Mine to Carry: An Irishwoman's Journey Through Forbidden Pregnancy

By Christine Mulvey

Upon her return to Ireland, following a year of travel in India, a young Irishwoman is faced with a set of circumstances that take her on a journey of wrenching transformation. Deserted by her fiancée, she finds herself pregnant in a country where unwed pregnancy is taboo, and is launched thereby into out and out war with herself, her family and her culture. Banishing herself to England to hide the pregnancy, she takes a job as a nanny and there, in a country hostile to Ireland, and surrounded by people who are certain about what she should do, she faces her impossible choice: should she put her baby, or her own life, first? Despite a final and cruel turn of events, Cris finds inside herself the resources to move forward. Though it will be decades before she finds a way back to her child, she does find a way to a new and empowered relationship to herself, her life and her place in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543977295

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Copyright © 2019 by Christine Mulvey

Cover Design and Interior Sketches by Nick Hayes.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. With the exception of myself, the names of all the characters, and some of the places, in this memoir have been fictionalized.

Print ISBN: 978-1-54397-728-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-54397-729-5

Contents

PART ONE

Chapter One.

New Delhi, India, June 1981.

Chapter Two

South of Stuttgart, Germany, June 1981.

Chapter Three

Dublin, Ireland, August, 1981.

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

PART TWO

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Day One:

Day Two:

Day Three:

Day Four:

Day Five:

Day Six:

Day Seven:

Chapter Twenty-Three

PART THREE

Chapter Twenty-Four

Dublin, Ireland, May 1982

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

EPILOGUE

For Nick.

With thanks to Jack,

who loved me back to wholeness.

There is, I almost remember,

another story:

It runs alongside this one like a brook beside a train.

The sparrows know it; the grass rises with it.

The wind moves through the highest tree branches without

seeming to hurt them.

Tell me.

Who was I when I used to call your name?

Prayer by Marie Howe

PROLOGUE

When I think of my homeland now, I see it from on high, as though I were a great seabird winging in from across the Atlantic. Over the restless waters I sweep, circling down to where they break into frills of white, all around the little mound of brilliant green that is my island.

In across the mauve mountains of the Iveragh Peninsula I fly, over the bays where I spent my teenage summers, clambering over blackened rocks, rough with orange lichen and the broken shells of limpets, crunching over sands wet from the recent tide. Over the hills where I wandered damp and grassy lanes, sheep and rabbits my only company, or tromped across the springing heather of mountain bogs, where once I found a corrie lake, colour of lapis, a lake I believed no one else had ever seen.

Across the rusted midlands I fly now, over the limestone towns, Tullamore, Carlow, Kildare, where my father would take me sometimes, to keep him company as he drove the country selling pharmaceuticals, telling me stories of the places we passed, calling out the names of trees and birds and plants. Until the day I’d first raised his ire, when laughing hard, I’d fallen backwards in the seat beside him, legs rocking over my head, dress falling across my face, knickers flashing white against the dark of the car. Through the thin cotton of my skirt I saw the jut of his jaw, the flare in his eyes, the twisted red of his face. How DARE you? he’d roared, spanking my thighs hard. How DARE you? It was the last time he took me travelling.

On I fly to the cold buildings of the city where I grew up, over the silver tongue of the Liffey, out towards the distant mountains and our little house of pebble-dashed stone and dim light, where every weekend the only laughter I knew would enter in the shape of a cake, brought by my aunt and Gran. I settle into the bone grey limbs of the sycamores that stood, night after night, outside my window, their ebony silhouettes painted on the silk of night, stars caught like diamonds in the net of their hair, and peer through the curtained windows to see each one of us alone in the spot we’d claimed – Mum at the stove; Dad in front of the telly; my sister, her headphones over her ears in the dining room; my brother with his camera in his bedroom; me alone in mine, the one I shared with my sister.

There I am, with my diary and my books, filling my time with words, and longing. Light shifting in the racing clouds, the undulation of trees, the song of robins perched on the sodden grass, or lifting themselves into the air to fly to where I could not see, all filling me with the sense, like a dark shape through a mist, that there must be more.

