Meet the Ma – comic boxer of small kids

Acclaimed comedian and writer Tommy Tiernan offers his unique perspective on the world at large in his column by ‘The Badger’.

I met my wife online, the Curraghline to be exact. She was selling Wexford strawberries by the side of the road and I was looking for something to fill a tart.  We got off together straight away and after that got on quite well together too. She’s one quarter Japanese, one quarter Inuit; the rest, she says, is up for grabs. And I grab it as often as I can.

We have a holiday home out beside Lackagh Quarries, the rhythm of the diggin and the explosions gives us great peace altogether. When the pace of life in Mountbellew gets too hectic for us, we always head up there.

Anyway, the mother came down last week to stay with us for a few days. She loves coming West during the summer. For the rain, she says. Tis a different class o’ rain than what she’d be used to up there in Meath.

Oh the Royal County rain is full of nutrients and vitamins, helps grass grow, good for dairy cattle and fast racehorses. I hear it’s a cure for baldness too. Bottles of the stuff being exported to China to keep the Oriental hairy.

Galway rain is an altogether more acidic beast. There do be days out West where it feels like pure vinegar falling from the sky. Tis the closest Mother Nature ever came to inventing her own bleach.

I know a man from Camus who shaves with it, tis that sharp out his way. Of a morning, he just leans the head out the bathroom window, no need of a razor blade at all, and the rain wipes the hair off his face. What women do be doing standing out in the nip in it is their own business.

Anyway the mother was down and a rare woman she is too. She worked in fairgrounds most of her life. Travelling the country twelve months of the year from Dungloe to Dingle and from Carlingford to Carna. She was a female comedy boxer and she used to fight children.

It was harmless enough for the first few years, the kids would pay a few quid and get into the ring with her.

She’s have big soft gloves and give them a soft clatter here and there, but nothing dangerous. She always let them win and they were delighted with themselves getting out of the ring after.

Around the menopause something changed. She got dark and started bateing the kids badly, often with the gloves off.

They had to let her go, too many wains getting seriously hurt and too many parents bringing their kids to get bet.

She went off to the Aran Islands to try and get her head together and met me father on the edge of a cliff on the longest night of the year, which out on Aran is every second night.

My father was a very sensitive creature who would get a fright clearing his own throat, but somehow this timid man and this woman in her wildness hit it off.

They decided to drive back to Dublin together stopping off to make love in every graveyard they passed on the way but they only got as far as Portumna.

He thrun her down on a grave in the sean reilig near the workhouse and mid-coitus realised the name on the headstone was the same as hers. She started laughing maniacally but it put the fear o’ God into him and he ran off, last to be seen stark naked on the sprint towards Ballinasloe.

Me mother went on alone, or so she thought. Miracles of miracles, there I was forming inside her, she thinking that she was beyond all that malarkey and she was most displeased.

She swung into the Garda barracks in Athlone and tried to have me arrested for trespassing on private property.

They said they couldn’t do that because she didn’t have a sign up and that at that early stage of my development I didn’t even have a head. The Guards have a strict rule of only arresting people with heads.

In order to appease her, they said that once I was born they’d have a word with me not to do it again. She accepted this and over the next nine months literally grew to love me. My lovely Mammy.

You know there’s a lot of talk these days about mothers’ rights and unborn babies’ rights and when does a person become a person? At what stage of cellular development do you become human?

My own personal opinion would be is that it’s not until you finish your Leaving Cert and a mother should have all options open to her up until that moment.

I’ll leave the implications of doing Transition Year and repeating the Leaving up to the courts.

I was born on the exact spot where the Boyne and the Blackwater meet, me mother had a leg in either river and out I popped on to the grassy gap.

She got a job punching cattle unconscious in the abattoir.

I had a fine childhood, but she asked me leave the house when I hit puberty. I did but I didn’t go very far, just out to the driveway and I stayed there til I was 18.

She’s happy enough now. She turns old rifles into pool cues for ex-IRA fellas, cos even though the war is over they still like shooting balls.

Anyways she was down last week, that’s all.