Gasping at Straws

We hit thirty and begin to turn into our parents. Sort Of.

My book, Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By is out now! If you’d like to order the hardback, audio or Kindle editions, they’re linked below.

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This could have been one of those deep columns. One of the ones which seeks to elevate the mundane by craning our neck and squinting at it pensively. A bit of metaphor. Some lateral gesturing at profound truths or some such. But we don’t have time for that because I realised this week that I’m turning into my mother, and you’re probably doing the same. Turning into your own mother, that is, rather than mine. Or your father, or some horrendous pastiche of both. Your mouth opens and one of their phrases is emitted from some strange forgotten recess. You say, ‘That’s what you’re wearing, is it?’ to your sibling or your boyfriend or your friend as you head out the door and you realise you are doing that passive aggressive thing your mother did. The thing you hated. In that moment you’d understand if someone wanted to put you alone on a barge with a supply of water and just nudge you out into open sea.

It has been coming on gradually over a period of years. Often, I’ll see a photo of myself and my eye will trace in its lines the contours of some expression that I recognise as having been arranged across my mother’s face. I’ll look at the eyes and see those of my father, which is a bit awkward when you never much liked him and you associate the original set with an expression of perpetual supplication or anger, or both. The only time they would rest on you for more than a moment or two was when their expression would corkscrew hilt-deep into your own eyes while he asked you for something. Money. Or vodka. Or money for vodka.

It must have been bizarre for him to see his own two eyes looking back, cold and distant, refusing. No was the answer, always. No I won’t give you anything. No I don’t have it. Even if I did it would still be no. And his eyes would flash and roll, and he’d call me a ‘complete cunt’ with a tone of vitriol so caustic only levity could slough it off effectively. I’d reply merrily ‘Personally, when asking someone for something I always like to consider how to formulate the request to maximise my chances of success. But I respect your more forthright method for being honest, if highly ineffective. I am, obviously, not giving you anything. Also, I’m eighteen years old, so let’s consider that for a moment. Alright. Well, you have yourself as good a Wednesday as you can.’ But I’d think, ‘Well that’s just typical. This should be far more embarrassing for him than it is for me. Yet here we are. Shame in all the wrong places, as usual.’

I see him still when I look in the mirror, or at photographs, particularly when I’m tired, or sad, or look as though I’ve been on a weeks-long bender. Since I’m a teetotaller it takes a bout of food poisoning or a bad flu to get me to look quite so messed up. It’s hard to mimic the forlorn grey hue and spooked look of a person six weeks into the sort of binge that renders them hospitalised, inflammable, or both. But if I’m sufficiently dehydrated and get gaunt enough in the face, there he is, peering twitchily back at me in the mirror, the force of his need enough to drag you down into hell with him. ‘No’. I tell my reflection then. ‘I have nothing for you. Even if I did, I wouldn’t give it’.

My mother’s legacy visits itself upon me in milder, often sillier ways that feel less taxing and generate a fonder, less complicated relationship with her memory. Keeping cups lip-down in the cupboard which in the context of Ireland is a known signifier of Protestantism or notions – the two are, after all, synonymous. I don’t like the idea of dust settling in them otherwise (even though I own six cups and they’re all used daily). A too-highly attuned disgust reflex so that if I dislike the smell in someone’s home my mother’s voice reverberates in my head. ‘Wash that cup before you drink from it!’ The implication being that I will otherwise contract dysentery from this mildly tea-stained cup and defaecate myself to death extravagantly before I can reach a hospital. Which of course I cannot do without causing offence or looking insane which my mother’s voice assures me I’m not. Safety first and all that. Sure – my two year-old nephew can be caught sucking the skirting board near the toilet and be absolutely fine. But if I eat a slightly stale rich tea biscuit, I will certainly die. I once witnessed my mother tip an entire cup of tepid tea into our host’s obliging potted aspidistra when they left the room to answer the front door rather than take a single sip from a cup she deemed slightly unclean. I’m confident that it killed the hearty old plant stone dead in the days or weeks after our visit. A casualty of unrelenting standards.

