It’s the women’s issue next week. In your column, we would like you to talk about women, or women’s issues. Perhaps you’d like to talk about your mother?” says the chatty email.
When an invitation turns up like that, there’s only one thing for it. Turn up ‘Mandinka’ by Sinéad O’Connor on the stereo. Very Loud. Jump about a bit.
Ah, that’s better.
Writing about women. In general. Commenting on them, no less. And their issues. Generalising. And, in particular: about mothers. Irish mothers. And, specifically: my mother. My Irish Mother. Where would you begin? Where does any man begin, truthfully?
The act of naming, of observing, of writing about, of commenting on in any way, is to distance yourself; it is an act of separation from whom or what you are describing. The exception to that rule, the one that proves it, is when a man talks about his mother in Ireland. For a man to say anything about his mother that would not fit snugly into the Guinness Book of Sainted Irish Mothers: that’s the last remaining heresy in Ireland. For a man like me, with a mother as extraordinary as mine, to hesitate to publish a sweet-sounding paean would, indeed, be very queer of me. Why don’t I just say something nice and make everyone feel good, and then we can all go home?
I’m reminded of Cordelia, who refused to pander to Lear. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her father, indeed her love was deep. It’s just that she wasn’t going to be inauthentic, and she wasn’t going to fawn in public to the old king, like her oleaginous sisters.
But it’s more than just filial integrity. Projection always comes into play in relations between the sexes, at whatever degree of separation, (and, unavoidably, when a man is asked to write about women). While it may not be a conscious choice, the notion of sexual orientation implies a preference for the set of characteristics of one sex, physical, emotional, social, energetic, symbolic, and relational, that is more attractive than the other’s. It’s not just a matter of the genitalia of the person you desire. But, if I were to construct a person from scratch in my mind, and disregard that curious circuitry in me that produces sexual arousal (absurd, I know) I could imagine k.d. lang fitting the bill for me as a partner, or someone a lot like her. My fantasy is that she’d be stridently independent like a man, croon like an angel, be noble in character, very humorous, but also possess a glowing warmth, and a relational wisdom, which I think is far more prevalent a quality amongst women than men. Not to mention that she swaggers like Elvis. (Bizarrely, I woke up this morning dreaming of one of the brightest women I know, a brilliant academic. She “accidentally” let her skirt fall, in front of me, to reveal the most succulent and enormous cock, which I wouldn’t go near, because it wasn’t a man’s cock. Freud, eat your heart out.)
It’s all projection, we human beings do lots of strange things in our minds when it comes to sex and the sexes. When it comes to mothers, on whom, at one stage, we all depended for life itself, we can often have very mixed feelings about someone who embodies that earliest memory of powerlessness, reminds us, at some archaic level, of that enormous need, alerts us to that experience of overwhelming vulnerability. Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic model posits that it is a matter of psychological maturity to acknowledge the extraordinarily intense ambivalence we all have in relationships, starting with our first great love affair, Mother. Our pleasure when we are loved and cooked for and fed and stroked and cuddled, sits uneasily with our rage and hate when we realise that it can all be taken away, against our will. It is Klein who gave us the notion of the good breast and the bad breast. The idea is that, once these projections and conflicts are, at least, acknowledged, that’s when the real adult relating begins, when the person behind the projection can step forward and be known. I’m sure every woman knows of a man who has loved them only up to a point – as long as they are being looked after, soothed, cuddled – and then witnessed a boyish tantrum, raging, when such maternal attention is not forthcoming.
In my experience, this expectation of being nurtured does not burden men in relationships to the same degree. Men who love men don’t have to live so obviously with that psychic legacy of our lovers’ mothers – we don’t have to replace them, play that role. And if we do play that role, we often pay the consequences. I think many women are familiar with that no-win situation.
In The Great Hunger, a play by Tom McIntyre that I was in, back in the 80s, the designer, Bronwen Casson, came up with a ghostly representation of an Irish Mother that was resonant with Patrick Kavanagh’s eponymous poem. But it also struck an archetypal chord with audiences. Made of a brown, peaty wood, the seated figure, at once Madonna of the Bogs, kitchen table with drawer, revered pagan icon lifted up in adulation, and a static, brooding, silent presence, this “character” of Mother was the stuff of nightmares. She could only have been “played” by a statue. No mere flesh and blood could have survived the voltage of projection going on in Kavanagh’s and MacIntyre’s world. She was spawned by the tortured imagination of the Irish male. Enslaved to this dominant, domestic devotional object, her son was “stuck in a slot of sterility”, and there was no escape. In such scenarios, common throughout Irish society, neither mother nor offspring wins. No change or evolution is possible, except a curious twisted sexuality in the man, the like of which we are beginning to understand more and more, sadly, as the Ferns Report demonstrates.
It is not an external agency that inflicted these pervert priests on Ireland, like missionaries from an alien planet. These priests are Irish men with Irish mothers and fathers – we made them. The understanding of how these men came to be the way they are will only come from the understanding of how they were brought up.
No, it’s not the mothers’ faults. But there’s something in the mother/son relationship in Ireland worth shining a light on; what men do to their mothers, and other women, and what mothers do to their darlin’ boys.