The winner of our current Short Story Competition is published in the Mar|Apr issue of Irish Country Magazine, out now. This story came in second place and was written by Marian Dalton
Helen sat by the window as she did every Sunday afternoon.
She watched the people come and go just as she watched the seasons. Today it was sunny with a breeze sending clouds racing across the sky. It was Mother’s Day and even in the nursing home, which had been her home for the past two years, there was a sense of love in the air.
There were more visitors than usual. Helen watched as a young man looking a little blustered, hurried past her window with a bunch of flowers for his mother who occupied the room just down from her own. If things had been different all those years ago, she would probably be getting flowers today too.
Her thoughts strayed back, as they often did, to the farm house where she had grown up in the beautiful wild Irish countryside. It had been a happy home with her parents and younger brother Pat. She had been what they described as ‘a bit slow at school’ so she had left at the age of twelve to help her mother. Then at seventeen, she became pregnant. He had been a local lad, her own age.
She remembered thinking it would be alright. But it wasn’t.
There had been rows, then silence, then whispered conversations and one day she had been forced to leave home. The convent just outside the city had became her new home, where she had lived for almost fifty years.
She had never heard from her family again.
She was told by the nuns her father and some years later her mother had died. She requested to go to her mother’s funeral but the nun said it was better to leave it be. So she had.
Of her brother, she knew nothing. She didn’t know if he even knew what had really happened. He had been a child when she left.
She worked in the kitchen in the convent helping the nun who did the cooking. Later, when there were fewer nuns, she became the cook. They had told her she was good at cooking, good with her hands.
And when the work there became too much, she came here.
She had never spoken to anyone about the little girl she had given birth to on a Spring day long ago. Or the pain she had felt when they took her away.
It’s better this way, it’s for the best, they had all said. She had asked where her baby would live but had not been told. It was against the rules. You didn’t break the rules. She had never asked again.
Outside the convent walls, no one knew she was a mother. No one in the nursing home knew. She longed to tell someone but you didn’t break the rules. But she knew and that was what really mattered.
She was a mother. She kept the picture of that little baby in her heart as clear as the Spring day long ago. Did that young woman ever think about her? Had she ever been told about the girl who gave birth to her? Would she look for her some day?
The voices came back into her mind. Leave it be, it’s better this way. Had they told her daughter that too?
No one wished her Happy Mother’s Day, no one came with flowers, but she was a mother and knew a mother’s love for her child and that mattered. And maybe some day…..and she drifted off to sleep.
You can read the winning story in the Mar|Apr issue of Irish Country Magazine, in shops now. Click here for details on how to enter our May|Jun competition.
