Reincarnation

I had a strange sort of conversation with my mother one morning in the mid-Sixties. I didn’t realise at the time that reincarnation was what it was about. I was four. Maybe five. I hadn’t yet started school. My three older siblings had gone off to school that morning. I don’t remember where my younger sister, the newest baby, was. My two youngest siblings hadn’t yet been born. My aunt, my mother’s sister, who lived in the house with us at this time, was at work, and my father was on the other side of the world ‘on the boats’ which meant the Merchant Navy. I was perched on a high stool or else it was a worktop in the kitchen, eating a piece of toast. There was a doll lying on the floor where I had dropped it out of boredom. The back door was open and it was sunny and my mother was continually between the yard and the kitchen. She was scrubbing clothes on the washing board at the sink, putting them through the mangle in the yard, then hanging them out on the line. It was always busy-busy with her and I was exasperated by this and by the smells and sights of everlasting cleaning. Cleaning was a maddening thing and women were always doing it. I wanted her to stop and to sit down and to devote herself entirely to me. Eventually I must have said something to that effect.
‘Oh, you just wait,’ said Ma. ‘When you’re grown up and have your own husband and your own children, you’ll be doing all this too.’
‘No I won’t,’ I said. ‘I was a mammy last time and I’m not being a mammy this time.’ I do remember clearly saying those words. I remember too, the certainty I’d felt of a series of histories once lived by me behind those words. What I didn’t know was that I’d caused a load of shivers down my mother’s back. I had shivered her into stiffness which meant instant deadstill throughout the entire cleaning universe. I’d put her too, into what later I came to understand was her quandary. This was that she believed in reincarnation but, being a Catholic, she wasn’t supposed to. Over the years, we, her offspring, couldn’t help but notice this reincarnation business caused ructions within her. The pattern seemed to be, first, she’d experience confusion after coming out with something that clearly showed she believed in reincarnation. Then, second, she’d become dejected, perhaps penitent, for believing in reincarnation. Then, third, she’d be right back to making another reincarnation remark. I’m not sure what we were supposed to make of that except we all knew definitely that reincarnation was real for Ma. As you can see from what I’ve already written I believed in it myself - at least as a four- or a five-year-old. I rather believe I still do. Indeed, I do. I do still.
I don’t mean I analysed and synthesised and theorised and deployed deductive reasoning and repeated scientific experiments, coming eventually to a rational, researched, calm or even a fiercely defended conclusion as to whether or not such a thing could be allowed to exist to be believed in. No. It was because of that memory, plus meeting people in my younger years of whom I’d no doubt I’d known in former times. As an adult though, I’ve not thought on reincarnation much. I cannot feel it is for now, needed for actual current everyday living. Occasionally, it’s true I’d lay hold of an indistinct sense of it being all around, part of spiritual law and spiritual law - the ways and works of God - most definitely I do believe in. At the least, for anyone who chooses to believe or feels they can’t help but believe even if they don’t want to, reincarnation would be a sure indication that life without end goes on. Furthermore, along with the belief in ghosts, which is strong in many quarters; and in the unseen spirit world, ditto; and in the divine, the occult, the commingling of the religious orthodox with ancient folkloric custom, ditto, ditto and ditto; as well as belief in the different supernatural entities and their influences of good and evil persistently believed in throughout all the different countries of the natural world whether or not there exists scientific proof of them, reincarnation would suggest that there is a lot more to reality and to consciousness than what we think or have proved there is. If reincarnation does exist, then it’s going to carry on doing so regardless of whether or not we give it our credence and our intellectual contribution. As I say, for me it doesn’t feature, even if the child I once was were to set down her toast and arch a brow at such dismissal coming from a sixty-three year old who really should know better. But the thing is, whatever I knew then, I don’t know now. That day with my mother I expressed a personal conviction, adamant of its truth even though I cannot now remember any of the substance behind it. What had been a deeply enriched, all-encompassing memory had long turned into skimpy, broken fragments of memory. Even so, I’m convinced that if someone had told me when I was four, or five, that they didn’t believe they’d lived before, I would have thought them quite, quite mad. Again, I still might, still would, still might, yes I would.
