As November Ends

It has been a hard Autumn watching my mother slowly sink into dementia and other family members fighting for control of my parents' life and money.Angry at their difficult childhood.Yet I have compassion for my parents.I try to remember the little acts of kindness that did happen sometimes.y parents were very young when they married my father married at 21 and by the time he was 30 he had fathered 8 children including stillborn twin sons.He had no childhood as he he was boren in 1930 so World war 2 stole the best years of his childhood  and then he had to go straight into National Service in Egypt and Malta.He enjoyed the experience .He had only known my mother for 3 months before they married.She became a lodger in the house next door to his parents's cornershop.they moved into the space above the shop and rented their house to two Irish girls.At the ime many landlords put signs in their windows ,my mother remembered,saying "No Irish,No Blacks"
My mother is Irish and had a hard childhood and I feel was born in the wrong time,She is intelligent and a free spirit but found herself trapped in the home based(no choice) life of the 1950's housewife,her life dominated by child bearing and rearing in a 2 up and 2 down house with no central heating, no bathroom or toilet or garden.Her Roman Catholic religion totally dominating and repressing her life and never having the money to go home and visit her parents save once 3 months after her marriageI was conceived in Ireland :) )and 17 years later when I went with her.I never my Irish grandfather as he died many years before.
I suspect she was envious of her daughters with their education and choices in life,though her father often sold his boots and went without so she could go to a boarding school at Spanish Point where she got the equivalent of A levels.They had hoped she would go to college.Mum was one of 9 children The second youngest ,the eldest was her only sister and there were 7 brothers.Her sister emigrated to America (as so many of her generation did) at 19 to help the family back home.There were dozens of relatives already out ther including almost all of my grandmother's siblings.Her father and sister raised her.My great Gtrandmother died just after giving to birth to my Grandmother so her 16 year old sister became her mother.My aunt went out to My Grandmother's sister.A whole generation before them had gone to New York to escape the Great Famine ,which was particularly severe in Co Clare.
My mother however was wild free spirit and at around 18 ran away to England where she wanted to work on the buses a she had seen this in a film Her eldest borther ,already living in England found her and persuaded to study Nursing.She was bored after a few years and left it.
Enough of that for today!