Part 13: Old Bloody Home

So I have spent the last couple days ruminating on this.
Here’s what happened.
A peripheral member of my husband’s family shared some thoughts with me recently. She said approximately this:
I have to talk to you about your sons.
(Sharp intake of breath…mine)
I see how wrapped up you are in them and how wrapped up they are in you. It’s just not right. You need to let them go.
I pause ….
I say this: in your brief association with me, what could possibly have led you to this conclusion? I mean- we have met like, just three times by my reckoning. What do you think you know about me and my sons to be able to make such a statement?
Well, she says, I see it on you.
What do you see, I ask.
She says – well we have a saying.
And then she utters some unintelligible pig Latin.
I say: I have no idea what that means.
And then she translates for me using the crudest words possible.
What she says in effect is that my children are still awash in my birthing fluids.
Except that is not precisely what she says. I’ll leave that to your fertile imaginations.
I recoil .
I say…. what???
What????
Yes, she says. And goes on to explain further except that I don’t hear much of what she actually says from there onwards because of the blood pounding in my ears.
Before I go further here, I’ll tell you a sort of funny story. When the boys were young they would pile onto my bed to hear a story, or a song (usually I Could Be Happy WithYou, but sometimes Normandy from Once Upon a Mattress) or watch a movie, or to sometimes just be. Sometimes all at once, which could make for some tricky positioning once three became four.
As you may know, I am constructed like your regular ordinary human. Two arms, two legs, one torso. Timothy, in accordance with the laws of primogeniture always claimed one arm. The baby, by the laws of the lagniappe would lie with his head on my chest and nobody better even think about moving him- they would be better off unleashing the kraken. That left one other arm, for either one of the twins. (No they’re not really twins)
One day, the child left with neither arm nor chest sighed. And I said, as I would always say, you can lie on mummy’s tummy, which then, as now, was a fairly squishy and comfortable place.
That day, the child, I think it was Chrissy, said…ahh, my old home. To which the other middle child, probably Liam, said “old BLOODY home,” having recently been coached in the details of the birth process and all the gore involved therewith.
And so another term was added to the O’Sullivan lexicon along with “squeazle,” “glub,” and “codenap.” (I will explain those another time.)
And there after the last one on the bed would lament, “Old bloody home AGAIN?? I was old bloody home last time! It’s someone else’s turn for old bloody home!” Clearly old bloody home did not muster pride of place, though it would do in a pinch.
And so for the last few days as I have been choking on bile at the sheer presumption of this woman I have pondered old bloody home and the fluids it contained and their role and mine in the raising and nurturing of these boys.
Someone who means nothing to me, and who incidentally has never birthed or raised anything, pitched my world on its ear and caused me to have an existential moment.
She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know my story. A story that began on Maraval Road and the oilfields of Guyana, and 3 Elizabeth Street; an inauspicious beginning and an inconvenient birth into a marriage that decayed in its infancy. It is the story of the troops who mustered to save the day in the form of a doting grandfather and a gentle grandmother, handsome and generous uncles, a flamboyant aunt, a passionate mother and a her loving second husband who was my real father. And in corralling to save the day, they also saved the baby.
And so I parent my sons the only way I know how. With only everything. With only all of it. The only way I was raised to.
I am not a perfect mother. My sons would be the first to tell you how imperfect I am. It’s a mother-child unit that’s mostly held together with duct tape and spit. I’m making it up as I go along. It’s all ad-lib and improv. But here is my role- I am the launching pad, I am the safe space. I will pay your phone bill and order your groceries online to make sure you eat real food. I’ll make sure you have clean socks and if she breaks your heart, I’ll listen to you cry at two in the morning. And I’ll cry too. I’ll read your term paper on your plan for peace in the Middle East, and listen to you recite Shakespeare monologues over and over and over. I’ll be your strength until you no longer need me. And if the day never comes when you don’t need me, so be it.
That woman does not know what we’ve been through to get here. Along with the stories and songs and joys there have been massive disappointments and tragedies- just like in any life I suppose. But she doesn’t know. Because it is not her place to know. Just as it is not her place to judge me. Or my sons. Or our story. Not her place to offer unsolicited drunken counsel about something she knows nothing about.
But that peripheral was right I suppose. Being their mother is not all that I am, but it is the largest part of me.
I suppose that at my very essence, at my very core, I am old bloody home.
And so be it.
Mind your own path. I will be walking mine.