Fires, Laws and Pharma

Centuries-old Things That Pulse – and Panadol

A Hawthorn Fairy Tree with ribbons on the roadside in County Cork, Ireland.

An abandoned old shopfront in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, Ireland.

“If you want to find the secrets of the Universe think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration”, Nikola Tesla

Sinéad was in town with her teen daughter and friend, walking up the main street, chatting a little and watching the world and its bits and pieces pattering out a quirky tune of life. She mentioned in passing that she had a headache, and her daughter’s friend snappily produced a Panadol from her tiny Channel handbag. Sinéad refused the medicine, saying it was just a mild headache, no need for a painkiller. The teen friend insisted, “Oh please take one, I’ve plenty in here”. Yeah, she did have plenty in there, in that tiny expensive handbag. The friend elaborated, “I always have them on me. So handy, especially for my period pain”. The girl was nearly 16, and soon she would be on the pill, to batter down that awful monthly suffering of being a woman.

Bloody hell, there was a lot of  ‘poor you’ and sympathetic head-nodding regarding female body rhythms, and a lot of running for a drug to quell the body’s distress signals. The teen girl would go to the GP, the consultation would be soft-toned, sympathetic and caring. The child would be hooked up to a drug to batter her endocrine system into being less female, less forthright, and less angry. Sinéad guessed that the girl’s mother was already hooked up to a HRT drug to mimic a youthful endocrine system, and reduce overheating, pains, and anger. Excessive and uncomfortable female things would be put right by the power of big pharma.

Sinéad looked at the child with an urge to scream out some truths that she knew the child would refuse to hear. You see, Sinéad knew things about the child’s family, things that others did not know. That was her way, she had a habit of sinking into the pauses and glitches in conversations that led her to see things that most Irish people did not want to see. She saw this child as incumbent to carry the striving lies to which the parents so ardently clung, the lies and undigested truths baked into that right-on, ‘nice’ family portrait, the tone of which was a well-balanced mix of slightly messy and endearing as well as self-possessed and successful. A thoroughly modern and Irish ‘good family’. The child’s body was signalling a sort of angst that did not fit with the non-negotiable vibe of the family portrait. She carried the unacknowledged fucked-up-ness of her parents’ unconscious and vicious fear of losing face in the world.

As parents, they were involved and conscientious, had interesting hobbies, were active in the community and went to mass regularly – they had a lot of belief and a lot of beliefs. Family dinner time was often noisy with vibrant and meaningful discussions. They had a high-functioning social identity, but they didn’t have faith, and they didn’t even know that they didn’t have this. And so, the girl is crying with pain every month, and the mother is so relieved to have a drug to deal with this awfulness that women’s bodies are heir to.

Three years previously, the hard-working, great-dad husband had had a wild sex affair with the neighbour. The whole thing exploded in the family living room one night when the wife saw a voracious sex text on his phone. She had remembered that number because the neighbour had taken out their bins and looked after the cat while they were on holidays. During their French holiday, the wife had phoned the neighbour and had remembered the unusual first 3 digits (789), the same ones that delivered the explosive text. She went ballistic, and the bottom fell out of their world.

Months of raw pain and anguish ensued. The kids were told that Daddy wasn’t feeling well, that work was very pressurising, and that he would stay on his own in an Airbnb for a few months. Primal anger and previously unfathomed levels of personal pain arose and swam around the family home, the two children were swept about in ambient rivers of adrenaline and gusts of violent emotions. They became hypervigilant to the subliminal vectors that accompany different types of anger. Their bodies and souls were knowing something big and true, but their minds could not, and would not, betray the familial operating system, which did not permit this kind of truth to be openly acknowledged. Now was not a time for teen rebellion, the ground had shifted, and they were just trying to find a footing, or sometimes even just trying to stand still in the eye of a storm. They did what most kids would do, they minded their hurting parents.

