Away

In light of the horrific recent events unfolding in Holy Ireland, with babies starved, tossed into septic tanks and sold to the highest bidders by demonic clergy, please read here and here for further clarification. Bessborough is where I would have been interred like a few of my friends who were abandoned by their boyfriends or raped by relatives or priests.

If you need further enlightenment on these horrific crimes against humanity I thought to bring to light my own narrow escape story that I still grapple with emotionally. I'm trying to set my story all down and come to terms with it, but it still festers in my heart, it is still so difficult to speak of. And I don't. Because I cry. Writing is what I do best.

And in case you're wondering, everyone knew about these institutions. We girls lived in fear of them and pitied the poor creatures within them when we would visit - as privileged private school girls - to entertain them. But never speak to them. Contamination, you see. and looking back, us girls must have been obliviously rubbing further salt into their scalded souls.

And yes I've had the therapy and tried to establish an understanding of my past with the male members of my birth family, to no avail.

For seriously, how can any Irish man, no matter the age, understand the Ireland of 1966 when a frightened, pregnant young woman, not more than a girl, together with her young husband, made life changing decisions to protect themselves and their families from the cult that was the RC church in Ireland? And make no mistake, it was (and still is) a patriarchal, hypocritical cult, steeped in misogyny, condemning so-called "unmarried mothers" to a life time of slavery, their babies stolen and sold, or killed or starved. Or horrifically raped by the parish priests who had unlimited access to these vulnerable girls and children.

I was secretly five months pregnant at my wedding. A very tight girdle.

Away

A wedding ring away from a workhouse, a lifetime of indentured slavery.

A wedding ring away from a child kidnapped and sold.

A papal blessing away from tribal condemnation on a secret side altar of the parish church.

An emigration away from family disgrace and pursed lip judgement

A lonely birthing away from family joy and support, among strangers in a strange land

A frightened young couple away from all they knew dear, alone and terrified.

A baby born away, questioning the whys and wheres and hows of the banishment of her parents.

A lifetime away in a country which beckoned when Ireland closed its doors.

Not Black and White

The restorative qualities of my sunsets.

Swimming in the sea of old wounds and enragements is not doing me any good. I was planning on getting very much into my own personal sea of RC harm on subsequent posts but it seems like that particular muse has fled and I have no irresistible urge to lay it all down on paper. I wrote a couple of notes and found that the subsequent apoplexy was simply not my colour at all.

Lay the ghosts. Become a kinder gentler me. No, impossible, scratch that last.

Daughter and I had a chat yesterday on old wounds, on how we are all wounded to some degree. How we carry those wounds being all important. Should we keep peeling those scabs off? Thing is, we decided, patterns in families repeat and repeat. Ad nauseum.

Certainly in mine. Much as I'd like it all to stop now, please. Let's be friends. Let's enlighten ourselves as to what is really happening. What truly lies beneath, as some wise old pundit had it. But enlightenment doesn't happen to all at once, does it. I sometimes think I'm some kind of Pollyanna, trying to make it all better. Kiss the boo-boos.

Thing is, again, that there are some who desperately need those boo-boos.

They need to keep tending them and tending them like a really bad abscess. So they don't have
to look at the root causes. Ever.

I'm finished with this particular topic for now.

Bloodied but unbowed, that's me.

Black and White and Denial All Over - Part 5

See Part 1 here
See Part 2 here
See Part 3 here
See Part 4 here


I'm now going to get personal on how the abusive nature of all this patriarchal priestarchy has affected me and my entire life.

BTW - Priestarchy is a term used in a book I'm just finishing up - House of Hate by Percy Janes. I truly can't believe how so much of this book resonated with me. But those reflections are for another time or post.

My father's eldest sister, here I'll call her Elizabeth, was a brilliant woman, a pianist of some local renown when her aspirations were smothered by her mother who had an all consuming belief, fostered by the RC church, that a life on the stage was akin to prostitution. E was thrust into service at the local manse which was headed by a widower, the protestant minister of their town. Encouraged by the reverend, Elizabeth resumed her piano playing and tutorials and the gods smiled and the minister and Elizabeth fell in love despite their age-gap of nearly 30 years.

