It took my husband to quell the unutterable dread that the baby I so cherished might be taken from me

CHRISTINA MULCAHY WAS 22 YEARS OLD when her infant son was taken from her, in a west of Ireland mother and baby home. The year was 1940. She was still nursing him. Perhaps the fact that I was a breastfeeding mother myself when I heard her story ensured that it left such an indelible mark.

Aside from feeling empathy, my hackles were raised. Motherhood can bring out the fiercest sense of protection – that which ensures the survival of the species is also the nature of love: enduring, tenacious, infinite.

Christina had become pregnant by the man she wished to marry. Unbeknownst to her, contact with him was severed by the nuns into whose hands she was delivered. She gave birth to a little boy and remained with him for ten months, until one day she was told unceremoniously it was time to leave. A car waited outside. She was to go alone.

Shocked, Christina asked the nun to see her son. ‘Is there no time to say goodbye?’ she said.

‘What does he know? Why would you go back and upset him?’ she was told. ‘No time to say goodbye.’

Hearing her testimony, I held my baby girl a little closer. The sense of defiant protection I felt was fused with a deep sadness: the pain of bearing witness to annihilation.

I saw the documentary Sex in a Cold Climate some years after its initial broadcast in 1990. Survivors courageously shared their testimony of mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries. Their brokenness was evident, but so too was the shining light of love that never went out, for their stolen children. They may have lost their babies by stealth, coercion or simple robbery, but they never let them go. As with so many women who gave birth outside of wedlock at that time, Christina was subsequently rejected by her family and forced to work in a Magdalene Laundry, run by the Sisters of Mercy. She held out hope of being reunited with her boy, but as a fellow Magdalene told her bluntly: ‘Once you come here you won’t be going out.’

Christina described the ‘milk fever’ she had endured upon arrival, spending a week in sick bay as her body battled to adjust to the sudden cessation of breastfeeding. I’d recently had first-hand experience of how painful this can be. But I couldn’t begin to imagine the circumstances she faced going through it, fighting for her very sanity, stricken down with grief of the cruelest kind.

But the light endured. It was in her eyes, and it burned. In it, I recognised something indestructible: a deep, primal love that nothing can pry loose.

I had known that love when our own tiny infant had to be hospitalised at ten days old. We spent a further ten trying to establish what was wrong and how to make it right. In high stress, night and day, my body had reacted and, like Christina, I developed severe mastitis. The fever stoked my worst fears.

It took my husband to quell the unutterable dread that the baby I so cherished might be taken from me. He walked in one night and declared with quiet, exacting confidence that everything was going to be ok. His certainty derived from a place that shouldn’t have existed in an atheist man. His own mother, who had died nine years previously, had told him so in a dream. It was as clear as day, he said. All would be fine. And so it proved.

The infinite bond between a mother and her child has many manifestations.

Thirteen years later, in one of those twists life delivers, I came to be in contact with some of the children, now in their later years, who had been taken from their mothers as infants. Their stories were equally moving and again prompted that familiar protective feeling. They had made contact after I’d written a song, Finest Flower, which drew on Christina’s story in a bid to voice a simple idea: ‘Though I lost you there a long time ago…/Not for one minute of an hour/my finest flower/did I ever let you go’.

Peter Mulryan, Michael Flaherty, PJ Haverty, Eunan Duffy, just a few noble men amongst generations of children who keenly felt the forced severance of a bond over years and decades, but who never let go. Their enduring love for their birth mothers has driven them on an often fraught quest to uncover the roots of that connection, and their own beginnings. A society must be judged by its actions and not its words, and Ireland’s church and state have let them down severely in that regard.

While it saddens me to know that they are still fighting, being forced to fight, for what is rightfully theirs – the keys to their past; the decency of a simple apology; the rightful acknowledgement of how they and their mothers were wronged – their resilience is inspiring.

Today, as the Tuam Home Survivor Network celebrates their Christmas memorial, I’ll light a candle for what these courageous people embody: enduring love. When I blow it out, my wish will be that 2018 will bring them closer to the justice, and restoration, they – and their mothers – so deserve.