On Blessing the Space Between Us

It is the morning after the historic choice by the Irish people to repeal the 8th Amendment of the Irish constitution of 1983, an amendment which granted equal right to life to any human life within a mother's womb, making it one of the most strict anti-abortion laws in the Western world.

With my fellow Irish women, I have woken up, this morning, to the end of a battle in Ireland for a woman's right to be seen as a person in her own right, even in pregnancy. In the distance I see a tinge of pink over the Galtees after a night of lightening and thunder, bringing a clear freshness to air that yesterday was heavy and damp and sticky.  This morning, my sisters and I, we feel we can breathe. 

I was at the count yesterday, and with other volunteers and campaigners at a hired venue booked as a place to gather after the result. What was striking for me was the difference in response between the older and younger women. The young women were jubilant -  in their many coloured badges, t-shirts and Repeal jumpers, there was a palpable sense of excitement: huge hope and optimism and discussion of where next to direct the energy of political change.

It was different for the older ones, and most particularly for the mothers, both with children and without. The energy and love and excitement were still there, and the trauma too. Tears were flowing freely. Huddled in corners we hugged and held eachother and cried and told our stories, alternating between being eachother's kind witness and falling apart, over and over and over again.

For many of us who had braved meeting "the other side" in this, we had bared our souls in ways we never imagined possible on the doorsteps and on the streets, in blog posts and tweets. We spoke of our miscarriages, our near misses, abuses and violations, addictions and violence - and our beloved babies dying within us that we had to bid goodbye to in a cloud of shame, secrecy and silence. 

We spoke too of deep longings - for freedom from this debate that has coloured our understanding of what it is to be female and what that means to our nation, for babies not born, for the fruit of wombs damaged irreversibly by abortion that we never got to experience, for freedom from the anguish and knowing of what it is like to be unseen or forgotten or alone in the moment of our greatest need.

We spoke of the collective weight of carrying no longer just our stories, but the stories of all the women who had told us theirs - many of whom found this was the first time they could speak, not just about the tragedies of their lives but also about themselves as sexual beings. We regaled eachother with stories of the old women who we would never have guessed to have been so wild in their youth, but whose eye glints and guttural laughs told a different story.

For most of the women I know of my age and older, at the cusp of the end of childbearing years or well past it, this week has been one of deep, deep contact with the suffering of our sisters for generations. For very few of us has it been exclusively about our own story - it has been about opening up to and staying present for the stories of the many, and more than that, to honouring the reality of the damage done by silencing women, by a collective cultural rendering of invisibility that has destroyed too many lives.

For the older women, there is a question. This is done now, and we feel the relief of it. How, now, will we bring the broader cultural change of openness to women's many-storied lives? How do we bring the change from one moment of sharing and community, to a country that allows openness and meeting of the heart for many?

I have been fortunate over the last six weeks to have been engaged in a course on Interpersonal Mindfulness, aimed at bringing true presence into everyday interactions, both pleasant and challenging. I took many moments yesterday to use this historic occasion to practice what I had been taught - to pause, relax, open, trust what would come out of an interaction between us, speak my truth and listen deeply, but of all of those moments, the one that stands out the most to me was this:

On the doorsteps of City Hall yesterday, two men stood with a placard with a variety of politician's faces emblazoned with the words "Murderers!". As I exited after the vote had been returned, I paused beside them and I said quietly: "I hope you can find peace in your heart". The man with the poster hissed back at me, "I hope you find peace in yours, as you'll need it. Murderer!".

As I have been doing in meeting No campaigners over the last few weeks, I stayed open, and present, to do what I felt mattered most in that moment - to see the human in these men in front of me, who so clearly cared about this deeply if they were to spend their Saturday morning protesting at a venue where a vote against their beliefs was known from exit polls to be foregone conclusion.

Did I meet controlling misogynists who wanted my destruction? Righteous God-botherers who wanted to deny me my bodily autonomy and chain me to the kitchen sink? Religious fanatics with a deep seated hatred of the female body and desire to control it?

No.

I won't tell the precise story of the man I spoke to yesterday as it is not my story to tell, but it echoed much of what I have heard in speaking to people campaigning for No in the last few weeks while campaigning. I have spoken to many men.

