July 11, 2025
FICTION by Meg Macroom
Saoirse
“Mum?” I called gently as I entered my aunt’s living room in West Cork.
“Mum, are you awake?”
Peat embers hissed in the hearth, releasing loamy, whiskey scents. Floor-to-ceiling windows flung wide, opening onto the stone patio, water puddling, moss growing between Wicklow granite. My mother sleeping in her favorite Charleston beige-twill chair, a cream, honeycomb Aran wool throw snuggled around her, feet up on a rose-hued ottoman. Her long hair, mostly white now with streaks of coal, still thick, coiled in a loose, long braid. I stopped and breathed. My shoulders dropped. Face muscles relaxed. Inhale. Exhale. Home. The cadence of soft rain and murmuring wind. Alive. Quiet. Wet. Wild. Diaspora nostalgia still seized me, like some Hallmark romance, I smiled, shaking my head.
I walked over to the French doors, the floor damp with rain. Outside, on the patio, an old wrought iron table, of so many morning coffees and after dinner drinks, tipped at an awkward angle on the uneven stone. Black, curved-footed iron chairs, akimbo, sleek with rain. On the table, my mother’s favorite coffee pot, a winking eye, rouge cheeks, red lips, Bailey’s forming an eyebrow, beside a matching mug, water lapping over the yum in the inner rim. Half-eaten eggs and soggy toast sloshing around on a white plate, knife and fork smeared with yoke and crumbs, resting on the side. Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, face down, sodden on the table. Sea gusts puffed at evergreens around the terrace, silver-blue thistles swayed in the distance. In the lower field, black and white cows meandered, munching their cud, fog stretched out like pulled gauze and the mighty Atlantic foamed white in the distance.
After my father passed, my mother took early retirement, gave me our white clapboard cottage in Maine, sold the family sailboat, packed a few things and hitched a ride with sea-faring friends in an Atlantic crossing back to Ireland – a bucket list Mum and Dad had planned together. Seamus was aboard, his remains in an urn, to be scattered in the Irish sea. That was Mum. Never one to wallow. Life gave you lemons, Saoirse set up a citrus farm.
At the time she was beginning to show early dementia. Aoife, Mum’s younger sister and her husband Aidan, invited Mum to move in with them. I had an appointment at Cork University by then, traveling to West Cork was easy and something I did often. Aidan and Aoife had taken over his parent’s sea-swept dairy farm and raised five children. My cousins. With the kids all gone to London and Australia, they had plenty of space. Aoife, my aunt, a self-taught interior designer, who helped open the Interior Design Academy of Ireland, had used the farmhouse as her métier studio, her training-ground. She did her self-organized apprentice alongside five pregnancies, births, endless breastfeeding, diaper-changing, shopping, cooking and cleaning for her family. Over the years, Aoife and Aiden expanded and modernized the ancient structure, crafting a home filled with light, streaming from countless windows and skylights, burnt umber, mustard and Persian blue carpets covering polished wood floors and tasteful, comfortable furnishing welcoming in every room. The farmhouse now garnered a good income, with Aoife and Aiden running an award-winning bed and breakfast as they slowly sold off farmland and cows.
“Mimi? Mimi, a leanbh, my child, is that you?” Saoirse stirred and struggled to pull herself up to a sitting position, her purple fuzzy sock-covered feet pushing at the ottoman for leverage.
“Mum. Mum, I’m here. Let me help you.” I turned from the door frame, overlooking the patio, pulling the massive window-doors closed behind me, and went to her.
“Mimi.” She said. “Mimi.”
“Yes, Mum.”
“Mimi.”
“Yes,” I said as I sat down on the ottoman by my now frail mother, my brave Irish goddess, and leaned forward, gathering her in my arms. I held her softly, hot tears tricking down the sides of my nose, into the corners of my mouth. “Oh Mum.” I said. “I love you so much.” She let me hold her silently and then started gently patting my back.
“Mimi” she said again, her jade eyes, tinged red, small and hazy with sleep.
“It’s me Mum. Mimi.” I released her and helped her sit up right.
“Well now,” she focused. “It really is you mo mhuirnin.”
“It is Mum. It’s me. Mimi. Would you like some tea Mum?”
“Oh yes, that would be grand Mimi. Just grand.”
“Let me go to the kitchen. I’ll be right back. Ok?”
“Yes, darling. Ok,” she said re-arranging the blanket around her.
The farmhouse was unusually empty that afternoon. Just me and Mum. The American couple, staying in the B&B section, were out on an Irish whiskey tour. Aiden and Aoife had gone to town for a shop. Niamh, the home health care nurse who helped with Mum didn’t arrive until early evening. Alone in the kitchen, as the kettle warmed, I opened and closed cupboards, pulling out biscuits and tea and arranging them on a green tray with red Celtic knots.
