Diary Entry on the 11:30 Train to Dublin

Jimmy O’Connell

My mother told me a story when I was a teenager, and it has been going around in my head all day. We had a stormy relationship, my mother and me, but I suppose that’s true of a lot of teenage girls and their mothers.

In her story, my mother was sitting on the station bench waiting for the train to take her to Dublin, where her boyfriend lived – boyfriend: not my dad; that was later. She was reading Woman’s Own in days long before iPhones and tablets. A young woman sat beside her. The young woman was extremely nervous, and seemed quite high strung and agitated. It was obvious she wanted to talk to someone, anyone. My mother happened to be there.

‘I should have taken the train to Galway. But I don’t know if I did the right or wrong thing,’ the young woman said.

My mother didn’t say anything, just nodded, perplexed.

The young woman started to cry, the tears just came streaming down. My mother didn’t know what to do. She herself was young then and had never experienced anything like this before. But she felt she had to stay and listen. It would have been too cruel to get up and walk away. It would be abandoning a woman in distress. She couldn’t do that.

The young woman told my mother that she had given her child up for adoption and had the opportunity to meet her for the first time, in Galway. It had been all arranged. The social worker was waiting to meet her on the Galway train and take her to the orphanage, where her child was waiting.

‘But I couldn’t do it,’ the young woman said, trying to control her tears. ‘I just couldn’t. I would be a terrible mother. I would. I know it. I’d turn out just like my mother – who made my life a misery. I don’t want to do that to my child.’

And then she just got up and left the station. My mother never saw or heard about her again.

‘There she went,’ my mother said, ‘not knowing if she would make a good mother. Her fear of being a bad one probably destroyed the opportunity of being a good one. Who knows? Maybe she would have learned from her mother’s mistakes and been a good mother to a child that needed a mother. But she and the child would never know one way or the other.’

I remember looking at my mother and wondering why she was telling me the story. She must have guessed my question. She put her arm around me, ‘I’d have never given you up,’ she said, ‘never.’

And then she said. ‘I didn’t take the train to Dublin to meet my boyfriend.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘I knew he wasn’t the right one for me. Your father was the better man.’

And why has this story been spinning around and around in my head all day, and as I sit and make this diary entry on the 11:30 train to Dublin?

But it’s obvious, really, isn’t it. As I write this, I am asking over and over whether or not I am making the right decision. My boyfriend is waiting for me at the station. I know that. But will he just be my boyfriend or the father of my child?’

• Jimmy O’Connell is a member of Inklings Writing Group who meet on Tuesdays at 11am in the Annebrook House Hotel.