Hannah
And ever ready to reel off the reasons why this was true.
She ran a successful company that she’d single-handedly built from scratch.
Home was a gorgeous apartment in a city that she loved.
There were diamonds she’d bought for herself in her earlobes and a vibrator with ten thousand five-star reviews in her bedside drawer.
It wasn’t so much that she didn’t need a man.
It was more like, at this point, she was confused as to what one would be for, exactly?
A plus-one she could rely on for weddings, so she wasn’t always seated down the back at the bin-of-broken-toys table?
OK, yeah. Someone who would make hotel rooms cheaper to stay in – yes, but then they would be in them with her, and she’d have to suffer all that excruciating so what will we do today?
chat you could skip when you travelled alone.
Maybe to introduce an element of suspense to orgasms, because they’d no longer be guaranteed? Was that it?
The men she met never let her get that far.
She was only ever at the first hurdle – trying to gauge physical attraction, if any – when BAM!
Out came a literally stupid political view or a self-serving story that was so blatantly a fiction, she blushed on his behalf.
Or he proudly asserted his hatred for something lots of people really liked, including her, because he’d confused shitting on popular things with having a personality.
Or their conversation went something like:
Him: So what do you do, then?
Her: I own a homewares brand.
Him (bemused): A brand?
Her (patiently): Yeah. It’s called Curated. I started six years ago with a website that sold a selection of candles, ceramics, stationery – that kind of thing. Now I have a shop in Powerscourt Townhouse Centre and an e-commerce operation that ships product all over the world.
Him (lifting his drink): My ex loved her candles. But, Jesus, the price of them. One Christmas she made me get her one that was fifty quid. Fifty quid! Literally burning money. And you can get the same thing in Penneys for a euro. It’s a total racket. (Sips)
Her (silently): Is it very small? Is it teeny-tiny? Does it not work very well any more? Did it ever? Is that the problem?
Even if, by some miracle, they got to goodbyes having avoided all that, she knew she had a text message that confused your and you’re and/or an unsolicited dick-pic to look forward to.
And more often than not, it was teeny-tiny.
There was only her and her brother, two years her junior.
He’d married a woman their mother detested, but that had been the only option because no woman on earth was good enough for Mary’s precious son, especially not one who – clutch your cross-and-chain – demanded that he share childcare and household duties equally, even after a hard day’s work.
The irony was that, in Mary’s view, any idiot with a pulse and a pension would do for her daughter.
The only problem was that Hannah didn’t realize that.
‘And if you’re going to be a mother,’ her mother reminded her every chance she got, ‘time is running out.’
Hannah had long suspected that Mary actually envied her independence, her self-sufficiency, her exciting life – and that’s why she needed it to end.
She couldn’t stand it. What she was really asking was Won’t you give up everything you really want in order to raise a perfect son and an ungrateful bitch, like I did?
It’s your turn now. You’ve had your fun.
Your suffering and sacrifice must commence.
‘I don’t want kids, Mam. I never did.’
This was a dance they’d done many times. They knew their parts. The steps were muscle memory.
‘But how do you know that?’ Mary would wail.
‘You don’t know what it feels like to have one.
I’m telling you, the moment they hand you your little boy, and you look at his little red face, everything changes.
You’ll never feel another love like it. It’s bigger than the whole world. It’s when life really begins.’
Ignoring the body-blow her mother had just casually inflicted, it was Hannah’s turn to say, ‘So everyone who doesn’t have kids isn’t really living at all, according to you.
What about all the women who can’t have kids?
And what if a man doesn’t want to be a father? Would you say the same thing to him?’
‘We’re talking about you.’
‘And the nuns and the priests and the pope—’
‘Don’t you dare! That’s different.’
‘To be clear, your advice is that I should do something I don’t want to do, at all, just in case I might want to later, even though I never have?’
‘I’d hate for you to regret it.’
‘I know what it feels like to want something, Mam. And I know that I definitely don’t want that.’
‘But who’s going to look after you when you’re old?’
When Hannah had the energy for these arguments, she’d point out that women had a longer life expectancy so any husband was likely to go first, just as her own father had twenty years earlier.
