Coracle

I am three days short of 33 weeks pregnant with my third pregnancy when I break my wrist on Carrigaholt Bay beach. It is the morning of the eve of the summer solstice. I am with nine of the women I love most on this burning, beautiful planet. There are only a small handful of places in Europe that are more westerly than where we are stood, at the water’s edge, when I slip on a slimy green pebble. I know, the moment my body makes contact with the ground beneath me, that it is broken, even though my friends in their gorgeous hopefulness suspect otherwise. We have come away together to celebrate the solstice, and sisterhood, and so many individual things within our own lives. We began to plan this trip back when winter still held the land in her icy grip. Back when the Cailleach, that strong-willed, beautiful ancestor goddess had yet to hand over the reins to Brigid, goddess of spring, of new life, of hope, and so much more.

And we, the ten of us women from across this whole earth, are part of a much wider, intricate web of women – all mothers – who have decided to live our lives, here in the west of Ireland, in a kind of reciprocal one-another-ness I have never before encountered.

Just the night before the wrist break, we sit around a small table, crows homing on the first properly sunny evening of summer, talking about – amongst other things – what we have learned, and unlearned, through the creation of this community.

For creation really is the word that comes to mind when I think of what we have together.

A woven thing;
An original thing;
An ongoing, many-coloured, inexplicable thing of beauty.

A thing that didn’t start, for many of us, at a gate, or in the pool, or in the queue for potatoes and milk. A community many of us found through the surreal magic of a WhatsApp group, advertised on notice boards in the small, rural place we had decided to build our nests.

A gathering of mamas, holding each other as we weather the storm that is mothering without the village, in late-stage capitalism – many of our skills lost, much of our wisdom displaced – beneath an uncertain, often grey sky.

A skein of support.
          A virtual village, as one mama named it.

I have long been taken by ideas of what we hold, and how we hold it.

I’m moved, as a woman, a creative, a mother, by the ways that us being held allows us to hold others more capably, more tenderly, more sustainably.

Holding and making feel more intertwined for me than ever before.

Holding, making and survival feel like a trinity more sacred, more healing, more vital, than I can really find any words for.

I’m not at all sure of the ins and the outs of it all, but this summer my Instagram has been playing a blinder when it comes to what it’s sending me….

In case your mother/ grandmother never told you/ taught you: you can do X when Y happens so Z is what you end up living as your life.

There are more than a handful of us who came away from our upbringings without feeling like our toolkits were sufficiently packed with all we would need to survive this moment, and all that lies ahead. More of us, perhaps, than we might be able to imagine, struggle with what others might call the basic craftspersonship to steer any ship through the seasons we are headed towards, full steam.

Through the small, cracked-screen-oriented device I now have to hold in my non-dominant hand, I have learned, through a group of women who began as strangers, how to live a life I spent decades dreaming of.

I have been taught how to ask for help, and how to take it when it arrives. How to give it, in shared, sustainable ways. How to listen, and wait, and trust, and how to keep going.

I have learned how to be held and to hold.

But, as well as these unseeable, unmeasurable things, I have had wildly wondrous skills passed to me, across fires, and tables, and fields, and dancefloors.

How to make soap; affordable bone broth; a pinch pot; a den; a felted birthday crown.

How to survive a toddler with chickenpox, when living in a van in a heatwave; how to survive on zero sleep; how to dry out feverfew; how to apply glittery eyeshadow after a life without makeup.

When to sow crown prince squash seeds; when to harvest calendula; when to accept the antibiotic; when to trust my own instinct; when to buy the plastic paddling pool/ bubble blaster/ rainbow windmill.

I’ve learned to work a sewing machine, reverse into specific farm pull-ins on particular country laneways, and how to grieve a baby – all through a community of care that exists first and foremost on a small handheld device that, for all intents and purposes, I mostly detest.

I spend all of the solstice eve in two hot hospitals, ensuring all is ok with my baby, and at the exact moment of the solstice, I am in a third hot hospital being x-rayed. Within moments it is confirmed I have broken my wrist. My writing wrist; my making wrist; my doing wrist; my mothering wrist; my holding wrist.

Within moments of sharing the news on WhatsApp, I am flooded with messages of support.

Let me hold this for you; let me hold this for you; let me hold you.
Let us hold you, and your lover, and your son, and your baby who is growing inside you.
Let us hold that other baby too.
A wee one who, on that solstice, should have been celebrating their first birthday.

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Let us guide one another, as we weave these sturdy, ancestral, miraculous ecologies of care.

Let us hold each other, as we gather and mend, make and tend; as we ready our coracles, together.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh is the author of Thin Places (Canongate, 2021) and Cacophony of Bone (Canongate, 2023).

Hold This continues at VISUAL until 30 August