Meet Our June Mum of the Month
Niamh O’Reilly chats to June Mum of the Month, Mary Buckley, about keeping the faith and why it’s so important to keep talking when times get tough
“I’ve got 272 stones here in a little bowl, there were a few big ones as well, but they got sent away with my gallbladder.”
It’s an odd way to start a conversation, but Mary Buckley is only home a day from gallbladder removal surgery when we speak. However, she’s not letting a small thing like that stop her from getting on with her busy life as a mum to seven grown up children and 13 grandchildren. Mary is very much a force of nature, who’s been the backbone of her large family since she married the love of her life, the now late John, in 1978.
“We went to the bother of counting these [gallstones] this morning, they are like gravel, they are very small,” she laughs.
“I’m okay. I’ve four little holes here in my stomach” she says matter-of-factly. Still, as upbeat and positive as the 68-year-old is, it’s fair to say the keyhole surgery was tough going. “It did take the legs from under me, and I didn’t expect that. Yesterday was a rough day, but today is a good day. I’m just happy to be back home and that’s all that matters.”
Family means everything to Mary and staying strong in the face of adversity has been her greatest gift to her large clan throughout the years. One of a family of seven children, she grew up on a farm near Macroom Co. Cork and went on to have Seven children of her own and settled into life with her husband John on their own farm in Mallow.
So far, so smooth you might think. And up until the dawn of the new millennium, life was pretty much plain sailing; hard work, but nothing out of the ordinary for a busy family. That is until the year 2000 saw the rug pulled from underneath both Mary and John in the most unexpected way.
“Both my eldest daughters [19 and 20] came in with the news that both were pregnant,” she recalls. “To say it took its toll was putting it mildly. It was against all we believed in.” While this wasn’t happening in the Ireland of the 1950s, in the shadow of the Church or under the fear of the Magdalene Laundries, although with the last of these only institutions only closing four years previous their echoes still carried in the atmosphere. Twenty-two years ago may seem recent enough, but Ireland has changed fundamentally since then, and as modern as we like to think our society was at the start of the new millennium, Ireland wasn’t as free from misplaced guilt as some would imagine.
“It was… I don’t know how to put it,” she pauses, very thoughtfully and measured as she goes back to what was clearly a difficult time, but one that she doesn’t regret for a moment. “I thought we were being judged. Where we were, was a very catholic place. Everyone knew John and myself as being the people who stayed at home and reared our family. We had no holidays, no babysitters. We were at home. It wasn’t that they [the girls] didn’t know right from wrong, but people maybe wondered, why did the two of them do it at exactly the same time?”
With only 19 days between the two grandchildren, it was a difficult time for both Mary and John who had to look deep within themselves to get through, with Mary taking the lion’s share of the load.
“People would ask you ‘what you were doing for the millennium year?’, well I was trying to keep my family together. I was able to talk to my own parish priest and my own doctor. They saved my life because it was the toughest year. But John was a very silent person, and he was talking to nobody, and he was very silent for 12 months and I mean silent,” she recalls bluntly. “It was very hard to live with him, he said nothing to me until one day I had said to him out of the blue, ‘I didn’t make either of the two girls pregnant.’ I felt he was blaming me. But in 38 years of marriage, we had one had bad year and that was it.”
Mary went very quickly from having seven children to nine; lovingly and graciously embracing the two new additions as her own, so her two daughters could carry on with work and college commitments. But having enough love to go around for this close knit family was never the issue.
“The hardest part of 2000 was that my mother was still alive, she was about 80 at the time. I had to go home to tell her about the two girls, and I thought, this is going to break her heart. But do you know what she said to me?
‘Mary, these are the two that will look after you when your own children are grown up’ and how true she was. Wasn’t she some woman? If my dad had been alive that time it would have been a different story.”
Those sagely words ringing in her ears, Mary carried on and today is incredibly proud of both grandchildren who are thriving in their lives and are in their early twenties.
That tough year taught Mary many things, chief amongst them, the importance of talking. “Talking is the biggest thing you’ve got to do,” she says plainly.
“Talk to husbands talk to partners, keep talking, share everything. I have gone down the right road and spoken to people when I got very low. For heaven’s sake share every pain or ache because if you don’t, you go it alone and you can’t go it alone. I don’t think anyone can.”
Mary’s family expanded again in 2009 when her daughter Audrey had her first child Donnacha and then Conor in 2012.
Both boys are special needs, having been eventually diagnosed with a mutated gene that was suspected to have been passed on from either Mary or John. The condition impacts the boys' ability to communicate.
It was another challenging time for the clan, who had to fight to get to the bottom of the condition affecting the boys. “It was a rollercoaster and by God, I think it took its toll on John. We were both hoping. I was hoping I hadn’t passed on this gene to Audrey, and he was hoping the same and then we were hoping for each other,” she recalls. “When we were told neither of us had it, we just looked at each other and said, ‘for God’s sake what was all this about?’
Mary has been a devoted nana to her grandchildren who have now grown to the impressive number of 13. “I badly wanted a photo with the 13 of my grandchildren in it,” she gushes, “and I couldn’t get them all together. But we finally got it at the christening of my youngest grandchild Eveline Rose recently.”
Sadly, Mary lost her husband John to cancer in 2016, which was devastating. But she followed her own advice of never losing faith, no matter what. Despite her loss, she kept going and put her energy into fundraising for the Mercy University Hospital Cork, where her husband was a patient. “I have a coffee day here at home on the first monday of May every year.
The hospital also every year do a gratitude book. I did it in 2019 sharing my story and it raised €46,000. My story just seemed to catch everybody.”
Never one to sit on her laurels, it’s clear Mary lives for the busy life her family brings and while she might be from a generation where the idea of self-care was not as popular as it was today, she still appreciates the importance of having some time for herself.
“I like my space. I love my family, I love looking after them, but I love when the door can close at night time, and I can sit down and do my knitting and watch telly. It’s a small bit of me time.”
A life filled with highs and lows, would Mary change any of it? “No,” she says defiantly. “I wouldn’t change it for the world. None of them would I change. Motherhood to me and grandmotherhood
means everything. Absolutely everything. And each child coming into the world was as amazing as the first one. It’s never changed for me.
The very best of luck to our June Mum of the Month Mary, who made it to the final of the Mum of the Year Awards in 2017.