On being a selkie

Visiting the seals of Kenmare Bay, April 2023

Late one afternoon during my April retreat in Ireland, I went canoeing with friends. We were staying in an old hotel on the Wild Atlantic Way. (It turned out that the ruined castle I thought I was staying in actually languishes in the grounds of the hotel; the hotel itself was a mere 120 years old.)

Dozens of grey seals rested on the rocks or glided through the water as we paddled out onto the bay, and my companions and I talked about the old Irish selkie stories. Selkie men and women live in the sea as seals but come up onto the land and take off their skins to dwell in human form amongst us sometimes. They can't stay too long though, or they become sick and pine away with longing for their ocean kingdom.

I remembered a chapter in Bone mother that I’d called ‘Selkie’. I wrote it when my children were young. Tommy was three, Emma five. Here it is, below.

On being a selkie, 1996

It seems to me that in our mothering, as in life, there is never a right path. There is only our path, the path we take and the stories we gather up along the way. Every path brings its own loss and grief, its own fragrant joy. What matters is that we care for each other as parents and refrain from judgement. Who can judge? We are all trying so hard to do the right thing for our family, for ourselves.

A mother of small children swims between the worlds like a selkie, a seal-woman. A lot of people don’t know about this. Some try to pretend it’s not happening. But a mother steps into the clinic or hospital or office and pulls on the skin of the topside world. When she collects her child from preschool or childcare, she is clambering back into her sealskin and disappearing under the waves. Topside, under the sea, topside, under the sea, day after day.

Yesterday I woke at dawn with an aching heart and lay there listening to the magpies and kookaburras and pigeons. I heard Tommy go to the toilet. I must have gone back to sleep because I dreamt that I ran down and swam out into the ocean waves. But the children were following! They would drown! I managed to grasp each one by the shoulder and keep their heads above water; my grip tore their skin and I felt this as if it were my own flesh rending. Their wounds ran red under my fierce fingers, the sea darkened with blood of my children. I struggled desperately against the waves, against the weight of my children, and dragged them into shore. Then they stood on the beach in the sunshine next to me, unperturbed, as I stared at their lacerated shoulders.

Yet even as I gazed the bloody mess of the wounds I’d inflicted healed, dried to a crust, disappeared. They had not been seriously hurt. What mattered was that I had saved them.

"Mummy – Mummy – Mummy –"

A sing-song insistence from down the backyard by the slippery slide broke into my dream. How on earth did he get out there? Did he unlock the back door by himself? Oh no he must have I’ll have to remove the internal key each night. And what about the redback spiders we saw the other day?

“Look!” Tommy cried out when I appeared shivering in my pyjamas on the back patio. I called and waved and smiled at him wanly from the top of the stairs.

He pointed to the half-moon, high in the morning sky and pale as bone. “Mummy – Mummy – ! I just noticed the moon!”

Is that what he wanted? To show me the moon?

Then just two nights later he was hallucinating with a fever.

“Make them be quiet Mummy,” he yelled, hands over his ears. “Mummy Mummy Mummy …” he threw the covers off his burning body … “Mummy, the dog, I hate it … Mummy tell them to stop, why can’t you?” I murmured comfort, insanely desperate for sleep. By the end of that week I’d developed bronchitis too. Thank heavens Emma remained well. My head ached. I coughed. I snapped irritably at the children.

I did my best to draw comfort from the land, because what else was there to do? One evening that week when Tommy and I were sick, I brought in the clothes from the line and saw a crimson sunset flare over the mountains; the smooth grey trunk of the gumtree glowed rose. A clean white waxing moon waited on high, bone dense, inevitable. Then I sat on the backstairs for a moment as tea cooked on the stove and the children kneaded playdough. I was so tired. The gums were whispering black silhouettes.

Did I doze off for a moment? What with Tommy coughing and me coughing, I was hardly getting any sleep.

"I’ve come a long way to find you," an old woman said, stepping out of the mist. She sat down next to me on the bottom of the stairs. Shadows shifted across her face. In her eyes I glimpsed craggy mountain ranges, purple as the dawn. Then she stood up carefully, limbs weary from the journey, wild white hair tossed about her face. For a moment her cloak fell back and a dazzling light spilled about us. The ironbark glimmered in the light dancing around her body.

"You know how to birth, you know how to mother,” the Cailleach said quietly. “Now it’s time to get serious about birthing yourself. Mothering yourself.”

Then she wrapped her mantle close, drawing the night back in, and was gone. A startled skink lizard scuttled away amidst the winter leaves. I went inside. What was that? The kids were still in the kitchen making snails with the playdough.

I finished cooking dinner.