This week, one particular habit of my mother’s has had me questioning the extent to which it is our undeniable destiny to turn into our parents. That we are mere victims of their traits and mannerisms and faces, which lurk coded or learned deep beyond what we consciously consider or know, and which emerge as time passes and we begin to discreetly point out teenagers on the street to a friend our age and say things like ‘Is that young man unhoused or is he just ‘doing a look’?’ Your friend will then squint ignorantly along with you and say ‘I think it’s an ‘on purpose’ look? Because of the bucket hat, which is Gucci. I think? He’s either got a lot of money, or none, but it’s hard to say which for sure.’

My mother gasped. She was a gasper. If someone dropped something, or nearly did, or if she tripped, spilled something, or simply took fright for any reason, she would audibly, richly gasp with the fulsomeness of a town gossip or a deep sea diver. She would emit a dramatic, objectively silly gasp. The sort of gasp you would associate with a Victorian woman being medicated with laudanum and cool, dark rooms for ‘hysteria’. The sort of woman who says things like ‘I’ll have to go and lie down’ as if anyone has the time or the budget to be prone in the middle of the day in this economy.

 My mother’s gasp made no sense. She did not ‘lie down’. Possibly even at night. It would not be a surprise to wake in the night to fetch yourself a glass of water only to find her reading, or engaged in some other manner of productive but in no way night-time-appropriate work. ‘I’m just polishing the coffee table. The dullness was bothering me.’ I’d just blink at her dryly, considering that if I were wearing a watch it must surely read between one and three am. ‘I couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d make soda bread. Get a run at the day. You know.’ A run at the day, as if Limerick city in the 2010s were Thermopylae. Somewhere you had to launch yourself at an enemy emitting a death-shriek and wielding your weapon of choice. A sword! Or some soda bread! My mother was a true product of second-wave feminism, believing that women should do everything but also that they should feel they’re not doing everything well enough.

So the gasp seemed out of character but it spoke to the reality beneath. The anxiety. The fact that my mother was a string pulled taut and any extra little tug or snag might snap it. As though she was waiting for the bad thing to happen at any moment, every moment. The milk spilling. The bills hitting the doormat. The bad news phone call. Always on the precipice of disaster. The sound was profoundly annoying. My brother and I would taunt her endlessly about it. The size – the mass – of the gasp. The luxuriant way it filled a room. Its disproportionate sense of drama in a person so otherwise undramatic. You sound, we would tell her, like someone on meth sanding a wardrobe; like a dog’s squashed chew toy reinflating; like an overzealous under 7s basketball coach with a broken whistle; like a forklift elevating a palette full of toilet seats; like a woman who’s about to demand to speak to the manager. You sound like a crazy person.

So anyway I’ve inherited the gasp. I hate it so much, and every time it happens I think of my mother and I laugh and I hate it and I wish a little that she were here to say that I sound like a cat barely tolerating a rectal thermometer. The gasp arises from the diaphragm and it is reactionary, so I cannot seem to train it away. To think it away. It comes forth of its own volition when something is spilled, jostled, walked into. When we find ourselves on the cusp of a tiny, routine disaster or an error that will definitely not cause grievous injury to anybody. I consider it, trying to remember if I did the gasp when my mother was alive (I don’t think so), and if not, when it began. When precisely my mother jumped forth from my past to fill my lungs noisily, hysterically, pointlessly, with air at precisely the least appropriate moment.

I suppose it doesn’t matter. There she is regardless, taking fright on my behalf. Reinforcing me with her many good and less ridiculous qualities. Keeping me humble with the stupid gasp. And there too is my father, asking for things I wouldn’t give even if I had them. Reminding me through his large and darting eyes that there are worse legacies than gasping dramatically like an arse when someone spills a small amount of coffee. Worse legacies than a bit of silliness and the odd aspidistra sacrificed to protect arbitrarily high hygiene standards. It’s all in there. It’s all me. And it isn’t, because I’m something else as well. Someone else.