Nostalgic story about the flat I just paid off. It’s a one bed flat with a living room and a kitchen. I painted it all, tiled the small hallway and the bathroom and the kitchen back splash. The leftover back splash tiles are on one wall in my utility room bathroom in my house.
Anyway, as I was doing all this, my mom talked about her own flat in Brooklyn. She had it for a little while after she left the nunny-bunnies and before she got together with my dad. It was clear it meant a lot to her but I didn’t really realise why till after she passed. Wish I’d figured it out before.
She left her childhood home around age 20. Her brother wanted her gone - my mom remembered doing dishes and watching her mom and her brother talking in the yard. Her mom came in and said it was time for her to go to America. She’d sacrificed her education to look after her mother and father and her reward was to be sent away.
Six months after she’d left for America she got a letter that her dad had died. That’s when she heard two American nuns talking about her loss, “It’s ok, the Irish don’t feel emotions like normal people do.”
Regardless, the convent looked after her. She got a bed, lights, indoor plumbing, heat, access to a car. But others told her what to do and how she could live. Then Vatican II happened and they could go out in non-penguin form. One day she and a friend did that and when they came back to the dining hall, two older nuns turned their back on them in disapproval. That didn’t strike my mom as very godly - and so she left. She left with like $20 and a bus ticket to New York.
I’m not 100% sure, but I assume she stayed with her sister. And then around the age of 31 she got her first apartment. It was hers - well, it was her landlord’s, but close enough. No mother or mother superior to inspect her room or tell her to do chores, just her own space. Her own rules. And for about a year she was on her own.
After that journey it must have been amazing. Incredibly free. When she talked about it there was wistfulness and pride. A school dropout immigrant who had been sent away from her home and then shunned by her Sisters and here she was with a studio flat in Brooklyn. Far from that she was r’ared indeed. I see it now but really wish I’d asked more.
She was very happy with how I did up the flat. It mattered to her as an echo of her own. And we had a lot of discussions about renting it out in 2010. I explained that the commute was really awful and that ultimately I wanted to move back to Galway and the plan had always been to rent it out - that I was following her retirement advice. And I explained how I’d do it through an agency and myself, the flat and the tenant would all be looked after (for a fee obviously). She agreed, but was sad.
And from what I’d learned from doing up the flat - where I had to go room by room - I did the same in my home. So that also appeased her too. More progress on my home was good, but it wasn’t the echo from that place in Brooklyn.
Anyway, I really do wish I could share it with her and learn more about her first heady days of freedom. For those of you with sound parent(s) who still have them around, seriously, ask questions. There comes a time you can’t.