The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Those of us with more obscure maladies should be exempt from the plebeian ones, such as whacking headaches behind the nose when storm fronts roll in. (Unless your obscure malady involves the sinuses. Er. Sorry, Sonya. You should still be exempt.) 

So why am I up at all, you ask?

Aiain called. It's a respectable hour in Ireland and he's on his summer vacation, I think (you know, when everyone Irish goes to Majorca or the Cevennes so the tourists can pour in?) I'm just glad I answered the phone.

"Mom I want you to come here to live now or I want to come there, right now."

He was angry. This is only the second time in his life that I've known him to sound so angry, and the first time, I was about to get on the bus to the Shannon airport and leave him in Ireland with relatives he'd only recently met. (Since then he has acquired a culchie accent. Ye Gahhhds.)

Me: "What's up, papillon?"

Aiain: "Auntie Grainne said the reason I can't come and see you for holidays is because you're a de, a deviant and she says you'll go to hell and don't I learn about hell in school and she said my mother was there too."

Inner Me: you foul, disgusting woman, I'll trek out to your nasty little sheep stand in the back of beyond and I'll skin you for fucking booties.

Me: "Aiain, no, honey, no... what did you tell her?"

Aiain: "I told her fuck off about my mother!"

Inner Me: Yes! Yes! Yesyesyesyes!

Me: "You need to watch your mouth, and you need to apol--" [check] "...you need to talk to Auntie Grainne and tell her why you felt that way."

Inner Me: Kill. Maim. Shred.

There was more to the conversation, at the end of which I conceded silently that ten-year-old boys in parochial schools west of Cork know more cuss words than I ever did. Also that I quite possibly need to go to Ireland and beat the tar out of some people who have had, because of Irish legal vagaries, the rearing of my son.

I tried to finish in a dignified, adult way, with 'Your mother loved you' and 'There is no hell.'

Except for people who are narrow-minded and petty and deride the dead for a choice they, themselves could never hope to understand. Yeah. There's a hell for those people. Hang a right at Pedophiles and Child-Beaters, go down the brimstone corridor past the restrooms and Murderers, Serial Murderers, and Sadistic Torturers, and someday Grainne Byrne will be there, in a little lava pool, eternally bubbling away.

I really hope Aiain doesn't develop a Harry Potter complex. I'm glad Finn is a more understanding human creature (maybe only because Aiain is his blood kin, but still) and I'm glad they don't make him sleep in a cupboard.

Aiain is one of the intensely private parts of my life. Partly because of his mother, my history with her, and how that shaped his life outside his control; partly because he's a child, and privacy is due children.

Partly because it hurts so much, not having him.

And he's just such a great kid, clever, clever (not so much with the maths, but... atta boy!) and so unique. Everyone says that about their kids. But. He had a good, strong formative upbringing, and he's at least had stability since then.

(Oh, and his name's said 'Ayin', like the Hebrew letter. Never seen it anywhere else; I think she made the spelling up.) He has red-touched blonde hair and eyes that are a strange color, sort of exactly the brown-gold-red of a fallen oak leaf. His mother had them, too.

He likes reading, syrup pudding, dinosaurs, insects and mayhem. He wants to be an archaeologist. He speaks French the way you only can if your mother taught you, he's way into Harry Potter, and his toy of choice is a stuffed black bat. (If you were ever in my suite in college, that bat.) The bat is sort of a surrogate Hedwig for his Harry Potter games, though I think I meant it as a surrogate me.

When I can visit, when time and fortunes allow, he makes me walk through way too many copses, and insists on riding my horse's withers as if he had no pony of his own, le pauvre. And we go to the sea, and he still holds my hand to go wading. He has no fear of the sea; it was his mother's rule.

( cut for angst and length )

So I guess I got the idea from her, then, that you protect and defend and never, never back down when it's about his welfare; but you also do the right thing, even if it's so far from the thing you want.

So if I never talk about Aiain, it's because it hurts as much as losing her ever did, because he's still here, just far away. He's not living the life we tried so hard to build for him, and I'm not ambling lazily into maturity with his mother, whom I loved with more of my heart than anyone could think real. I know it's the right thing for him, but it galls the hell out of me.