Recently, Aoife had been giving Mum medical marijuana - illegally. The tincture gave Mum relief from the dementia corroding her brain. Aoife had given Mum a dose just as I set off on N71 in my car from Cork City. Time for Mum to sleep, and the cannabis to work magic, as I drove down - offering a few hours of the old Saoirse where she could remember and communicate – as she always had. I lifted the whistling kettle from the AGA, decanted some of the roiling water into a translucent white tea pot, swirled to warm the porcelain, then sprinkled dried teas leaves and filled with the hot, sweet spring water. How cruel that cannabis was not yet legal, I thought. How totally insane. Why would any government deny citizens this succor? I was working myself indigent. The law had to change. It must. In the meantime, I sighed, climbing down from my soapbox, God forbid Aidan and Aoife get arrested. Absurd but possible.
I returned to the living room with tea, Hob Nobs, Jaffa Cakes and McVities digestives. Mum was upright and lucid. “Oh lovely,” she said, “Proper tea. Not that American-style soggy bag in a mug. Thank you, love.”
“Of course, Mum,” handing her a digestive and setting the tea tray on the settee. “Just let it cool a bit first, ok?”
“Do you think I’ve forgotten how to drink tea, now do you?” she said in her old mischievous tone.
“Just don’t want you to burn yourself, that’s all,” I smiled gently, settling down on the carpet near her, stretching my limbs after the flight and propping my feet up on the chair’s arm.
“Such a good child. Always were. You know.”
“Well Mum, you made it easy, having a mother like you.”
“Ah now with the flattery,” she reached for my hand and held in hers on the arm of the chair, “tell me all about America.”
“America’s great, Mum. You know. It’s America.” She had forgotten I had not yet left. That I would fly next week. I played along, easier that way.
“Yes, I suppose it is,” she sighed.
Wanting to talk about the past, terrain where her brain still functioned smoothly, I pivoted and asked, “Hey Mum, when you and Dad first bought the sailboat in Maine, do you remember?” I handed her a steaming cup and took a sip from my mug, bergamot blooming in my mouth.
“Biddy Met, you mean? Ah, the times we had on her, didn’t we?” Mum launched into the time when we ended up an island, too far out in the ocean, and a storm blew in. We took shelter in a little cove, Biddy Met scrapping her belly to anchor, and spent the night under deck, waiting out the storm, playing mad games of scrabbled until we fell asleep rocking in the waves.
As she lost herself in the familiar family story, I gazed at her and my mind wandered. Of the privileged I had been born into, Saoirse as my mum was the luckiest of all. She was the rarest of mothers. When I was young, she would plan elaborate “capers” for me and my friends - adventures along the Maine coast and forests, enthralling us, as we hiked, with stories of brave goddess who wielded magic spells. Eventually we would all collapse in a giggling heap on a sun-warmed rock by the ocean, moaning about aching feet, my mother dolling out cheese sandwiches and her homemade English pickle. In the late summer evenings, she would drag mattresses to the yard and host mattress-jumping contests and marshmallow roasts for all us kids. My father would strum his banjo, other parents mellowing, smoking weed, lounging around the lawn in fading light. As I grew older, she encouraged me to become a scientist. Just like me, Mimi. You’ll be just like me! She would say with excitement. Did I ever want to be. Just like her. Just like my Mum. My best friend. My hero.
Seeing her slowly tormented, fading as her brain dissolved was surreal horror. This was not my mother. Brilliant, playful, beloved Saoirse, slipping away. How cruel mortality is. I had been offered a one-year visiting professorship at Washingtonian University after my presenation at their May conference. I did not want to leave her and planned to turn the position down. When I had told her, she threw a violent screaming fit, very un-Saoirse-like and a common side-effect of dementia, when I said I would turn the offer down. She would not hear of it. Not her daughter. Not any daughter of hers. No. A daughter of hers had courage. Her daughter would go to America just like she did. Forgetting, of course, that I was American. That she raised me to be American.
“Hey Mum,” I said when she finished her story, pouring more tea for us both, “you know I had this weird memory I wanted to ask you about.”
“What is it Mimi, love?” her green eyes now flashing with life, energized from the cannabis, tea and storytelling.
“Well, I don’t know if it is even a real or something I imagined.”
“Go on. Tell me. You better hurry up I don’t have much time left you know.”
“Mum. Stop.”
“Well, now, it’s true. Talk” she commanded.
“Ok,” I said reluctantly. I was hesitant but she was right. Soon the chance would no longer exist. Plus, she was enjoying rare lucidity, thanks to the cannabis. I needed to take advantage of this time, if I was going to ask at all.
“Well,” I started slowly, “It’s bizarre. Awful and it can’t be true.”
“Spit it out” she encouraged sipping more tea.
“Do you remember when Dad gave me ‘the sex talk.’ I think I was eleven or twelve? We were at breakfast and I asked why you were screaming at night? Do you remember?”
“Oh yes, Mimi. I remember.”
“You do?”
“I do,” she put her cup down.
“Can we talk about it?”
“We are, aren’t we?”
“I remember waking up, hearing you scream “No! Seamus, no! No!!” I got out of my bed and went towards your bedroom. Your door was shut. I never heard you yell before. I remember being scared and confused.”
“Go on” she said quietly, picking up her cup down.
“Did that happen?”
“It did.”
“What happened?”
“Your father thought he might try to rape me.”
“What?” I flinched in horror. My childhood starting to crumble a bit. “Dad tried to rape you? That’s what I heard that night?”
“Mimi, love, do you know why I remember?”
“No.”
“Because it was the first and last time. He hurt me and hurt you because you heard. He was so ashamed. Now, you don’t hurt people you love, do you? If you’re decent, you don’t hurt people or animals or any living thing. Right?”
“Right.”
“I told Seamus if he ever tried anything like that again, one night, while he was asleep, I would saw off his prick with a serrated knife and throw it in the ocean. He knew I was mad enough to do it. Too. That’s the thing about Irish mothers, Mimi, we have suffered. Lord knows we have suffered. But we don’t take shite lying down. It’s the revolutionary DNA, you know love, all those years fighting the bloody English.” I nodded, transfixed on her face, trying to process this information. “You don’t fuck with an Irish mother, now do you?”
“No.”
“No, you don’t. That’s right. That’s what I said to your Dad. He knew.”
“But… but,” now I was the one weepy and confused. My mother had reclaimed her mother-like role. I was the child again. “I always felt so special. You guys gave me this rare, magical childhood.”
“You did, now, didn’t you Mimi. Have a magical childhood. We made sure of that, didn’t we?” She put her teacup down.
“But how could that be true if Dad did this? Even once. It doesn’t make any sense,” I said confused.
“You know Mimi, it was the ‘70s and that damn Playboy magazine was so popular in America. The sexual revolution and all that jazz. The sex was great—sure. That I didn’t mind at all. But the misogyny linked to the sex? No thank you. That I did mind. Very much.”
“What do you mean Mum?”
“Your Dad and I, we loved sex. We really did. We had a few love affairs too. The both of us. Not together, of course. We did. Don’t look so surprised, Mimi. We gave our marriage that freedom. We did it discreetly. That meant we were not into that swinging shite.”
“What swinging shit?”
“You know, the key parties.”
“What’s a key party?”
“Everyone threw their car keys into a basket and at the end of the night, after a dinner party, everyone pissed, the wives went home with the men whose car keys they pulled.”
“No.”
“Yes. But we never did that. We also did not hurt each other. Until Seamus, heard that damn Vermont guy… what’s his name?”
“Who?”
“You know the one… he keeps running for president but not wining?”
“Bernie Sanders?”
“Yeah, that’s him. Bernie published some shite about how women secretly want to be raped. I assured Seamus that was total bollocks. At that time there was also a bit of rush about anal sex. It was an altogether bad combination. Seamus begged me to try it out. The anal, you know. But that was not my thing. No. Pain and love do not mix.”
“Shit Mum.” I could not believe what I was hearing. From my mother. This cannot be true.
“Yeah. That night he was pissed-drunk. He had come back late from a poker game with the guys and wanted to just “try it once.” Claimed he should be “a man” like the daft America men were telling him. By God, I furious. You heard it. In the morning, when you asked, he was ashamed and embarrassed. He tried to cover it up with that absurd birds and bees talk I was against. You were too young. Anyway…” She trailed off lost in her memory. “Gave up the booze after that night, he did. Never touch it again.” I sat at her feet, the fire warming my back. Stunned. My own Dad?
“That’s the thing Mimi,” she said looking down at me. “All those lies about good men… You were lucky, you know. Horrible thing was that fecking Playboy magazine, encouraging men to rape their children.”
“No. That cannot be true. Playboy encouraged men to rape their children?”
“Aye, but it is. They didn’t call it rape, of course. They had these cartoons. Awful. One I remember, so clearly, had a little girl with ribbons in her hair going down a slide on the playground naked with her legs spread wide and her father is at the bottom of the slide, mouth open-wide, tongue hanging out drooling.”
