My Dark Rosaleen

In my short twenty five years on this earth, I have seen and experienced more than many have in a lifetime. I have been through horrors I believed at the time would be impossible to survive. I have watched those I love lose their battles with the hand of death itself in front of my eyes and I have grieved the loss of children that I never held.

At the centre of all this, a woman has stood. A woman who has lived every step of my life alongside me, though she battled her own pain and her own horrors. A woman, who in her unconditional way of loving, leaves you feeling that you have known the love of God.

My mother, Rosaleen.

My mother has never won a Nobel prize. She has never walked on the moon, nor has she cured a disease. She is an ordinary woman and that, is what makes her so extraordinary.

She was born and raised on The Falls Road in West Belfast and is a mother to two children and a Grandmother to three. She has lived through The Troubles, charged bravely through gunfire raining down on her very streets, nursed the sick and the dying, loved and forgiven where others could not have, smiled where others would have screamed, changed lives without ever asking for a single thing in return and saved lives where others would not have seen a life worth saving.

It is in her perceived ordinariness, the fact that no one has ever written a song or a book about this eccentric and beautiful woman, that makes her so worthy of praise.

I was not an easy child, in fact it would be more than fair to say I was somewhat nightmarish. I always felt as though I lived in a world that I both understood and somehow knew nothing of. My brain refused to work the way that those of me peers seemed to. I saw things, I heard voices, I lost time. It's difficult to say when it truly started or what specific even caused the fracture, if there was a specific event at all, but the first black out I can recall occurred when I was seven. It's called Dissociative Identity Disorder. I called it the imaginary and troublesome friend that lived in my head and occasionally took over my body. I questioned everything. I fought everything. I detested silence and then seemed in equal measure to long for it, to savour it even.

My mother knew that I was different. She saw conflict in me and knew that I was both the happiest of children and the unhappiest. She did not fear this as others would have. To my mother I simply was. Where those outside saw something in me that gave them cause to fear or resent me, my mother saw only a daughter.

I was not an easy teenager. I lied because I could not find the words to admit what I knew; there was something wrong with me. My imaginary friend had not departed the way that other children's do. Instead mine stayed with me; within me. I made decisions that I could not remember making and I fought with my mother over things I knew I didn't care about.

When I told her I was bisexual, I half expected the Catholic in her to recoil, but of course my mother believes that God is love and so she embraced me. When I told her I had been raped, that I was dirty and shameful, she gave me the only answer I needed, I was still her daughter.

I have watched my mother sit with two sisters, a mother and a cousin as they slipped from this life and into the next and impart to them such unimaginable strength. In their final moments, she gave them what they needed to face the unknowable without fear because she loved them and she brought them peace. I have seen her give love to those who do not deserve it, ever determined to bring them back into the light and drag them from their own self imposed darkness.

I have never known my mother to treat anyone better or worse than anyone else. It didn't matter where they came from, what they sounded like, how much money they had, what church they attended if they attended one at all or who they loved. If they could be helped, she helped them. She fought for the freedoms of individuals, children and families and even now in her retirement, she will aid where she can, Whenever there is someone in need, they will find help at Rosaleen's door.

I am not an easy adult. I continue to battle the demons of my past now for my own children. Still, my mother stands by my side.

When my daughter was born I named her Rosaleen, what else could I name her? To me it means, eternal love.

I wrote this because my mother deserves to be recognised for all that she is, not only because of what she has done, but because she never once sought recognition for it.

Everything I am that is good, I am because my mother can love in a way that never asks for anything back.