*


The first night it happened, I was twelve. It was summer. Outside the kitchen window, the sun was firing the tips of the sycamores. We were eating dinner; the radio’s thin whining barely concealing the tension that always accompanied family meals, something about the farmers protesting outside the Dail. I scanned my father’s face, peeking from behind my hair, watching for signs of trouble.

Seconds into the story he started shouting, working himself into frenzy, berating the farmers, damning their insolence, the way they held the country to ransom. I watched his face turn red; his eyes grow that cornflower blue, then bluer still, that familiar jut of his jaw. He’d noticed we weren’t listening. Then the table jumped with the sudden thump of his fist. Spoons clinked. Willow cups clattered in their saucers.

Then he roared, "What does a man have to do to be respected... All of us froze, stopped our chewing, and tried to swallow our food without a sound. …in his own HOUSE?"

No one answered. I could see they weren’t going to. Though I knew it was crazy, I couldn’t help myself. They’ve a right to say what they think, I said, a little under my breath.

"What…did you say?" he bellowed.

They have a right.

There was a long moment of silence. Then he erupted, WHO do you think you are? Little miss high and mighty. You have no idea what you’re talking about. His fork stabbed the air near my face. "I’m sick of your attitude." He looked around the table. Then his tone changed to a sneer. Get upstairs to your room this minute, you little hussy. And stay there. Stay there until you learn some respect.

I glanced at Mum, wanting her to say something, but she wasn’t looking. No one was looking.

LEAVE! my father roared. Get out of my sight!


*


The battles continued for the next ten years, my father banishing me; my mother later, whispering, You bring it on yourself, you know. You have to learn not to upset people. Alone in my room, I tried to tell myself it was everyone else that was screwed up, but really, inside, I was deathly afraid it was me, that there was something irredeemably bad about me, and therefore, I could not be me, and belong.

Throughout my teens and into my college years, I sought escape in books – mythology, the stories of ballets and operas, the journals of explorers and adventurers. I sought solace in journalling, about God, love, and beauty, about how to live a life that mattered. And I dreamed of getting out of Ireland. Perhaps I felt that in a foreign land, far from family and culture, I’d find a way to break free from all the territories of forbidden-ness I had known.

Then, I met Marc. German, dark and serious, Marc had eyes like melting chocolate, and a slow, irresistible smile. His refusal to do military service, his love of Bach, and his unfettered desire for me, swept me off my feet. Like me, he was searching for the pulse that would unlock the mysteries of the universe, mysteries to which everyone we knew seemed oblivious.

I remember, with startling clarity, the day he asked me to marry him. We’d been hiking when a sudden storm forced us to shelter in the ruins of a castle. With cold rain dribbling down our backs, we kissed for a long time. Then, Marc pulled away, held my head to his chest and, whispering into my hair, asked me to be his wife. I was twenty-one, teaching religion at the local school. I wasn’t ready, yet, not knowing how to say no, I allowed us to become engaged. Everyone was thrilled. Who knows what would have happened if Life itself had not intervened?

Some months later the voice appeared. At first a mild unease, like an irritating sound a bit far away to be clearly heard, it grew steadily into a nameless longing, a short-temperedness that was my defence against the feeling of walls closing in on me. "Escape from what? my best friend Deirdre would ask. Everything! I’d say, looking around. This!" Then, one day I heard it, clearly and with absolute directness.

*


It was an anonymous day, random clouds scudding across an overcast sky, interrupted by periods of brilliant sunshine. I was rambling home from work, ruminating about my teaching, when a sudden movement high up in the shell-like arc of sky drew me. A flash of light off a gull’s wing sliced the air above and, through a sudden rift in the belly of the gathering clouds, a depth and purity of blue startled me.

I was drawn, as if in a dream, down a winding tunnel into an unfolding movie of my life. Scene by scene rolled out before me: my classroom in the convent where I teach, a church, a wedding – mine, another school. I saw a hospital ward, a babe in my arms, two more; myself grey, heavier, bent over a table at night behind stacks of papers, my family folded into a sterile apartment in Germany, looking out on a street so clean you could eat from it. Then I saw myself in black, burying Marc, returning to Ireland, the tape running faster and faster as it neared the end. Treed parks. A traffic jam. A bicycle falling under a semi’s wheel, a body sprawled in the centre of a road, then, the black and gaping hole of my own grave.