Over time the couple made up. Therapy had exposed some deep-held fears and insecurities, which were duly acknowledged and examined. Both spouses began to embrace very different perspectives on things and committed to restructuring the familial landscape. The wife was now mucking in extra when her husband was very busy with work, she began to take out the bins and mow the lawn. Sinéad had been impressed at how they had faced big pains (without resorting to Xanax or Valium) and had slowly made their way back to dedicated coupledom. For the kids, Daddy’s period of work-induced burnout had passed, he returned home and everyone paid more attention to what was said and done in the house, as an act of care for Daddy who had suffered a lot. There was never any real explanation given as to why during that period Mammy had rapidly lost 10 kg, was consumed with something urgent and excruciating, was always on her phone, and cried profusely and randomly throughout the day. Women could be awfully emotional beings.

Two years later, Sinéad noted that one of the children had become a super-high achiever, and the other girl had fallen into unexplainable bodily pains, sporadic dysfunctions, and outlandish friendships. There was talk that she might be on the spectrum. The girl’s soul was screaming big and real things, and the world of her parents said, ‘Let’s medicalise all this’.

And this is what Sinéad would have liked to say to that girl, she would have liked to have put her hands on her young body, or maybe to have had a special liposuction machine to suck out the energetic-sludge of visceral fear and big-lie pain which had been handed to her with love and instruction: This is how we love in this house, we hold it together, we don’t let others see the big blackness we have inside of us. Some family members will use this denial-generated energy as drive and ambition to get on in the world, others will be weighed down by its pervasive and pernicious fakeness. To go against this code of behaviour is to lose our approval, and maybe even our affection, and you wouldn’t want that, now, would you? Thou shalt not betray the groupthink from which thou were begotten.

Of course Sinéad isn’t going to say that to the child with the tiny Channel handbag. Instead she says something to the tone of, “You know period pain doesn’t have to be that way forever, it can change, diminish, or even disappear”. But the girl is having none of it. She replies back instantly, “Oh no. My mum had this too, and two of my aunts also. It’s just the way we are in our family” – the inherited curse of womanhood. Unfortunately, Sinéad knows the story of the girl’s mum, whose uncle had invaded her childhood private moments and violently ripped apart her precious sweetness with dirty sex games that no child should ever have to play. Another painful reality that only 3 other people know about, which will not be breathed into ordinary conversations.  Another secret awfulness held in the body-mind of another Irish woman, from where the quietly-throbbing anger reverberates into the undertones of daily life, discernible only to those who care enough to listen into the unsaid things that pulse in the sealed-off pockets of our psyche. Sinéad thinks that polite Irish conversation has special vortices that gobble up any hints of such things. She can get personally weighed down by this, and fantasises about a squadron of ninja-like ferrets trained to root these things out into the open. 

Sinéad remembers reading about how, in three generations of women, the egg that will one day be fertilised to become the granddaughter is already present in the ovaries of the unborn mother as she lies in the womb of the grandmother. Sinéad is thinking that the realities of the forefathers are visited upon the children, that ancestral essence and rhythm is coded into our blood, into our DNA. We come into being through this individualised tune. Sinéad’s mother would often say of a local lass given to unladylike behaviour, “There’s no breeding in that wan”, in the way of country people who look on humans almost like animals such as dogs or horses. There are pedigrees and mongrels. And that was that. All this talk of education, self-improvement, and getting on in the world didn’t really mean much if you had knacker-grade genes running the show inside you. Sometimes Sinéad’s daughter would sit in the kitchen with her back to the evening sun, but when she moved her head to the side, the light shone right through her blue eyes, rendering them translucent, and she had the look and air of Sinéad’s beloved aunt. These moments seemed out of time, and Sinéad wanted to turn to her father and say, ‘Briseann an dúchas trí shúile an chait’. But her father was dead, and she had nobody to say that to, and she would not reduce its essence by translating it into a perfunctory English, for others. So she said it to herself, inside. Ireland can be a sad place, where ordinary and centuries-old things that made us what we are, survive only in little islands beloved to a few custodian cognoscenti. Irish people are good at holding secrets, at being two-faced, and ‘nice’, that’s how we work, and sometimes that’s how we kill each other slowly.