(There was no question that Mary would ever consider taking up with someone else, the disdainful phrase she used when other widows dared look for love again.) And that maybe having children purely so there would be someone there at the end to wipe your arse and pay your nursing-home bills seemed, oh, I don’t know, slightly unfair?
Not to mention all the complaints Hannah had had to listen to over the years from her friends – the rap-sheets of man-boys who’d apparently just crawled out of their mothers’ wombs, in their twenties and even thirties but unaware that you should separate whites, occasionally actually switch the dishwasher on, and take out the bins before they start leaking toxic sludge.
Some of them had to be reminded to change their underwear.
How could they be her old-age saviours when they were barely able to look after themselves?
But then there were other times – more times – when Hannah surrendered with a sigh and walked away from these conversations because she knew her mother’s views weren’t strictly her own.
Mary was carrying relics from the Ireland that had raised her.
When she’d come of age, women who worked in the civil service had to quit if they got married.
A woman couldn’t apply for credit without her husband’s or father’s signature, sit on a jury, or guarantee that if she ordered a pint in a pub, she’d be served it. The phrase marital rape was a misnomer.
And it wasn’t as if, by the time Mary started having children of her own, Ireland was a completely different country.
Condoms available for general sale: 1991.
Divorce: not until 1995, and only after you’d been living apart for at least four years.
The notorious Magdalene Laundries, where so-called fallen women were forced into hard labour – and whose babies were often adopted without their consent – weren’t confined to history, but present tense. The last one closed in 1996.
And still, now, there was the language.
‘They’ve no family,’ she’d hear Mary tell someone on the phone. Later, when Hannah pointed out that everyone has a family, her mother would roll her eyes. ‘You know what I mean. No family of their own.’
‘You mean they’ve no children of their own.’
‘So?’
‘So say that.’
A feral, failing farmer in his seventies who’d never ventured further than his local village was a bachelor, but a vibrant, self-made woman twenty years younger who ran miles every morning and spent her free time travelling the world was a spinster.
If she didn’t have children she was also childless, because a woman without progeny wasn’t whole.
She was missing something. Mother was the feminine default.
A couple of years back, a conversation in the pub had turned to the subject of Confirmation names, and that’s when Hannah learned she had a namesake in the Bible.
The next day, she’d looked it up. In the First Book of Samuel, Hannah is one of Elkanah’s two wives.
The shame and sorrow of her barrenness torments her to the point where she can’t eat and can’t stop crying.
Her husband laments, ‘Am I not better to you than ten sons?’ but their union alone isn’t enough to fulfil her desires.
She hadn’t bothered to read on.
‘Childfree,’ she’d correct her mother. ‘Childfree.’
‘What does it matter? It’s the same thing.’
‘Only one of them is a value judgement.’
‘A what?’ her mother would screech. ‘For the love of … You know, Han, you need to stop taking everything so seriously.’ There’d be another, even more dramatic, eye-roll. ‘If you lightened up a bit, you might find a man.’
Her friends’ husbands were nice. Inoffensive. Thoughtful, for the most part. But not at all the kind of men she’d pictured them ending up with.
There were five of them, threaded together since the first year of secondary school.
Hannah remembered the hours spent collectively daydreaming about marrying a rocket scientist (Jill, because she wanted to be a rocket scientist herself), a Concorde pilot (Nicole, laser-focused on becoming Emirates cabin crew), a Garda detective (Tara, worryingly obsessed with true crime) and a rock star (Niamh, whose sixteenth-birthday present from her parents was a drum kit and soundproofing, and whose teenage crush on James Hetfield confounded them all).
Though, weirdly, she couldn’t recall whatever job her own imaginary future husband might have had.
What had happened to those plans?
It seemed like there’d been a moment there, two or three years after they’d graduated college, when the music only Hannah didn’t hear abruptly stopped and everyone, panicked, threw themselves on to the nearest empty chair. When all her friends seemed to say, one after the other, You’ll do.
But had they looked long enough? Thought about what they really wanted? Or had they just settled for what they had at the time, because it was time?