mns  2006-02-25 18:08   

It’s nearly March and spring is not in the air.
Over the last month, domestic problems on the Irish front (namely D.I.V.O.R.C.E.) have kept me on an emotional tightrope where there appears to be no safety net.
I find myself in the last few days thinking more and more of my mother. She had these sayings; sayings that as a child left me bewildered, but as an adult can reduce both myself and my sister to hysterics of laughter in a matter of seconds.

One of these sayings was, ‘It’s the best thing that ever happened.’ Now my mother would utter this at the most unlikely of moments, like when my sister fell on her roller skates in the house and broke her arm, or someone failed an exam at school, or when the window-cleaner fell off an upstairs window and I, aged 8, ran to catch him. The implication of the utterance, ‘it’s the best thing that ever happened,’ was, that in the happening of whatever event, a worse one would be avoided.
It was sometimes, if not always, difficult to see how this might be, but I can look back now and realise that my sister falling in the house and breaking her arm (and thereby being more careful in the future) might well be a lot better than her falling on the street under a car. And failing an exam pulled one up short and made one realise that a bit of work would solve that issue in the future. And indeed in my not reaching the window cleaner in time I learned a) I needed to be faster and b) it was lucky this 6 ft tall 14 stone man did not fall on me. And so on – any and every disaster could be seen in a positive way.
My mother was a woman whose cup was always at least half full. This reminds me of a friend of mine, also in the throes of divorce, who was telling me about her husband’s pessimism. ‘His cup is ALWAYS half empty,’ she said.
And then, a few weeks after she said that to me, he went and inherited some €35,000,000 (yes, honestly, thirty five million!), and I said, ‘surely now he can see his cup is half-full.’ ‘No,’ said my pal with a grimace, ‘now his ocean is half-empty.’
Well, no matter what happens – my cup is half-full, and I know it and I know I’m lucky.
Another of my mother’s sayings was; ‘Well, you’ve got to laugh!’
Again this was said at the most unlikely, and indeed sometimes the most awful, of times.
Illness, despair, even death might be staring one in the face, and my mother would smile wryly and say, ‘Well, you’ve got to laugh.’
It was as if, when all is said and done, and there is nothing left, you might as well laugh, because you couldn’t change the bad things that were happening.
And so, as I go into the month of March, with yet another court date looming on the near horizon, I say to myself, it’s the best thing that ever happened, and yes, well, I’ve simply got to laugh.