Right now Sinéad was beholding the child whose iron-clad familial ‘niceness’ was copied and pasted over her body-and-soul knowing about big and real things. Sinéad really wanted to help this girl, to speak a truth to her, the one her nervous system would recognise, but which her loyalty-trained mind would reject. Nobody had said such truths to Sinéad when she was young. She had had to go through her own awful marriage breakup and lots of pain to discover that there was an age-old darkness coded into her cells, and this is what had authored the theme tune for her major life events. Sinéad is also protective of her own daughter, and feels the need to fight off the pounding message that women’s bodies are battlefields, places of suffering, because none of this is true for Sinéad. She feels like her experience of womanhood is being cancelled. She talks about magnesium, omega oils and other nutrients or therapies known to alleviate menstrual cramps. Again the girl isn’t having any of it. She is hardwired to the belief in her pain-body, the curse of womanhood. There is also the fact that if she sticks with this storyline she will be swathed in the comfort of her tribal groupthink.  She will please her mother and the doctor and take the pill – the pharmacist will be happy too.

For a moment Sinéad wants to imagine what it would be like if the family secret were to burst forth into the ‘good-family’ living room, just like the explosive text had done. What if the dad came home one day and just said, “Look girls, this is what actually happened, and this is why I stayed in the Airbnb for that time”. He could offer a vague outline of adult insecurities, fears and accumulated life pressures, and take a large inbreath of remorse when explaining the biggie of betrayal. The kids would have meltdowns, slam doors and cry into pillows, but would they still cling so ardently to the Panadol in their tiny handbags? The parents would lose standing and authority, but the household would be cleansed of the weight of an important and undigested truth. The air would be calmer, sensitive bodies would no longer feel the charge and pulse of unsaid things that are big and real. Rather they would witness random moments of grace and humility, and threads of deep marital love and forgiveness in action. But all this would require a sort of faith, and that isn’t easy for a race that has experienced constant battering, bruising and repression at the hands of outsiders – the centuries-old things that made us what we are.

Sinéad used to hang out with the girl’s parents, go to dinner at their house and have the odd drink in the local pub. In such situations it is understood that a married couple are socially superior to a single mother. This is how the game is played, and Sinéad accepts – an attractive single woman isn’t truly welcome in most married-couple social groups. The dad has a nice friend, a fine thing, but he was married. He had the usual mid-life trophies, nice house, family, job and car etc., but he was also a man with a question pattering around inside of him, a question that he wasn’t even sure of himself, but which sporadically arose and burst through decorous social settings. Sinéad kinda loved him for this. He used to pop around to the couple’s house a lot and smoke cigarettes out the back with the dad. The men would be shoulder-hunched in the outdoor cold and engrossed in something, but every so often he would turn around and blow out his cigarette smoke while staring in through the kitchen window to where Sinéad and wife were seated over tea. He made it look like he was staring into the mid-distance, deep in thought, but Sinéad knew he was checking on her. She noted every single glance, and wondered how happy this man was with his wife. Sinéad was mildly turned on, and wanted to talk about the qualities of this man and his fine arse, but wife was having none of it. Sometimes Sinéad would see him around town. When he noticed her he would falter slightly, even if only for a micro-second. The questioning man was feeling something alright.

Then one day she got to know his wife better. The woman was technically attractive, pleasant and interesting. Her clothes and style were lovely, but she carried the weight and awfulness of something that had never been defined. There was stuff written into her story that creaked with heaviness and loyalty to unspoken bleak and dark things. She hadn’t been able to release this burden, and fair dues to her, she had not opted for the HRT happy-gel solution. The man had loved her and minded her, but he was now at that stage of life where unnerving questions were arising within, and he was carefully gauging Sinéad as something that might present the answer to his existential queasiness. She knew this game: single woman appears light and free to the fettered men who aren’t so sure of the wife choice they made 20 years ago. There would be an emotional dalliance, and that was all. He was using her as a sounding board for his inner question, their bodies would not meet. She took the lead in their coded flirtations, but she was not the winner in this game.

