically abuse women for the crime of getting pregnant outside of the sanctified institution of marriage. Babies were deemed illegitimate, and therefore inhuman. Many starved to death due to neglect and malnourishment. Many were experimented on as guinea pigs for medical trials. The dead were thrown away into fields, sceptic tanks and mass unmarked graves. Survivors have been forced to live with the cruel legacy of projected out shame and post-traumatic stress.

Around the late spring of 1978, my birth mother was 18 years old and living at home in the same south Dublin house in which her parents are now growing old, when she discovered she was expecting a baby. As the eldest of seven children, my birth mother knew she could not let her younger siblings know about her body of sin. And under the critical gaze of a devoutly Catholic, morally perverse patriarchal Ireland, she knew she had to disappear, or she would be disappeared. Unless they were married, pregnant women and girls were confined to Mother and Baby Homes to have any developing sexual desire beaten out of them. When a teenage girl is faced with the prospect of being imprisoned by nuns and subjected to the judgement of the local priest, the parish and all the community, the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn trauma response would stimulate the autonomic nervous system and fear would naturally take over. But my birth mother was already terrified of the church and its powerful agents, as she had suffered relentless sexual abuse at the hands of pedophile priest between the ages of ten and fourteen. And she had learnt from bitter experience that trying to call out a religious authority always backfires in victim-blaming. Rather than supporting her as a victim of child abuse, the adults in her life reprimanded her for showing any fear when she was coerced into serving the pedophile priest his tea, and accompanying him in his private room to be molested.

Four years after the abuse had stopped, she was still carrying the Father’s shame, when she learnt she was also carrying a child. It was usual for fathers in Catholic patriarchal Ireland to be an absent presence. The father of the family would be the provider and lawmaker, while the parish priest would be the Father of guidance and counsel; the Father to whom the people were expected to confess all their sins. In this phallocentric order, the father was the overruling authority, confining the mother to the domestic affairs of home.

As the eldest of seven children, my birth mother was supposed to set an example and act as a sort of authority in the organization of the family system, but she was already burdened by the secrets and shame of child abuse inflicted on her by a paternalistic authority everybody was supposed to both trust and fear. When the idealized protector figure becomes connected with hidden cruelty, this can cause a dissociation, especially in the developing mind of a child. My birth mother was still a child when she met my teenage birth father, and while she was weighed down with the trauma and terror of child abuse, my birth father was entangled in a violent household, with an alcoholic father and competitive older brother. His two sisters were trying their best to escape their aggressive father – one ran away to London, and the other got pregnant and was confined to a Mother and Baby Home in County Cork.

It was against this punishing authoritarian backdrop that my pregnant birth mother had to decide what to do about her baby. She had dreams of escaping to England and giving birth in a freer country, where abortion was legal and unmarried mothers could exist without being othered as devil spawn. Instead, she made it to London only to find herself in St Vincent de Paul’s Mother and Baby Home next to Westminster Cathedral, run by the Daughters of Charity. It seems there was no escape from the church’s rule and the complex web of power it wove throughout society to keep people trapped in fear.

Abuse functions by way of coercive control. The most vulnerable are the easiest to control, and there is nothing more vulnerable than a baby in utero or a new born child. Having taken a vow of celibacy, nuns are not usually associated with motherhood, but I can recall a recurring dream I had when I was a young child. I was standing at the back of a huge room, a bit like the interior of a cathedral, and the room was empty apart from a figure at the very front dressed in black and white robes, like the image of a nun. In the dream, she was so far away I could not reach her, and yet she was the central focus of the scene, like an all-powerful, all-seeing and all-knowing eye. I would sometimes wonder whether the figure of the nun was my first conception of a mother.

The Catholic Crusade of Rescue

I first wrote to the Catholic Children’s Society in 2004 to enquire about my medical history. I was twenty-five. I received a generic reply saying the organization (previously known as the Catholic Crusade of Rescue until 1985) had arranged closed adoptions, and birth records were sealed, so it was very unlikely I would ever find out about my medical history or origins. There was no acknowledgement of adoptee rights to their ancestry or identity and no recognition of the birth parents, but I did not expect any acknowledgement. Prior to that time, I had been deeply ashamed of my adoptive identity and had tried to pretend to myself and others that I was not adopted.

My adoptive parents had two biological sons and a daughter of their own before I was born. Their daughter was premature, and I remember being told she had been half the size of a sugar bag. She was named after her mother, died at six days of age, and buried in an unmarked grave. I was her replacement.

There are unspoken rules in Catholic families that difficult truths must remain unspoken. This often means that unless ‘the past’ can be presented as some kind of coherent idealized biblical fairy-tale – often with a paternalistic figurehead positioned as the savior – then it must be stored away in the realm of the unsayable. My own adoptive Catholic family narrative centered around the figure of the Grandfather, whose name my adoptive father inherited. He was the great war hero, sporting and boxing champion, and colonial educator, who taught at a missionary school in Uganda, run by Catholic priests. He was also born out of wedlock; an ‘illegitimate child’, whose mother worked as a house maid for a rich family. His mother was probably raped, but he was raised by his grandmother and his mother was blamed by the entire family for her sin.

My adoptive father’s only brother was sexually abused by a priest at a Catholic residential school. He was estranged from the family for over a decade, re-emerging as a priest with the English Benedictine Congregation at Ealing Abbey, an institution that has since been exposed for its long history of sexual abuse against children. By the time I was adopted into the family, they had moved back from Uganda to Scotland, to escape Idi Amin. We would meet on all Christian holidays as an extended family of 40 people, and were often visited by the missionaries they had been raised with in Uganda.

As one of the principal Abrahamic religions, Catholicism is centered on the belief in one God, and that Jesus the Messiah was a living incarnation of God. He was resurrected following crucifixion, and will return again in judgement of the living and the dead. The principle behind the Catholic Crusade of Rescue bore the traces of charity, sacrifice, and judgement, rooted in the idea that an Abrahamic omnipotent paternalistic ruler, white savior, or priest could provide homes to needy children. Underneath the surface of saviorism lay a hotbed of abuse – scapegoating, secrecy, maternal separation, loss, perversion and shame. For the scapegoated victims – most often women and children – the trauma has been buried along with the dead children entombed in unmarked graves.

Around the same time that Britain was exporting ‘poor and vagrant children’ to its colonies, the Indian residential school system was set up in occupied Canada, forcing Indigenous people to be separated from their families and sent to boarding schools run by the church, in order to ‘civilize’ and assimilate them into the dominant colonial culture. This school system was in operation for over a hundred years, and around 150,000 children were taken in. Over 1,000 unmarked graves have recently been found at these institutions, and potentially thousands of Indigenous children died there due to abuse, torture, sexual violence and neglect.

~ Elizabeth McMullan