With a sudden snap, I was back in my body, one flat-heeled shoe placing itself in front of the other moving me down the path. Dizzy, I leaned against a garden wall, breathing the scent of lilac, the cold of the stone bringing me back, as though from a great distance. Inside I heard a voice, barely audible, but completely irresistible. It whispered, Go! Go! You have to get out! By the time I reached home, I knew I was going to follow it.

*


I spent the rest of that year fighting to hold my ground through the argument of everyone around me. My father, enraged at the waste of my education, declaring I need never come back; my mother, frothing with worry at what the neighbours would think, warning me against losing everything; Marc, wounded and protesting. Despite it all, I planned the trip, overland by bus to Kathmandu, then somehow into the mountains. I had no idea what I would do when I got there, but I believed I would be guided. Whatever had parted those clouds, whatever had spoken that day, would show me the way.

And so it had, throughout the year I spent in India, until the day Marc wrote, and called me back. Pressures from home had started to intrude months earlier. "Please, whatever you do, don’t just drift," my mother had written, and I, trying to explain, had responded: I’m happier than ever, though I haven’t yet found what I’m looking for. I don’t want to let you down, but I’m on a path. I’m not wasting my life. I hoped she’d tell me to carry on seeking. Instead she reminded me to think of Marc, to remember I couldn’t expect him to wait forever. When Marc’s letters started to say the same thing, I reckoned it was time to go home.

Reluctantly, I booked a flight from Delhi to Munich, to reunite with Marc. I had no way to know, back then, that the bonds that tied me to the territories of forbidden-ness I so longed to escape, did not exist on the outside. I had still to learn, if I was ever to inhabit the freedom I craved, that I would have to undertake another kind of journey, a journey that would confront me not just with external borders, but with the ones I carried deep inside.

PART ONE

I close my eyes and the images rush in. The palace in Rajasthan, its whitewashed towers and blue-domed roof, where I slept beneath a rose and turquoise bedspread sewn with a thousand tiny mirrors. Peacocks outside, roosting in the banyan trees, their unearthly screams thrilling my senses, over and over throughout the day and far into the night. Every morning women filling golden urns from the sacred ghat below, their bangles and rings glinting in the sun. Every evening, the same sun, pouring like liquid gold onto the marble steps, lighting the brilliantly-coloured and capacious turbans of the camel men, who gathered there to water their growling animals.

The little stone village where I lived for months, its craggy peaks half-way up the sky, their snow fields bright with sun; the voices of the black-robed Tibetans at the pump, their thin braids, their beads of coral and turquoise, their open, russet-faced children; the sound of bells and spine-tingling chants, the sonorous bellowing of the monks’ long horns, all pouring through my window. Everywhere the wild green forest, and the blood-red flowers of the rhododendrons scattered on the crooked trails of steep-stepped stone.

India! India! All steaming air and murky rivers, palm-lined beaches and sweltering plains, teetering shanty towns and gilded temples, and the cinnamon and black pepper passion of its peoples. Poorer than any land I could imagine, I love its shameless embrace of – everything.

Soaring mountains, floating silks, sacred cows, the burning hues of spices and fruit side by side with shit-spattered gutters, the toothless untouchable clutching my sleeve, the yellowed nails of beggars and pockmarked children, their limbs broken by poverty and disease, pulling at my skirts whenever I walk outside.

Land of ethereal Buddhas and sensual Gods, smiling alike on muddied peasants and bowing monks; emaciated sadhus pestering the poor for their paisa and chanting priests lost in the smoke of corpses; masses of people, tilting buses, steaming trains, orange flowers pressed into brick corners, rotting vegetables in the dirt, vats of curry smoking the streets, tinsel-ribboned rickshaws, women breast deep in the streaming Ganges, sticks of incense burning on stone altars before statues black with cobalt – everything wreathed in the stench of urine.

