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Saturday 17 July 2021

Irish mothers and badly needed memories

Thats a lot to cry about lately... the world is weeping and it feels like a tsunami. Tidal waves of crazy crashing over us and its never ending, and doesn't even cover whats going on in reality.
We are killing each other. Forget everything, forget the world and the pain its in, forget the floods and the apartment complexes collapsing, forget the fires and the burning of everything we knew. We are literally killing each other.
Its become a vax war, a mask war, a who's right war. 
A petty war of who knows more than the other war and the saddest thing is we won't know who's right until the history books are sitting on library shelves unopened and unread by all of us in them but too dead to be able to read them....
I've spent a lot of time recently just reflecting... a lot of time in my hands through what they call a hidden illness, an illness I have to breathe though and live through and remember my mother going through. I'm ok going through it though thanks to a family who love me,  siblings who see me forever as their little sister and friends who stay every minute these days to remind me that I'm not going through this alone. Children who always surround me with love and reminders of my motherhood and a husband who deserves all the respect and love he gets because he is a soul that the world doesn't deserve, and he lives to protect me from the pain he doesn't want me to feel....
But last night I saw a picture of a woman who pulled on her amaze pants and headed to the bog to prepare for the winter... a woman we all recognise and acknowledge, a woman that represents our past, our present and our future. A woman we sometimes try to avoid in the mirror when life hurts, a woman that raised us, protected us and helps us to remember that we can be amazing too,  if we just let ourselves believe it...
She made me cry that woman because she was my mother, your mother and a mother to all of us. She was the country shop women, the mart women, the neighbour women, the women who never had money but had a deeper value, the Ballymahon women, the worldwide women who woke us up, dragged us out and sent us to school hoping we would learn something. She is the woman who cried when we were hurt, cried when we cried and the woman who fell to her knees every night to pray for a dawn to greet us. She's the woman who today would sit us down and listen to our every fears and wipe our tears and whip our asses when we got out of our box and thought we knew it all. She's the woman who vaccinated us so we could fight on, vaccinated us against pain, against hurt, vaccinated us with love knowing we would feel pain but maybe not feel it too hard and vaccinated us against anything that would leave a scar on a child she loved
For those of you who know the picture I'm on about, you will know the mothers love I'm talking about, for those of you who didn't see it, I know you can picture it in your heads and you feel the love. 
For those of you vaccinated against covid 19 and for those of you not vaccinated, the same love applies. Your mother is either hugging you or watching over you with a hug but her message is simple. Her message is love and for gods sake stop god damn trying to get one over the other in a war we don't understand....
Let the history books decide this virus war and allow our children to remember that we loved like our mothers loved....
Eileen Mcloughlin thank you for giving us a moment to see our mothers... that moment will keep us warm forever...

Valerie Masters 

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