“No way.”
“Aye,” my Mum said sadly. “Taught men how to drug the children to make it easier. Another reason we didn’t go in for those key parties. This whole group of men at the university, they were all into that. The wives went along. You know, of all the other mothers, I was the only one with a Ph.D.”
“No, I didn’t know that Mum.”
“Aye. Wasn’t easy. Never is, I suppose. Refusing to play dumb for the limp-dicked men. All the other faculty-wives, most of them hardly graduated from secondary school. It was a big deal for them to have a husband who was a professor. Big deal in rural Maine. High status. Jobs were hard to come by. People were poor. To be a professor at the University of Maine—well you were a respected member of the community. So, the mothers, well, most of them had very little say, in anything really. When those professor pals of ours started molesting their own children, well…. We ended almost all our friendships.”
“You know, I remember that.” I said. “The Johnsons, Poulins and…. what was their name? The Epsteins. They all stopped sailing with us. What that why?”
“That was why. There was even a story about it, later, in that Bangor paper. How college professors were taking video equipment out of the university to film themselves raping their own children. Some child protection staffer. What was her name, now? Cindy something. She went ape shit, she did. Called the cops, the media, the local judge. She tried to protect the children. Take them away from the father-rapists. But she was fired and silenced instead.”
“Shit.”
“Indeed,” she paused and took another sip of tea. “You know Mimi, if we lie for these criminal men, we become culpable along with them. Promise me Mimi, promise you will never lie for a man. Won’t hide his crimes.”
“Of course, not Mum. Would never occur to me to do that.” I said.
“Aye, Mimi. Cowardice is the most terrible of vices.”
“Quoting Master and Margarita again, I see. The book is out on the patio table. Soaked now.”
“Imagine it is. Don’t worry I’ve got another copy.” We sat in silence, listening to the spitting, popping peat fire and the rhythm of the rain on the roof and windows. Then she said “Mimi, love, promise me you will always be brave. You don’t know what courage is or how vulnerable you become as a mother. So many women, they choose their own comfort over the courage it can take to protect a child. You wouldn’t you live that life, like so many mothers do, would you Mimi?”
“Never Mum.” I said.
She hadn’t met Michael and I hadn’t told her I was pregnant. Michael was far too busy to come to Ireland and meet my family. He was in the middle of several big investigations, he said. My family would meet him at the wedding. That was fine. After our whirlwind romance in May, when I told him I was pregnant, boxes of expensive chocolates and dozens of roses were sent express to my university office. Then he sent a first-class plane ticket back to DC where I met his lovely parents, his father a prominent judge, his mother a beautiful, aging socialite, and he proposed to me on his knees with a four caret diamond, at a dinner in his family’s home multi-million dollar home on Garfield Street. Swept off my feet would be an understatement. I had walked into a Hollywood romance, giddy with the good fortune that suddenly enveloped me after years of slogging away in the decidedly non-glamourous world of academic and war zones, it felt like I could relax and trust this good fortune. Indulge in it. Enjoy it. Maybe even believe I deserved it.
“Anyway, Mum. There’s nothing to worry about. Michael is a good man. He’s on the child exploitation unit, for God’s sake. And he’s very shy about sex. It’s a bit odd but he’s not really even into sex, Mum. You know, I think it is his job. It takes a toll, you know?”
“Mimi, dear,” my mother said, “those are the ones you have to watch out for.”
“Mum. Really.” I said standing up and pouring us more tea.
“Really. I hope you won’t ever face that. So…” she said, trailing off. “Anyway, that’s the story, the night your father decided he was going to test out Bernie’s theory.” She chuckled. “Old Seamus, God rest him, found out quick how wrong Bernie was.”
“Oh Mum. I am so sorry. I cannot image.”
“Don’t worry Mimi, Seamus didn’t get very far. You mightn’t even call it rape. More of a failed attempt. Anyway,” she took another sip of tea. “I’ve had a good life. Most women suffer so much more.” Her voice was starting to fade. She put her teacup down on the tray.
“Why are you telling me now Mum? Why not earlier?”
“You never asked. And anyway, your father is dead. I’m on my way. No need to take it to my grave, the way many do. Maybe this knowledge might help you someday.” She sighed and reached out and patted my hand, resting upon her other arm on the chair. We sat in silence. The rain splatted the windows. The embers sputtered.
“Mimi,” she said, “did you say you were going to make us tea?”
“I did Mum. Look it’s right here. You just finished your cup.”
“Did I now,” she said looking confused.
“Would you like more?”
“Yes, please my love.”