Máire T. Robinson
Trinity Knot: A Nollaig na mBan Story (in 3 Parts)
I
After my son was born, I didn’t know what birth story to tell. When people asked how it had gone, what version of the truth did they want to hear? The word traumatic was on the tip of my tongue but I swallowed it back. I defaulted. The important thing is he’s here now, I would tell people, even though, secretly, I felt I wasn’t fully there myself. There wasn’t one birth story. It had fragmented. There was the story I told everyone else; the story I would eventually tell my son; and the story I told myself – there were three.
Growing up as an adopted person, I was never told my own birth story. This has led, perhaps, to a degree of overzealousness on my part in sharing my son’s birth story with him as he’s gotten older. Yes, yes. I’ve heard this one this before, he says as I launch into the story again, but he is smiling and listening so I continue. This is what I tell him: When you were born, we were living in Dublin. Do you know how we got home from the hospital? We walked. Our house was just across the street. As we were crossing the road, a little girl couldn’t believe a baby could be so small. She said, Oh my God! He looks like a tiny lamb. When you were born you had a full head of jet-black hair. We had so many visitors to our little house. Everyone wanted to meet you.
*
During my pregnancy, I was telling myself the story of gentle birth. I diligently listened to CDs. I repeated mantras:
– My body is capable and strong
– Each contraction lasts only one minute
– I am present. I am doing this. We are doing this.
When things didn’t pan out; when I had the opposite of a gentle birth after a failed induction; when I heard the word: undeliverable; when I was being wheeled on a trolley to the operating theatre for an emergency C-section, the birth story I was telling myself was that I had failed:
– My body is not strong.
– I am not present.
– I am not doing this.
I gave up. I wasn’t there. I floated off somewhere else. I remember having this fleeting thought: this is what it must feel like to die.
There is an old joke that goes like this:
– How many Irish mothers does it take to change a lightbulb?
– Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll just sit here in the dark.
Being an Irish mother is putting up with things. It is martyrdom, not making a fuss, not having “notions” What right do you have to complain when someone else has it much worse than you? What right do you have to use the word traumatic when you are leaving the hospital with a healthy baby?
*
When I became pregnant with my son, I started the process of tracing my birth mother. It was something I had thought about doing over the years in an abstract kind of way but never followed through on. Something about being pregnant myself made it seem real, urgent. She was on my mind the day I brought my baby son home from the hospital. I was in a daze of insomnia. Bleeding. Leaking milk. We walked him across the road to our terraced house. For the first time I had some sense, in a visceral way, what it would mean to be separated from your baby. I thought: imagine going through all of that and not getting to keep your baby at the end of it. Imagine wanting to keep your baby, and instead, leaving the hospital bleeding, empty-handed, alone. Imagine going through that and then going back to your life like nothing happened, never telling a soul.
I finally got to meet my birth mother just over a year later. Before I met her, I imagined asking her about my birth story. How had she concealed her pregnancy and who had known about it? The social worker mentioned that she had confided in one sibling. What story did she have to tell everyone else to cover it up? The day I met my birth mother for the first time in the Tusla Offices in Dublin she told me my birth story. This is what she said: Well, I wanted to keep you. I was trying to figure out how to do that right up until the end. But I couldn’t. So… that’s it. In that small yellow room, as we sat and drank cups of tea, I knew I couldn’t ask her anything further. I approached our conversation in trepidation, fear of compounding existing hurts. It was hard to find the right words so I uttered few. We steered the conversation into safer waters. I showed her photographs of my son. She told me about her time working as a Montessori teacher.
Before I met my birth mother, I always wondered how people kept these things secret. Ireland is a country with a long history of hidden pregnancies, adoptions, and shame. How was an entire country silent? After our first meeting, I started to understand. Stories can break a silence but they can be difficult to share. Sometimes despite the best of intentions, silence prevails.
II
The custom of celebrating Nollaig na mBan, or Women’s Little Christmas, has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. The twelfth and final day of Christmas, January 6th, was traditionally a time for women to finally take a break from their festive household duties. It was customary to call on female neighbours, friends and relatives, to enjoy a cup of tea and the last of the Christmas cake, and share stories with one another.
What began as a day off for housewives has evolved in recent years into a more general celebration of women. Nollaig na mBan events have popped up around the country. Offerings include literary readings, concerts, afternoon teas, and even package hotel deals for a night away with female friends to mark the occasion.