‘What do you mean, last time and this time?’ asked my mother. And that day I don’t think I had got her attention so quickly in all my young life - or in my subsequent not-so-young life either. She had stopped her mangling and scrubbing. The insane clacking, the turning of, the running of, the dripping of, all that soapy, splashy sight and sound and movement in enervations of tumult and multi-direction stopped. The breeze too, strong and brisk and delighted-in on wash days, seemed itself to come to a halt. I too, stopped, or was stopped, momentarily, by this sudden change.
‘I mean I did it last time,’ I resumed. ‘So I don’t want to be a mammy this time. I’m not going to be.’ I was, I think, exasperated because this was so very simple, but it was so only to me because I’d no idea I was saying something of huge significance to my mother. It seemed that having total comprehension of not just one past life but also others was for me no guarantee of cognizance of the short-term memory span of this, my current one. No doubt this was down to my not having been in it for very long. So when Ma dropped everything and dove on me with a load of questions, you would have thought I’d have been delighted at getting exactly what I was after: total bestowal of attention. But no. I hadn’t been after it this way.
Within seconds she was at me, at my side, gaze focussed, trying to read me, every inch of her concentration upon me. But it was demand for information upon demand for information, question upon question. ‘Did you know me last time? Was I a mammy? What did I do last time? Who were you? What did you do? What happened? Where any of the others there? Who do you remember? What about in-between? Being born? Being dead? Dying? Other times? Other lives? Tell me. Tell me everything. What do you remember? Say out all you know.’
These questions are speculative because I can’t remember the actual overload. They were in that vein, at that speed and of course my mother was fascinated. I can see that now. At the time though, I didn’t grasp that this was for her a genuine quest. To my mind, all this falling on me with urgency was at once bizarre and perplexing. Why this fuss? What is she doing? Truly, I didn’t know.
I thought, you see, my mother knew all I knew. I thought everybody knew what I knew. I knew for a fact other children did because every so often, during our play, both at this time and for a wee while after, we’d have short and easy, commonplace exchange about our last times, about further back other times, even the odd dropped word on the chronologies of the last times of others. And so on. Such brief, throwaway comment between us continued for more years too, until eventually it fell away, leaving our heads empty and impoverished. By that time we’d fully entered the world. I mean this one. This blunt one here.
But back then in the kitchen, and for reasons not at all obvious to me, Ma was continuing because she couldn’t stop. Here she was, after all, with a possible little oracle eating toast with memory recall from beyond sitting right before her. Why not get out the shopping list and ask all she could? She told me years later that I looked at her with such annoyance though I do not think she had a clue that that was because I thought she was pretending. And it was this winding-up at my expense as I saw it that had brought on my sullen withdrawal and huff. I was a teenager at that later point when Ma brought it up and I told her I did remember she’d asked so much of me, a ton of shit of me that morning, though I did not say shit to my mother. I added that I hadn’t a clue that she really didn’t know. After all, how plausible could it be, to me, with my knowledge then, that this woman before me had forgotten everything along with all the meaning of everything? I mean, really! It would have been risible except I was sulking. I had my own assumptions and could not accept at the old age of four, or five, probably four, that my mother no longer had acquaintance with the transmigration of souls. Instead I was cross because I thought she was having me on.
I refused to be drawn into becoming a plaything. I didn’t recognise my poor mother’s fascination and hunger for what they were. I didn’t know she’d forgotten what I seemed easily to possess as a fixture but which, as I say, and well before even my own teenage years, I would have forgotten as well. What a pity. If only I hadn’t been stubborn. If only I’d been a little farsighted in entirely the opposite direction. It would have been something to have been given back into this, my current life, my own information on, well, everything, and that ever so casually too, and at no cost to me, I could have thrown out to her. But I didn’t. At the time Ma didn’t get answers because in my pique I didn’t deign to give them to her. Then, when she asked if it was at all possible that I could be referring to dolls, to my nice little dollies, and not to actual babies that I might previously have mothered, the insult was so insufferable that I closed off communication completely, refusing to discuss the matter any further from that point.

‘Reincarnation’
Anna Burns © 2026
Source: Kaleidoscope 3
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