Easter Memories
I was born into a big Irish catholic family, the youngest of nine in the year 1958. My father’s mother was very devout. She was a Countess of the Holy Roman Empire. My father used to grandly say to us “you are all countesses”! I am not historically sure if this lineage did carry on but my man is very happy for me to don this title…
My father believed in the catholic faith, his sister was a Sacred Heart nun and his brother was a Jesuit priest. This was a very prestigious and not unusual thing for an established Irish family to have people in holy orders. My mother was a believer but more reserved about it yet nonetheless bore the consequences of being devout in that she had eleven pregnancies in total. I was sent to schools run by nuns, a harsh environment if you weren’t a scholarly scholar that got high grades. I was good at English, Art and History but rubbish at hockey, tennis, geography, maths and adhering to the endless rules. For PE I was always put in goal which was a terrifying and freezing place to be. I was hopeless at it. I was rarely picked for any of the sports teams and felt the isolation of not being in the ‘cool gang’.
When I was young, I loved going to Mass and truly believed I would be a nun. Mass was in Latin and the priests would sing together, a special sound, especially at Easter; a glorious and uplifting time: the smouldering scent of fresh flowers, three or more priests at the altar, their voices rising up above us, their vestments all purple and gold swishing down the aisle with the gold cross held aloft and the burning sense of the swinging thurible. Easter was a time to celebrate, Christ had risen. All the pain he had suffered on our account could now be taken up by God and our prayers to promise to do better would carry on ad infinitum.
devouring as much chocolate as you could muster
On Good Friday there were no pubs open, no meat was eaten and you were to spend time reflecting on the huge sacrifice Christ made for us. The only place you could get a drink was on the trains so there used to be lots of very unlikely travellers rushing onto the trains and staying on there for quite a while.
Easter Sunday would arrive, the anticipation and joy not only to be soon free of the lenten sacrifices you made but the knowledge that after Mass you would be eating a huge lunch with family and devouring as much chocolate as you could muster.
A lot of Catholicism is designed to make you feel bad and guilty about yourself and others. As a baby you were born with venial sin, doomed from the start, always lacking. We were constantly threatened by the nuns that we could end up in Purgatory (which is a very bad waiting room ) or hell which is a lot worse, if we didn’t do….. whilst Heaven was practically an unattainable goal it was your main aim in life. In class I would ask the nuns “how would I cope with being an amorphous soul endlessly floating around heaven”? They had no answer other than we would be in God’s paradisiacial domain, The Father’s House and that would be enough. Not for me. It terrified me, the never endingness of it.
After my father died when I was ten, I became less enchanted with the whole God is Great deal and I started to question how good was he? After all my family had imploded, I was left with my sister next in age to me to live with our very depressed and increasingly emotionally absent mother. When my sister met her first big love she went to live with him in Wicklow in a gypsy caravan and it was just Mummy and I in a big Victorian house in Dublin that I still have recurring dreams about.
It made total sense that some years later my first big love would be drink and drugs.
Easter today is a different beast but still with some of the old traditions. I don’t eat lamb but I will have something special for lunch. I like to have lots of yellow flowers and I put out my funny collection of antique linen and weirdly knitted egg cosies. I think of my mother and father and the religious traps they were in. I send them love and I send forgiveness to myself and my family. We have all suffered as a result of restrictive religious beliefs.
I also take a quiet moment to remember the time that I, as a young Irish woman in Dublin where there were no women’s health services, other than ones secretly run by brave feminists, stupidly became pregnant and was in no position to have a child and had to find a way to get help. That woman making calls in a public phone box to a number passed on by another woman and finally meeting that advisor in a tiny room above a shop and that advisor giving the contact details for a clinic in London. The feelings of shame and horror at what she had to do. Hauling herself over to London staying with her sister under the auspices of partying with an old friend for a couple of days and then driving back to Dublin with her for the big Easter celebrations.
There was no celebration for me that day other than I hadn’t destroyed my future with a child I could give no real family name to….
Easter is a poignant moment in time. I take a short brief nod to the history and send love to myself and that being that I do hope is spinning around in the atmosphere with all the other beloved beings that are no longer with me.