*
My interest in Irish culture has grown as I’ve gotten older. I feel I am constantly grasping for something just out of reach, something that is not quite mine. I read books about Celtic knots. I listen to podcasts on Irish folklore. I study the Irish language and try to increase my vocabulary. I self-consciously force out words, my flat, Dublin-accented Irish making me cringe. I do not have the Connacht blas. Nevertheless, I am trying. I jot down expressions I come across that I like. Fite Fuaite – interwoven, inextricably mixed up.
*
The Celts were fascinated by things that came in threes. Celtic knots are complete loops with no identifiable start or end point, said to represent eternity. With its distinctive leaf-shaped design, the most famous Celtic knot is probably the triquetra, or trinity knot. It takes its name from the Latin triquetrus meaning three-cornered. Once I start to notice the trinity knot, I spot it everywhere: on drain covers; on stamps; on the fingers of strangers in the twisted metal of Claddagh rings; in the border of a drinks’ menu – hiding in plain sight.
The trinity knot is an ambiguous symbol. The meaning of its triple thread is open to interpretation. In religious practice, it has been used to represent the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Others have interpreted it variously as representing earth, sea and sky; past, present and future; birth, life and death; or the three elements of the pagan goddess – maiden, mother, crone.
III
My daughter is supposed to be a February baby. It is January – four weeks and four days until my due date. It is too soon, but there are complications. I make a promise to myself: this birth experience will be different. This time around, no matter what happens, when my daughter is born, I will be present. I take steroids to help develop the baby’s lungs. There is nothing more I can do to prepare. I worry how tiny she will be when she is delivered, if she will need admission to NICU. When the nurse fills in the date on the paperwork for the planned C-section, I realise today is Nollaig na mBan. So much of pregnancy seems to be about the stories we tell ourselves. So I tell myself that this must mean something, a good omen.
We are in the middle of a national lockdown. On the maternity ward, we wear masks at all times and must keep our bedside curtains drawn. COVID cases are at a record high but some vaccines have started to be administered to frontline workers. There is reason for optimism.
In the hours before the C-section, I lie on the hospital bed, earphones in, listening to The Gloaming’s rendition of “Samhradh Samhradh” on repeat:
“…buí na nóinín glégeal; Thugamar féin an samhradh linn…
(…yellow summer of clear bright daisies, we have brought the summer in…)”
Perhaps it is strange to be listening to these words of summer as winter rages outside, but this particular song feels more calming to me than any Gentle Birth track so I listen to it again and again, hands on my bump, focusing on the steady inhale and exhale of my breath. Telling my daughter that all is well and I will meet her soon.
I walk into the operating theatre and am told to hop up on the bed. What felt alarming last time around, this time is convivial. It is striking how many people are here especially as we’ve been limiting social contacts due to COVID. Everyone is chatting. I almost feel like I’m at a party.
When it’s time for the epidural, the nurse holds both my hands in hers. She says, You grab my hands and squeeze as hard as you like. I tell her that today is Nollaig na mBan. Oh, what an amazing birthday for your daughter to have! Yes, but so much for my day of rest and relaxation. She turns to the anaesthetist. Do you hear that? Women are supposed to be having a break today. Sure, every day is Nollaig na mBan in this place, he says and we laugh.
The anaesthetist bends down so that we are at eye level. He talks me through every step of the procedure, makes sure I understand everything before he proceeds: This is what we’re about to do. This is what it will feel like… a cold sensation…
We are holding our newborn daughter. She is minutes old. We were expecting teeny-tiny and her being whisked off to NICU but she is breathing well all on her own. The surgeon tells us it was a good thing we went for the C-section when we did. There was a knot in the umbilical cord – a true knot. It could have cut off her blood supply during delivery. He speaks of it as a near miss, a blessing. We are dumbstruck, unsure how to respond. All we can say is, thank you, thank you, thank you… Lucky baby, he says. Lucky baby, lucky parents.
My husband calls my birth mother to tell her the baby has arrived safely. Máire was breech too, she tells him. I didn’t know that before. A new knot to add to my own birth story. A knot reaching back, connecting myself and my daughter through generations.
*
Samhradh buí na nóinín glégeal… It turns out yellow is not this baba’s colour after all. We are discharged from the maternity hospital and spend one night at home, but now we are back in the paediatric ward for two nights. The baby will spend twenty-four hours under blue lights to treat jaundice. I pack blue onesies to counteract the yellow but she doesn’t need them in her little Perspex treatment container. She is dressed in just her nappy and a tiny pair of goggles to protect her eyes. She looks like she’s having a baby spa treatment. She takes to it straight away. Plugged in like a phone charger, her heart monitor makes a ticking noise with every breath. I feed her every three hours. I call the nurse to lower the glass door and disconnect her from the monitor. There she is, in her very own submarine. Little round windows, air holes, strange noises that distort and lengthen.
