By Mae Leonard

Every so often something stops me in my tracks to remind me of my mother. I see her in flowers – even though she had no grá at all for them. Every bouquet she received – and there were several of them – went straight to the church altar.

She could never understand my obsession with flowers – wild or cultivated. It began for me with the wild flowers that grew in abundance beside the Abbey River that flowed close by our house in Limerick. There were marsh marigolds as big as saucers, masses of bluebells, fluffy bog bean and creamy meadow sweet.

I even braved the wrath of Canon Lee to ease my way onto the swampy field behind the Parish House and balanced on tufts of grass to pluck yellow flag-iris. I brought my treasure home to Mam and she settled them into a jar of water.

Shortly afterwards black beetles dropped from them and trotted across the scrubbed kitchen table. Mam was terrified of creepy crawlies and, with a screech, my flowers went flying out into the back yard.
There was a little girl,
who had a little curl,
right in the middle of her forehead
And when she was good,
she was very, very good
but when she was bad she was horrid!

My mother frequently recited those lines wagging her finger at me. Yes, I was that little girl. I tried to be good. And I was…. mostly. But there were times when I stretched Mam beyond her maximum measure of tolerance. And the Day of the Dentist was one of those.
A trip to the dentist was a sort of mixed blessing because I had the entire day off school and Mam always rewarded my bravery by buying me a special treat on the way home. But this time I was to have a back tooth filled.

My best friend had experienced the dentist’s drill a couple of days before. She told me that the buzz of the drill terrified her. So, what did I do? As that buzzing implement came closer and closer I clamped my lips shut and refused to open my mouth.

The dentist tried all sorts of tricks but had to give up and my mother was furious at me for ‘making a show’ of her. There was no treat for me on the way home.

Everyone we met along the way was told the story and laughed at me. I didn’t like that. My mother made her point very well.

On my next dental appointment, I most certainly opened my mouth but by then my tooth had deteriorated to the point that it was excruciatingly extracted. There, Mam said, God has a way of punishing little girls who make a show of their mothers.

There was that time on the bus to Kilkee when the conductor came along the aisle clicking his ticket machine. “One adult and one child,” she said, pointing to my brother. On handing over the fares to him he pointed at me and asked, “How old is she?”

“Three.” Mam said. Three! Did my mother say that I was only three years old? I was furious. So, I roared “Don’t be telling lies, Mamma Nellie, I am four.”
Every head in the bus turned. Everyone was smiling and I was too. I had told the truth. The conductor made her pay my half-fare and gave me the long strip of tickets because I was a good girl. Once again, I had made a show of my mother.

But there was another side of the coin too. My mother sometimes made a show of me. She was the town crier. On my First Communion when we came in a procession out from the church, there, in front of all my classmates, my mother had tears streaming down her face and she was snuffling into her lace-edged handkerchief.
I was mortified. “Why are you crying?” I asked through gritted teeth. “Oh, all those innocent little voices singing,” she sobbed. I couldn’t understand that.

And there was that other time when I was pulled from near drowning in the Abbey River. Drenched through and numb from the experience, she took the ribbons from my hair, held them and there, before the gathered crowd, she began to cry. It was bad enough to be almost drowned but did she really have to make a show of me?
I see her in old photographs and she is not even in them. She is there in front of us holding the Kodak Brownie Box Camera telling us to stand tall and say cheese.

On Mothering Sunday I say, Thanks Mam. Thanks for the memories. ÷