This is how I heard the story, twice removed, from a sister who disliked her mother as much as her mother disliked her.
On the day of our mother’s first holy Communion, a special day in that family of devout Catholics, she went first to visit the priest in his confessional. Her first ever confession as a seven-year-old and a task she took on dutifully.
To this end, she had practised her list of sins, tiny misdemeanours: late to school because she had dawdled longer along the road than she should; an extra biscuit snatched from the biscuit tin when no one was looking; and failing to brush her teeth properly, even after she had promised her mother she would.
The thought of repeating these sins to the priest was satisfying. She knew once she spelled them out to him, one after the other, he’d set a penance of prayer, a Hail Mary pass, which she could go through later in the church and thereafter be absolved of all her sins, at least those she had confessed to, and her burden would be lightened.
My mother disliked the burden of sin. It weighed heavily. She was the first born and a daughter. She was meant to set a good example to her many brothers. She was meant to behave in ways that made her shine as brightly, as bright as any saint in the firmament of saints above. Brighter than Joan of Arc on her horse with her shield and sword ready to fight for freedom; brighter than her namesake, Elisabeth of Hungary, who fed the poor against a cruel husband’s wishes; and brighter even that Maria Gemma Galgani, an Italian mystic who suffered from stigmata in her hands in the same place where the nails bore through Christ’s.
In my memory I mistook for this Maria Gemma for Maria Goretti, another Italian, the youngest saint to be canonised. This second Maria laid down her life to a man who made sexual advances and wanted to ravish her but she resisted. He stabbed her fourteen times for her refusal.
My mother did not know what it meant to be ravished but it sounded like a serious sin, one of the worst and she was sure she would never be accused of such a sin.
Against the tiny failings of her temperament: wanting the biggest serve, her wish to read the newspaper first in the morning even ahead of her father. She could read if she snuck outside and collected the newspaper before her father stepped outside to greet the day. The sin of her secret dislike of her brother, the one immediately below her. The one who loved to play up at night when they were meant to be sleeping. He could get her into trouble because she was the oldest and should have been able to keep him quiet.
As the nuns taught at school. The person who chatted in class out of turn while the teacher spoke was no worse than the person who listened. Both should be punished.
My mother thought this unfair. How could she help it that her brother liked to play games in the dark talking to himself as he pretended he was in a battle where he fought off the enemy? She could shush him. If she shushed too loud the nanny would hear. And if the nanny heard too often she would report it to her mother and then my mother would ….
The priest listened to my mother’s sins in the confessional, the rectangular box that stood in the corner of the church of St Bavo to the side away from prying eyes. The place where all sinners sat outside in silent rows to wait their turn to visit the priest and be absolved.
My mother’s knees itched against the hard wood kneeler, and she wanted to scratch at them, but she held her hands together in prayer position before the open grille. She could see the silhouette of the priest and caught the wetness of saliva on his lips the way it glinted in the thin light that sat above his head. So that neither of them was in complete darkness. She could not see him. Safe in the knowledge that she was just another little girl from her primary school unknown to this half-hidden priest to whom she could list her sins.
Secret enough but safe sins that should not attract too much attention, to give rise to any further probing from the priest. And when she was done and sat in silence waiting for the absolution and pronouncement on how she might atone for her sins the priest took a deep breath.
‘What haven’t you told me?’ he asked.
My mother hesitated. This was not part of the script. What could he mean?
‘That’s all, Father,’ she said.
‘But your mother tells me that you didn’t tidy your room even after she’d asked you many times.’
And my mother stammered a ‘Yes. That, too’.
The priest sighed, ‘Now I can absolve you. In the name of the father, of the son and the holy Ghost.’ He made a sign of the cross in front of his face. ‘Don’t keep your sins secret anymore.’
Then my mother slipped the latch on the confessional door, stepped out into the church and blinked back her tears.
She did not understand much about confession other than what the nuns had taught. She knew it was meant to be a private thing between you and the priest as God’s representative. Even though God could see all things, the priest could not, and she needed to tell the priest while God looked on. But not her mother. Her mother was not meant to be part of the story at all.
And so it was my mother’s trust in her mother trickled away, not quite to nothing, at least not yet but this became the first of many times my mother needed to keep secrets from her mother so as to protect herself from those ghosts, the ones that visited me as well after my mother grew up and had babies of her own, including me, the daughter to whom she gave her name, the one who like my mother was meant to be a saint, but secretly under the cover of darkness, was anything but.