I put on my mask and go to use the toilet. The walls are full of painted teddy bears with strange expressions. On the wall by the bathroom, a giant map of Galway with examples of nautical knots. Their names are poetry – Alpine Butterfly. Three Strand Plait. Perfection Loop. I scan them looking for a true knot even though I know I won’t find one there.
Back in our little room, I turn on the Six-One news as blue light shines on the baby. I’m expecting COVID numbers to be the lead story again, but instead it’s about the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. The homes were government-funded institutions, largely run by religious orders, that emerged throughout Ireland, from the 1920’s up until the 1990’s, to provide refuge for unmarried mothers and their babies. Many of these homes later developed into adoption agencies. The commission was established in 2015 with a goal of providing a full account of what happened to vulnerable women and children within these institutions. Six years later, the report has finally been published. Some women have shared, for the first time in their lives, their experiences of these places. There are countless stories of forced separation, illegal adoptions, and abuse. On the news, the words of one survivor are quoted. She was told by a nun that her newborn son was “just another pig”.
After our babies are born, we new mothers are helped by a succession of kind nurses. As I hold my newborn daughter, I hear another mother giggling as she plays with her baby: Hey, piggy piggy piggy. You get angry when you’re hungry, just like your daddy! I am behind my curtain and she is behind hers, but her laughter travels. I smile when I hear her even though I can’t talk to her. In the forced intimacy of the maternity ward, I hear other women’s birth stories even though I don’t mean to. They are so close, behind other curtains in this room. There is the woman having her eighth baby. Then there is the woman who has given birth to a nine-pound baby with no epidural because it was too late to request one. None of us are alone. Even behind our separate curtains, we are aware of each other, aware of each other’s stories.
Perhaps there is an invisible thread that ties all mothers together. We are fite fuaite: the old mothers, the new mothers, the secret mothers. We each have our own story, our triquetra, our personal trinity knot: the version we tell our children, the one we tell other people, the one we, perhaps, never utter.
*
When I am finally discharged from hospital and at home with my daughter, I ponder why this birth experience felt entirely different than my first one. On paper, this second birth should have been the traumatic one: giving birth to a premature baby on the day COVID numbers were at a record high; her needing to be readmitted for jaundice treatment; then me needing to be readmitted for five nights of intravenous antibiotics for a post-operative infection. None of this phased me this time around. I felt like I was an active participant in my care. I was spoken to, listened to. I was heard.
Traditionally, this country has silenced women when it comes to stories of our pregnancies and births. It has forced some women to deny the very fact of becoming mothers. In turn, I wonder if we have internalised this and made ourselves involuntarily complicit. We silence ourselves. We make light of our pain. It’s not that bad, we tell ourselves and everyone else. Yet, I have never heard a woman recount her experience of giving birth without an element of fear, or regret, or trauma involved. As we revisit old Irish customs, adapting them to our current concerns, perhaps a way to truly honour Irish women is to create a space for them to share their birth stories, whatever they may be.
Tie a story into a knot. Try it on for size. Bind the threads together. Give it a shape you recognise so you don’t have to be afraid any more. Shape it into something safe. Smooth the jagged edges. Tell the story and take away its power to hurt you. You can tell it to someone else, or choose to tell it to no one. You can tell it to yourself. Yes, this happened. It is yours.
My daughter is still too young to hear it, but when she is older this is the birth story I will tell her: You arrived in winter, 4 weeks and 4 days early. You came along on Nollaig na mBan because you heard there would be a party and you wanted to celebrate. It was a cold day. Dad wasn’t allowed into the hospital until the very last minute and he was wandering around the carpark trying to keep warm, wearing a pair of tiny gloves that belonged to your brother that he found in his backpack. He said he looked like Mickey Mouse. You were so tiny but so perfect and all you wanted to do was sleep. We came home but you were sick so we had to go back into the hospital. Then we came home again and Mammy got sick so she had to go back into hospital again. Finally, we both came home and we slept and slept.
The years have passed quickly and my baby girl has started preschool. Last year, on my daughter’s birthday, on Nollaig na mBan, I lit three birthday candles to celebrate her three years of life. I told her to blow them out and make a wish. And then I lit them once more to honour all Irishwomen: maiden, mother, crone; birth, life, death; past, present, and future.
Máire T. Robinson is the author of novel Skin Paper Stone. She received a bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2023 to complete a memoir exploring motherhood, adoption and belonging. In 2024, her creative nonfiction featured in Banshee, and on Sunday Miscellany. Recent short fiction has also appeared in Southword, Trasna, and The Waxed Lemon. She lives in the West of Ireland with her husband and two children.