In conversation she had heard his wife decry the nastiness of menopause things. This was a burden Sinéad did not carry. She didn’t have  pain with womanly things, not even childbirth. She had lived her particular womanly pain through a different format, through real life trauma and suffering. Her female power had been battered by her former husband and the family law courts, not by pharma.

Sinéad’s mother had told her of how in the late 1960s she had to be churched after her first childbirth, of how babies that died before baptism went to limbo and mothers yearned forever for the salvation of their souls, of how the law didn’t permit women to work in paid employment after marriage, even if they didn’t have children, of how the priests and nuns took complete and vicious dictatorship over everyone’s sexual morality, and that this was most punitive on women. She saw awful images of the excavated grave for infants in the mother and baby home, a sealed-off septic tank had contained the remains of 600 tiny bodies. How many people had known of this atrocity and never breathed it into speech to anyone? And how many of these ever-so Irish atrocities remained undiscovered, buried as pockets of horrific and unspoken things that pulse quietly in the beautiful land of our Emerald Isle.  

 She knew that domination and rule over women’s bodies was a powerful way to subdue a people. She also saw that in Ireland, the medical industry had taken over where the church establishment had left off. She remembered how, until recently, in medical situations, the life of the unborn child was given priority over the pregnant mother, but that now, in 2023, the pill was free of charge to women under 30, and there was a stated political request to remove the three-day waiting period for accessing abortion medication. Previously it was fervently believed that a soul didn’t stand a chance in this life or after, if the church-sanctioned baptism and last rites were not administered in a timely fashion. She noted how during hospital childbirth the medical staff were hell-bent on getting pharma into her at every stage. She had staunchly fought them off, and they still got an injection of sorts into her directly after birth, just as she let her guard down. She noted that when her father was dying, the nurse was racing to get to his bedside to administer “something to make him more comfortable”. Just like the church sacraments in the past, the medical establishment was now standing at the points of entry and exit of this life, with sanctioned authority to inject their products. Doctors and nurses were the new priests and nuns, and consultants were the new bishops.  She had told her children that, when it came to the time, on her dying bed she would like to remain drug-free, and that they should be prepared to fight medical authorities for this.

In March 2023, while waiting in a café for a friend, she glanced at the Irish Examiner on the table beside her. As booster-induced death stalked the land, the front-page headline of this national newspaper read, ‘I Never Knew that Menopause had Killed my Mum’. The older teen girls with acne were going to the doctor for the pill to sort their spotty skin, her friend at the pharmacy said young women were taking the morning-after pill as if it were candy. There was a growing belief that many women required pharma HRT to deal with ageing. Young women were getting spiked by men intent on rape on a night out, that was a thing now. There seemed to be a modern urge to quell female hormones, to neuter and drug women – the powerhouses and gestators of life.

She asked her teen daughter’s friends if they knew when they ovulated. They invariably replied no, but two girls had ovulation apps on their phones. Sinéad wondered at this. She wasn’t really ovulating any more, but when she was younger she used to notice that men noticed her mid-month flourishing, there was extra attention, her body odour was sweet, and she could outrun her sporty friend on a 5k road race, she didn’t need chocolate and her sex drive used to go through the roof – the kind of stuff to wake her up in the middle of the night. She had read that coaches of elite female athletes were tailoring training programmes to exploit mid-month performance peaks. Why was nobody talking about the feminine powers of a woman’s cycle?

The teen girls were clueless on these things, but they could elucidate scientifically on the ingredients in their skincare products, they could do hour-long make-up tutorials and pinpoint the nuanced detail in an online influencer’s look that earns her big bucks. They also know about vitamin and mineral supplements for hair and skincare. Her daughter was into juicing carrots to boost her suntan. Sinéad made a point of telling them how it was believed that a baby, when breastfeeding, creates a vacuum in the nipple and generates a backwash of baby’s saliva into the breast, which in turn prompts the mother to produce milk with immunological agents specifically tailored to the baby’s needs at this time. The teens paused when they heard that one. Evidently no biology or home economics teacher had ever told them how powerful a woman’s body actually is. Many educated young women did not know what colostrum was, but they all knew what hyaluronic acid was. Neither did they know much about the Irish legal restrictions on contraception availability or divorce in the 80s and 90s, but they did know all about Black Lives. Sinéad told them that in her day, every Irish kid knew the nursery rhyme Eeeny, Meeny Miny, Moh, and that they used the N-word. Whooah, there were shrieks of horror, how could you use that word? However, they had  no problem brashly using the word bitch as a term of endearment.

Sinéad is starting to imagine a cailleach old crone who gathers all the women together and calls out the unspoken ills and horrible cruelties that were meted out exclusively to women down through the centuries. The list is horrible and nobody wants to listen, but the cailleach commands attention: incest, rape, or pervasive subliminal threat of these, sexual objectification, aggressive pornography, patriarchal and brutal medical regimes and treatments, church dictates and abuses, legal restrictions on freedoms, education and dignified earning opportunities, chemical battering of healthy hormone systems, unregulated and continuous impregnation, chastity belts, psychological and financial subordination, and many other big and real things that batter women. As she calls these out, she wails and moans in hysterical anger, and the high-pitched shrieks function so as to burst open those sealed pockets of darkness encoded in the women’s cells and the collective psyche. There is a release, an oozing-out of the awfulness that nobody had wanted to talk about. The women will have meltdowns, slam doors and cry into pillows, but Humanity can leave out a sigh of relief, pause and recalibrate its tune to embody more female essence, more yin.  The air is lighter now. There is a reduction in the strained hype of contemporary culture. There is a new sense of equilibrium,  something that vibes of primordial serenity. The humans with bodies designed to gestate, birth and nurture baby humans, can now actualise the empathic intelligence that is rightly the blueprint for organising a society. The men take a while to adjust (nobody had told them this was coming). They can kick off some of the modern shackles on their masculinity and stand taller in the world.

There is a very big party. Some people are scared, they do not remember ever having felt so alive and so alright. At this point we know that things will get messy again, there will be spill-overs of energy which people do not know how to correctly use, there will be power struggles, and attempts for domination over others. We need the cailleach and a wise old man to guide us on how to utilise all this freed-up life force, we need babies to capture our innate goodness and intelligence so that it is channelled for the right things. But firstly, we need to recognise that the wise old man will be safe, but there is a big and real danger that the cailleach will be decried as a witch, and that centuries-old groupthink could raise its ugly head and see this woman burnt at the stake. That would send us all back to square one, to a world that controls and batters females, even the ones with tiny Channel handbags.

The seed of this essay-story was born over thirty years ago, through Seán Ó Ríordáin’s poem ‘Siollabhadh’ which describes a pulse reverberating through different people and things, discernible to the poet as he lies sick in a hospital bed. The story is also a reaction to conversations with ordinary people, and recent incidents. Three such incidents in early October 2023 are:

 1)  An American Facebook activist posted a photo of a surgically removed womb and ovaries on a white background. The text delineated the biological and gestating specifics of the womb as an immensely powerful human organ. This writer posted a comment stating that the location of the womb is the centre of being (dan tien) in Eastern life sciences, and how “Modern pharma contraception batters the physiological intelligence of this organ in women, dampening their feminine essence and vibration in the world, and hence also affecting their male partners and children. This was the cleverest move [by the New World Order] of all, to adulterate the feminine nurturing force in the world, to neuter women, the gestators of life”. Within 24 hours Facebook had removed this post.

2) On that same day, a neighbour told of how his 13-yr old daughter had played a girls’ soccer league match in rural Ireland, in which one member of the opposing girls’ team was actually a boy.

3) A week later an activist posted a Facebook video calling out the Irish government’s attempts to obfuscate the findings of geophysical scanning in the grounds of Sean Ross Abbey in Tipperary, a mother and baby home from 1931 to 1969, with an exceptionally high infant mortality rate (1,090 babies died over 38 years). The activist stated that the actual findings pointed to significant ‘anomalies’ in the grounds and that the government was trying to hide this fact.