BETTY

I was 6 months pregnant with my son when my Granny died. Betty Hubbard. She will never know him, and I cry each time I remember this. We named him after Betty’s mother, Joey. Joey Hubbard. Betty had five children and arthritis from a young age that meant in recent years she was unable to leave the house without help. She followed the news and read magazines. She knew Irish model Rosanna Davidson was pregnant before I did. This was because we gave birth around the same time. She read about Rosanna’s struggles with miscarriages in RSVP Magazine and she empathised. She told me stories about giving birth to her first daughter and moving to Wexford. The baby never stopped crying. Nanny didn’t know how to make it stop. She felt so alone.

She told me about moving again to Wimbledon when her girls were grown up. She moved with her husband Eamonn and their two young boys. Her three older girls stayed in Dublin and attended boarding school. This broke her heart. She missed 'her girls' so much. She told me this while I was pregnant with my first child, who was to be a girl. I needed some certainty, so we found out the gender. She told me I would soon know exactly what she meant.

Betty wrote beautifully constructed text messages. They were so much more than ‘Happy Birthday!’ She worked as a secretary before she married my grandad. My mum and her siblings recently found her typewriter in the attic – they didn’t know she had one. She once told my mum she wished she could have kept working. She really liked her job. In 1973 when the Marriage Bar was removed in Ireland, Betty had five children under fifteen: three girls and two boys. I wish I could have spoken to her about what this was like and how she may have felt optimistic for her three daughters who all went on to college and had opportunities she didn’t. How difficult it may have been to raise five children and manage a household without very much left for her.

I miss how engaged she was despite being in her seventies and being so incredibly frail. She showed me how to knit, and she made buttery toast, burnt sausages and tea with far too much sugar. She gave me all her dresses from the 1960s and 70s which fit me like a glove. She held my daughter Florence even though it must have hurt her to do so. Her body had never been able to keep up with her mind. She was so sharp, so knowledgeable, so engaged. Betty listened intently when I told her my birth story. How terrified I was and how incredible it was to me that women could do these things. How they have been doing them forever. How deeply lonely it can feel and yet how connected we instantly feel to other women, to women like her. How something so life-changing, so transformative, is treated as an every-day occurrence. We are expected to keep moving and keep it to ourselves. Betty gave birth five times. Our bodies are amazing, what they go through. They grow and stretch and contort and create life and fingernails and tiny hearts. Tiny hearts that love us back.

My doctor friend recently told me a remarkable fact about women’s bodies; when Betty was pregnant with my mum, my mum was producing her own eggs, and one of those eggs would eventually become me. This comforts and amazes me. I keep her alive in my excessively sugary tea, my attempts at cooking burnt sausages, the heart necklace I wear of hers that says ‘Betty’ and in striving to be as kind as she always was to me and everyone in her life.