In the Ireland of 1924 this whole affair had to be kept under wraps. Even for the week after they were secretly married in a little village protestant church many miles from their town, E continued going home every night just as before while the minister arranged a transfer to the North of Ireland. She never said goodbye to her family, she just left for work as usual on their day of departure and took the train from her town to Bangor in Co. Down with her beloved.

When the truth of what had happened hit the family, my grandmother immediately held a wake for her daughter and declared her dead to the family and forbade anyone to mention her name in the house again. An order that only ended on her death in 1958. 34 years of bitterness and estrangement. Her husband, my grandfather, never recovered from the loss of his favourite child, my aunt, and died "broken-hearted" seven years later in 1931.

But more was to come. As they sat in their customary 5th pew of the huge RC church of their town the following Sunday after E had fled with her husband, they were assaulted from the pulpit by the roars of the local parish priest who denounced the family for having "harboured a harlot", and my father, the head altar boy, was removed from his position forthwith. My grandfather, to his credit, marched the whole family out of the church before the mass was over and they did not attend services in that particular church ever again but walked 5 miles every Sunday to a small village church.

You can only imagine the ripple effect this had on my family of birth which continues on to this day.

See Part 6

Black and White and Denial all Over - Part 4

See Part 1 here
See Part 2 here
See Part 3 here

One of my greatest disappointments in life and in the human race is that so few men stand up for women. I've heard from two or three on this blog, private emails, mainly fathers of daughters or granddaughters, but you know what? I never hear from fathers of sons. And that says so much. Women need more men speaking out. Saying "I would never behave that way!" and moving on is just not enough. I have many "good" men in my life but they are silent. Where is the massive male outcry against these misogynistic paedophiles and sadists masquerading as the One True Church?

Maybe it's the old case of Irish people bowing to the masters and never standing up for what is right. The RC church has such an empowering grip on the male psyche enforcing the privilege of being male in this male-driven church. I ask myself: Why on earth would they want to change? Why on earth would they want to fight within this male bastion of droit du seigneur and subsequently be called "pussy-whipped" or worse by their male cohorts?

Another unfortunate case of "I'm alright, Jack - fight for your own justice and equality, woman. But don't ask me to give up anything."


Meanwhile, A recent article shows that men's biggest fear is being laughed at by women while women's biggest fear is being killed by men. Isn't there loads to think about in that one sentence?


The Brehon Laws,long before the arrival of the mythical Saint Patrick to Ireland declared women as fully equal and could inherit and lead. Needless to mention, this was all abolished under the mighty males of Rome. Power and endless propagation being the driver. Forget those stupid Brehon Laws where men and women were equal and Ireland had the most advanced justice system for its time. Where there were no prisons, no crime. And restorative justice prevailed. Yes, there were flaws, but early Christianity brainwashing must have felt severely threatened by such female freedoms. Men's rights to regulate our bodies and what we do with them still prevails.

And yeah, I caught that article in the Irish Times about Ireland being closer to Muslim teachings that anywhere else in the world.

I only have to think of the shame of Savita to realize that nothing has changed in the country of my birth.

To be continued.

Black and White and Denial All Over - Part 2.

Women at their wedding to the greatest polygamist of all time.

Read Part 1 here.

And there are some that come out and talk about the mothers of these "wayward" 14 year old pregnant girls. Why didn't the mother protect them from the incesting father/brother/uncle. You must be joking, would be my response.

The grip of the RC church was so huge that no Irish mother, in the fear of being consigned to hell, for all eternity:

(1) Took birth control
(2) Refused her husband
(3) Worked outside the home, as if she could anyway with endless children to care for.
(4) Even considered divorce - it was illegal.
(5) Separation was the women's fault. She made her bed, why couldn't she lie in it, the slut?
(6) If she did separate from him, her life, poor before, was now abysmal beyond belief with no financial support from state or church and the complete shunning of her neighbours and family. I will write more of the power of shunning later. And she'd heard of women who had to resort to prostitution to make ends meet.

So leaving her husband was out of the question and reprimanding him for molesting her daughters, would result in violence towards herself and the child who told her. Police turned a blind eye, as did the church who would advise her neighbours and family to shun her. Husbands controlled the purse strings and what was donated to the church every Sunday was his and the church's business. He was the cash cow and deserved protection. At all costs.

The RC church was and is a huge business. In Ireland, it controlled the schools and the hospitals, orphanages, reformatories (yeah, right) and homes for the worst sinners of all time: "unwed" mothers, often as young as 12.

Have you read about the conditions in these homes of the "unwed"? As punishment for their sins, they had to give birth:

(1) without medication or pain relief.
(2) when ripped in the process of birthing, as so many of them were, they were forbidden stitching so the subsequent infections added to their pain and often resulted in sterility and lifelong incontinence.
(3) they were forced to wet nurse the babies of mothers who died birthing.
(4) their babies were sold as further punishment to Americans for the highest price donation.
(5) they had to pay to be released from the hell-holes of these institutions or endured years of slavery. Their families viewed them as "damaged goods" so they were unmarriagable and a life long financial burden so were left to rot in these places.

I could go on.

Follow the money has been my mantra for a very long time. The RC church made untold billions from the "simple" Irish people. It paid to keep them breeding like rabbits in and out of wedlock, it all paid off handsomely no matter which way you sliced the product. A per capita amount was paid by the Irish government to the penal institutions for feeding and clothing the "illegitimate" products of rape.

And those "evil bitches" those sisters, married to the Great Son of the Invisible Cosmic Housekeeper? Yes, married. They would wear a veil and don a wedding ring 'n everything for the polygamous wedding ceremony. And, I nearly forgot, had all their hair shaved off, it was a symptom of vanity, they couldn't have anything around that reminded them of their femininity, their very womanhood.

And their husband (Great Son of ICH) spoke to them only through their priest or if they really got rebellious, ICH's henchman, the bishop.

And how were they instructed?

See Part 3.

Black and White and Denial all Over

Part 1 of _____

Another of my lobes has exploded, so enough of my blog-fluff for now:

Tuam. Dead children being tossed in unmarked disused septic tanks in Galway up to 1961. The stark horror of it all. But nothing is black and white is it? The debate can rage on if it was or wasn't a septic tank. Distraction from the huge black elephant lounging about in the living room shoving everything else out of sight. I read vituperative blasts of prose condemning the "bitches", the "evil bitches" who ran these horrific homes for "wayward girls" who had the temerity to get themselves pregnant, all by themselves. The bases were covered in these places - if they were younger than the age of consent, still children themselves: well then the devil himself had a hand in it, making them tempting seductresses of innocent adult males, be they their fathers, uncles, brothers or the local priests. Those fathers of these casual sperm implantations were never made accountable. Or answerable to the law of the land. Oh, sorry, the land where the word "rape" was never countenanced. And paedophilia I didn't know about apart from a difficult to spell word in crossword puzzles.

She must have been "asking for it" was the phrase I heard around my house.

There was a girl in my class in national school. We were 12. Just past our confirmation where we pledged our purity, our bodies, ourselves to the Invisible Cosmic Housekeeper. By the age of 12 I'd been touched inappropriately by men a few times which I've written about on this blog - no little girls are safe in a patriarchal culture such as Ireland was in my time. This little girl's mother was a casual church acquaintance of my mother. They were poor. I remember that. Kathleen was her name. Kathleen got very fat very quickly and then one day never showed up at school again.

I kept pestering my mother as to what happened to Kathleen. Finally my mother broke down and told me Kathleen's mother was expecting another child (her fourteenth) and was older (mid forties) and Kathleen had to stay home and help her.

Later, much later, I was in high school and had seen Kathleen around, wheeling an obviously mentally challenged toddler in a stroller, my mother told me Kathleen was one of the "lucky ones" and didn't have to go to a "home for bad girls."

And that's when I heard another phrase, common in use in Ireland then: Kathleen had "allowed" someone to "interfere" with her.

Later again, my mother told me it was Kathleen's father who had "interfered" with several of his daughters, thus the massive "retardation" in the younger "siblings" and an aging mother covering it up, to protect her daughters from the hellish "homes" run by the sisters.

He was a good man, a pillar of the church, said my mother, with only the one "weakness".

A good man? I asked her in disbelief, a good man?

Ah, said my mother, sure he didn't drink at all.

See Part 2 Here