| When I think of my emigrant experience I am surprised by how much some of the deepest aspects of my experience are set, not in the country to which I emigrated, but at home in Ireland. I seem to define emigration as "I am from Ireland" rather than "I live in the US". After 25 years! Now is that Irish or what? Oops! You're going along, "grand altogether", in your new world when out of the depths of what one is pleased to call one's mind, bursts a powerful emotion which brings you up short. Such a thing happened to me just yesterday. Our house where my parents and we seven children lived, a two-up, two-down divided by a stairs, was home aplenty for me. Breakfast was bedlam. The porridge on the oil stove. Gay Byrne -or was it "His blasé-ness" Larry Gogan - on the wireless? Orders arriving in quick succession. "Mind!". " Move!", " Eat!", "Did you get enough ye poor crayter?", " Sit!", "Give Over!", "Whist!", "Are you ready yet?", "Go! Go! Go! let ye!", "Use the holy water font for God's sake will ye!", "The one by the front door, the one by the kitchen door is empty". Serving breakfast my mother watches anxiously for the CIE bus to Kilkenny for the oldest who goes to the "Brothers". One sister being readied for the "Convent" and two of us for "babies". Three more of us go to the same local Boy's school. All of this frenetic activity occurs in an 8x10 space we are pleased to call "the kitchen". The Germans had nothing on my mother when it came to organization nor did the Japanese hold a candle to her when it came to putting a lot in a very small place. She got it all done. I woke up one morning in my fifteenth year and with two leaps of the stairs I was at the kitchen door. Mom was sitting by the oven in what I have always remembered as terribly silent tears in a too silent kitchen. Hanky clutched in her hand she quietly said "Sean is gone". The power of those words over her was overwhelming. Out of the depths she cried to thee O God. Had Sean died I worried? The shock to me was not that Sean had emigrated, two of my siblings had already gone- one to England the other to France -, but that I had never seen my Mom cry before. She did not have the strength to hide it anymore. Emigration to a young man is adventure. To the mother of that young man it is an unbearable tearing at the heart. A tragedy. Dreadful unspoken suffering. Of Mom's seven children, six emigrated. All her work and desperation and love in the mornings years ago and for what. To lose her children to the world. I was not saddened that neither of my parent's were there when I walked out the door to catch the CIE train to Japan via Dublin. My youngest brother stood at our front door. He was stunned that no one was there. "Can I come with you? Somebody needs to see you off." "No, No" I said "its not a bad thing to leave this way. Dad must be somewhere looking after Mom. She's suffered enough. I'm not sure I could handle a good bye at the station with you either. We'll say it here." I could not look back to say goodbye. That brother has lived in Washington DC for 15 years now. I was listening to U2's "These are the hands that built America". A thought, about what is important struck me. The heart behind the hands " that built" is a mother's heart. "These are the broken hearts that built America". For you, Mom, on Mother's Day. No expression of gratitude, thanks, or love from me is equal to your never-ending sacrifice for all of us. May God reward you. For surely your children have failed in their love to you to leave you so alone for the sake of adventure. "Oh, Mom, is the breakfast ready?" Thomas Cahill © | 