Nothing prettified. Nothing denied.

All of it out in the open.

All of it real.

Chapter One.

New Delhi, India, June 1981.

The engines of the jet start their air-splitting whine. My mouth fills with saliva. Turbo fans roar. Awkwardly the plane jerks into motion, taxies into position, and then gathers speed for take-off. Pressing deeply into my seat, I close my eyes, and let out a shaking sigh. I am leaving India, heading back to my life and the long put-off task of settling down. I am twenty-two, full of nagging unease, and the sense that I am leaving too soon, before I’m ready, and more importantly, without what I came for.

With a sudden sweep of weightlessness, we lift into the air, circle the litter of low buildings that is the airport of New Delhi, and begin to climb. In the quavering distance, the mirage-like peaks of the highest mountains on earth are glimmering. From my first night in Kathmandu, when I stood on the hotel rooftop, dizzy beneath a vast bowl of stars, and gazed across the tops of stupas to the snow-peaked rim of the world, I’d fallen in love with the mountains and decided to trust myself to their guidance. Throughout my time in India, even when they were out of sight, I felt their presence, their constant beckoning. Home of Spirits and Ancestors, someone told me, they became the symbol of my longing. For the rest of my life I would seek out places where they interrupted the sky.

The land falls away now, disappearing into clouds of heat and filth. Uncomfortable in my seat, I unlock my belt and push it away. The hostess offers water. I take the little cup, white plastic crinkling between my fingertips and, hoping to douse the sinking feeling in my stomach, pour the liquid down my throat. Over my year of wandering, finally out of the dark box called Ireland, free of the shoulds that had defined my life, I’d grown dazzled with the world exactly as it is, intoxicated by its beauty and ferocity, its edge of terror and threat. But right now, inside this enormous airplane, I feel suddenly unconfident in my ability to carry home with me the magic I had found.

I stare now at my reflection in the window beside me, my long, untied hair framing my face, a face too open, too eager for acceptance; my round eyes, full of fire and a kind of subterranean watchfulness. I shake my head and sit up straight, determined to replace the images of India with images of Marc. You had your time, I tell myself, just like Marc told me in the letter that brought my trip to an end. It was his turn now, time to knuckle down, as my mother liked to put it, time to get real.

It would start tomorrow, this life I’d put on hold. At 12.00pm German time, I would step off this plane into the arms of the man who was waiting for me, who had been waiting for me all this time, on the other side of the world. Fourteen more hours and my real life would begin.

The otherworldly cleanliness and empty space of Munich’s airport shocks me. Used to India’s teeming streets, their filth, their cacophony, their kaleidoscope of colour and chaos, I stumble, as though lost, through buildings made of glass and steel. Swept into a river of people, moving like one organism, I allow myself to be carried towards the Baggage Hall.

Ceilings soar above me, high as the Indian sky, their flickering and buzzing making me feel as though I’ve had too much coffee. People, dressed in black and white, walk like robots, eyes glassy with too much thinking, busy, frowning foreheads, tension locked into the hard, unsmiling lines of their lips. I avoid the moving walkways. I avoid the escalators. I feel like a character in a sci-fi movie.

In the Baggage Hall I stand at the edge of the crowd, waiting for my canvas rucksack to pop up from the insides of the conveyor belt. There’s no conversation, no laughter, no interaction, only, every now and then, startling and raucous public announcements in a language I don’t understand.

Nervous and impatient, I concentrate on breathing, the way the monks taught me in my meditation course. Twenty minutes later I walk through sliding doors into the Arrivals Hall, scanning the faces of a crowd of strangers, looking for Marc.

I see him first – and gasp. How handsome he is! I had forgotten. Broad-shouldered, stocky and strong, his face is generous and sensitive, his dark skin more Italian than German. He’s dressed informally – jeans and a loose-knit sweater. I watch his face, those hazel eyes taut now with watching, that sensuous mouth, moving with nervous energy. I’d wondered on the plane if, when I saw him, I might discover I really was in love with him. Seeing him now, that does not seem impossible. He runs fingers through chestnut hair, longer now than it had been, and pushes it behind his ears. It’s a gesture I recognize. He is both familiar and completely strange to me. I don’t know what to do.

The sliding doors close again and this time he turns in my direction. I raise my hand, wave and watch as he finds me, eyes narrowing at first, uncertain about the recognition, then widening, coming alive. He rushes towards me, moving with haste, yet great precision, skipping over suitcases, dodging children, squeezing through the sea of people, until he’s beside me, peering with all the intensity I used to love, deep into my eyes. He wraps his arms around me and presses me to him. For a moment I hear his heart thump, thump, thumping behind the hard, flat bone of his chest.

Cris! At last!

He kisses me shyly, slowly, then more deeply. I pull away, pretending to cough, then work to get my pack off my shoulder. Give me that, he says, You must be starving. We should eat before we go. My place is an hour away.

He tosses my pack over his shoulder and sets off upstairs to a little café overlooking the runway. I follow. While I look for a table, he goes for coffee and food. He brings a tray of goodies: almond croissants, Danish pastries, a bar of chocolate. Without talking, he begins to eat. I do the same, each of us stealing looks at the other, avoiding eye contact, happy for the distraction of food. When I finish my Danish, I lick my fingers and lean back in the chair. I need to say something.

"So… I smile brightly; feigning an eagerness I hope can hide what I’m actually feeling. Where do we begin?"

It’s been a long time, Marc says.

Something about his tone gives me pause. I wait for him to say more. He looks at me for a moment, quick, burning, then looks away. He does it again. He can’t seem to hold my gaze.

"A long time," he says, then takes another sip of coffee.

I lean one elbow on the table and put the tip of my thumb in my mouth, nibbling on the nail. Something is working him and it’s making me nervous, nervous in a whole new way.

Well, would you like to start? I say, raising my eyebrows. I get the feeling there’s something you want to say.

Marc puts his coffee down and sits straight up in his chair. Once again he runs his fingers through his hair, pushing it behind his ears and pulling it around his jaws. He takes a deep breath and puts his hands flat on the table. Then he looks at me unblinkingly and says, I do have something to say.

I incline my head and nod, encouraging him.

I haf become father.

I stare at him, not comprehending. His heavy German accent seems more apparent than I remember.

He says it again, louder.

Cris! I haf become fah-ther.

I can hear it even now, all these decades later, the clear, staccato clip of those words. In that moment I registered only shock, but what struck me later – what still strikes me now – is the weird declamatory way that he put it, the strut of him around it, as though it were some kind of honour, or affirmation of potency, something he’d achieved all by himself. It showed an aspect of him I’d never seen before, an aspect I’m grateful now I never had to get to know.

He reaches across the table for my hand, but I put it in my lap. He searches my face, waiting for my reaction. Long moments pass. I feel a wave of nausea. I think about going to the bathroom, but I can’t seem to move. Then a public announcement explodes in my ears.

Fath-er? I say slowly when it finishes, frowning. What do you mean…father?"

"I haf become father. Desiree is carrying our child…my child. It is my child. She has no doubt."

Desiree? Who’s Desiree?

I shake my head trying to clear it, buying time. Marc starts talking again but I can’t make out what he’s saying. There are tears in his eyes. He’s blubbering, apologizing. I hear only single words, short phrases, Sorry…old friend…an accident … so sorry…exams, all running together in one, long whine, sounds coming through to me as though wrapped in cotton wool.

Slowly his meaning begins to filter through: someone is pregnant, someone he knows. No, someone he’s with. No, someone he was with, someone who is now carrying his child. Finally, it hits me: The man I’m engaged to has been with another woman.

I am a man, no? he’s saying now. I am young. Hungry. A year is too long.

How long? I whisper. How long is she pregnant?

Two months. Just two months. I finished it a month ago. I don’t love her. I love you. It was a mistake, an accident…now she’s pregnant!

He wipes tears from his cheeks, but it is an angry gesture. Through clenched teeth his voice comes tense and bitter, all pleading