I met a man who had married at 19 a woman who, navigating a history of severe sexual abuse, spent her life in and out of psychiatric hospitals as the two of them, with no money and no support, raised six children. I met a man who spoke of what it had been like the night his wife had been taken from the river, and when she survived, the hell of living with the unpredictability of when she might try to die by her own hand again, and of how he stayed, and how for him, this debate is about asking us to stay with suffering, rather than avoid it by pretending it isn't a part of life.

I met a man who told me that he had learned that marriage involved three rings - the engagement ring, the marriage ring and suffering - and how in living with human suffering in his union with his wife, he had also learned the value and meaning of being safe harbour and hope to another human being unable to navigate the storm, and how the most precious moments of his life were those she found peace, and particularly the calm joy he experienced that she had a peaceful death some years ago, surrounded by family who loved her for all her faults, and all her challenges.

I met a man who told me that he worries that our "progressive" Ireland is one which will increasingly see women's suffering as something that can be met with easy, sanitised and often commercialised solutions - abortion clinics on every corner, young girls going to these before reaching out to their families for support or forced into by controlling cads, women still alone but now just alone and unsupported by family and community here.

I met a man weeping in front of plastic foetuses, aged 55 with a moderate learning disability, who kept repeating over and over: I have a right to life, I have a right to life.

I met a young man who said to me, desperately almost, as I spoke softly and gently about why it was so for me to hear rape described as an anomaly or a hard case was so hard, "but there can't be grey areas! It's either right or its wrong, there are no grey areas in life". And I felt sorrow for his desperation, and how much he wishes this to be true.

In many of these cases, I spoke at some length about how we viewed some aspects of this differently, and though I doubt anything we spoke of would have changed our vote if we had to vote again, we heard eachother. There were tears, and there was deep looking into eachother's eyes. 

There were many times we fell into respectful, sad and companionable silences, the spaces and gaps between us where there are no easy answers to meeting the deep social issues that underpin crisis pregnancy. We spoke wanting to see and understand eachother, with respect and compassion for our own awareness of and responding to the suffering of our shared human existence.

I was struck in my encounter with the men I met in this that we would do well in this to remember that the gravest hurts that we endure in our country have arisen from not opening up to and hearing the truth of others lives. They come from not seeing or hearing the human in front of us, from our aversion to someone whose path makes no sense to us, from fusing with rigid stories about how the world should be that are so powerful and all-consuming that we cease to be aware of the potential for connection in any given moment.

The men I met yesterday and I parted with a warm shake of the hand, thanking eachother for the time we had shared. "I've been bewildered at all these women calling me misogynist", he said. "I don't know misogyny. I only know love".

We all want to be seen.
We all want to be heard.
We all want to be understood.

I understand for many of us as women in processing the traumas of our shared past, thinking about the perspectives of men who would have denied us our right to choose is not the task of today.  The anger and rage and sadness we have contained for so long need some time to filter, to be seen and to be held and allowed, just as they are in the here and now.

And still, my hope for Ireland is that we can allow ourselves to fully be in this experience, and that this will allow women to feel that what has been spoken of the past now belongs to the past, and that what is unsaid about the past can also rest where it is.

My hope for Ireland is that when we have taken time to heal after the 8th is that what we can take from it is the power there can be in sharing eachother's humanity freely and with care and compassion, and not a desire to other or destroy those who are not like us or who challenge us in ways that bring discomfort.

My hope is for an Ireland where we can, now this has been removed, begin to speak to one another from our hearts and from the home that is our bodies to begin to find where we can connect, even when we do not always agree. In this we might meet the potential for true progress based on a real, deep and sustainable compassion. There are no easy answers to human suffering, but the load is lightened when we remember to soften and open our hearts, and that we truly do live in the shelter of eachother.

For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past:
For everything under the sun there is a time.
This is the season of your awkward harvesting,
When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,

Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place
You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;
And a time when that bitter tree was planted

That has grown always invisibly beside you
And whose branches your awakened hands
Now long to disentangle from your heart.

You are coming to see how your looking often darkened
When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,
How deep down your eyes were always owned by something

That faced them through a dark fester of thorns
Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;
You could only see what touched you as already torn.

Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.
And your memory is ready to show you everything,
Having waited all these years for you to return and know.

Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.
You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering
And according to your readiness, everything will open.

May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide
Who can accompany you through the fear and grief
Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.

As your tears fall over that wounded place,
May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.
May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound

So that for the first time you can walk away from that place,
Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,
And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.”
― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings