Why I Write by Frank McCourt

McCourt, the fourth commandment. I tell him, Honor thy mother and father, sir. Good, that is, for a Yank. I never did hate my father for drinking the dole. I loved my father who read the paper in the morning and told stories at night. I slapped my mother for going up to the shameful loft, but then I was miserable and went to church and cried to the priest. I loved my parents, with dead brothers and a sister, with fleas and rats and pints and woodbines and typhoid and hunger. One priest said nothing of sins and missions and told us God loved us because he made us in his own image. My mother and father didn’t make us to be in their own image, because they loved us too much to do that.

Dad would do a bad thing with the dole money. He would do a bad thing with the baby’s money. He would live in England doing bad things with the money he earned working until he went to Belfast and died. Sometimes I think Cuchulain and the mornings with the Irish Press and the nights with stories can’t make up for pints. Some days I wish I could hate him. Other days I wish I hated Mam. Dad drank money for the bread and coal and Mam would yell but how come Dad never left the pubs for good and worked on Saturdays so Eugene and Oliver wouldn’t have brittle teeth? Then Mam took us to Laman’s house and she didn’t stick up for me and she went to the loft and then she left him to live on my money. I wanted to go to America. I didn’t want to be the image of my mother and father.

When the master says Honor thy mother and father I think he means that we’re supposed to love them and I could never understand why you should love someone if they don’t love you because if they loved you there would be bread and jam and toffee and cinema money. But the more I think the more I know that my Dad wouldn’t have come home to Ireland at all and that Mam wouldn’t have begged at the St. Paul de Vincent Society and Dad wouldn’t have married my mother in her condition and Mam wouldn’t have searched the streets of Limerick for me if they hadn’t loved me. Children honor and love their mothers and fathers because their mothers and fathers do love them but sometimes they don’t know how. My parents didn’t always know how to help us or even help themselves, but they gave us what they could. My mother—and my father—raised four children but failed to live out their dreams. We didn’t freeze to death on the ashes Mam tended, and we lived to be prosperous on the ashes of my mother and father. I want the world to forever know the love parents have for their children. That’s why I write.