How much my mother ever knew about my life will be forever a mystery. As she’s been dead for over a decade, how much she now knows, if any part of her consciousness survives, is naturally an even greater one.
I was never especially close to my mother. We were never what you might call friends. She mothered me well, taught me a few crucial things that I needed to know (how to read, what menstruation was, that if I thought I was ‘going on the pill’ not to tell my Dad), but she was also ‘not there’ in the way I wanted her to be when I was discovering that I wasn’t what the boys I was seeing wanted me to be and was basically falling apart as a consequence. I learned very early to stop telling my mother that I was upset, much less why.
There was one particular incident from my hormonal, romantic, chaotic teenage years that she regaled the family with for ever after. Basically I’d been publicly humiliated at a party – not an unusual occurrence when you’re mid-teens and illegally drunk and totally naïve – I was devastated. I made the mistake of explaining all. I got the standard ‘more fish in the sea’ lecture, which was the last thing I needed in the middle of the night. When Mam told the story later, and she did, repeatedly, she always concluded it with “I never had any trouble with her after that.”
Of course she didn’t.
Not because I had learned what she wanted me to learn: no man is worth the tears (which, by the way I still don’t agree with – not all fish are the same, no matter how many of them you might catch). Rather because I had learned a more important lesson: be careful who you share your pain with.
In my case, my mother had just excluded herself from that pool.
I did not talk whole-heartedly to my mother ever again. I was probably about seventeen years old.
We weren’t estranged. It was nothing so dramatic. I just began censoring how much I shared, and never stopped.
That was not entirely a bad thing.
On one occasion it literally saved my life.
At my lowest ebb, I spent a night and a day in tears. I sat on my bed looking at the entire contents of my bathroom cabinet trying to figure out if there was enough to do the job – probably not – but I was working on it – when it occurred to me that it was a Thursday, which meant that in an hour or so’s time, I had a weekly phone call to manage. Mam would be on the phone. The idea of not picking up did not occur to me, so I had to figure out what to say when I did. At this point I had been weeping, on and off rather than continuously, for long enough for just breathing normally to be a struggle.
If Mam and I had been close, I would have continued weeping, allowing the overwhelming darkness of my life as I saw it to seep down the telephone lines, where (in the fantasy) she would have been helpful or helpless depending on all manner of other things.
We weren’t. So I didn’t.
Instead, I bundled up all the pills and threw them back into the cabinet under the wash basin. Cold-washed my face. Got dressed. Went downstairs and – when six o’clock came – took the call pretending I was fine – a bit tired, a bit work-stressed, but fine.
Dad knew I wasn’t, but didn’t push the point. I have no idea what my mother knew, nor if they talked about it afterwards. Neither of them ever said anything. It took me a long time to crawl out of that particular pit, and I still fall back in now and
then…but I have my hand-holds now.
Self-carved.
I’m more compassionate towards my mother now. I allow that she loved me and did her best. It’s not her fault that she got a daughter she could not understand. There is not a lot of my mother in me – some, but not much. It’s not her fault that she got a daughter who got all of the freedom of the seventies and eighties and decided to grasp it all, a daughter who knew early on she wanted to get away and go around the world, one way or another, a daughter who would take a long time to realise that what she really wanted to do was write, a daughter who wished she’d been born early enough to be a hippy, or a 1950s rock’n’roller, or a jazz-age speak-easy flapper, and who would claim as much of that freedom as she could, first by trying to keep up with fashion and then by abandoning it completely and claiming her own sense of non-style, a daughter who would retreat into books, try to learn foreign languages, try to learn her own, a daughter realistic enough to claw her way through university as a way of putting off working for a living and then a post-grad as a way of
qualifying to get a job in which she could make one, a daughter who never really chased the money, but chased independence, a daughter who would never get married, never give her grandchildren, a daughter who would continue to
worry her and confuse her while somehow seeming to be mostly happy and never actually in any trouble.
I don’t regret being that daughter. I love her for being the mother she was, even if that isn’t the one I might have wanted her to be.
If we had known each other better, our relationship would have been different – but there is no guarantee it would have been better. Only different. I have stopped wondering in what ways.
I dream about my mother a lot these days. Not fantasy dreams, just situations that never were and how we would have been in them, being who she was, who I am. I haven’t worked out why.
Maybe I want her to know what happened after she left. What I did next.
When I wake from dreams of my mother, I wonder what she would think if she could see me now.
I look around my home and figure that if she saw it at its best, she’d be pleased, maybe even proud, that I have come this far from the first bedsit she visited as my home, and the less squalid flats that followed. She would like what I’ve done with the place, up to a point. Then she’d start listing what still needs to be done, or by this stage needs re-doing. She’d tell me what she likes and doesn’t and I will be surprised by both.
She’ll be amused by my memory board, which is a collage of photographs from the family going way back, but won’t understand the vision board – neither its eclectic collection nor its purpose. She’ll like the pictures on my calendar but not understand the depth intended in the words, not care about the phases of the moon.
Like most people she’ll think my hallway a waste of space, and not see it for the energy flow that it is. And let’s not get into what she’d think of my half-neglected, half-tended, garden. Not least because to a large extent I might be forced to agree with her – except that to an equally large extent it would miss the point of what I want out there.
Then I catch sight of my own reflection, maybe in the oven doors in the kitchen, maybe in the large mirror in the hall, and then I know. Whatever my mother might make of my home – and on balance, I genuinely think she’d be impressed that I’ve managed to pull this space together – what she would really struggle with is how I live in it. What my mother would never understand is how I use this space, who I am, the way I live my life.
It's August. It’s hot. I’m in shorts and barefoot. Today I’m in proper underwear and a pretty, flowery, sleeveless top. Other days, I’d be in a swimsuit with shorts over. Some days I carry it off; other days I'm just plain scruffy. She'd not forgive me either...especially my tendency to go around with nothing on my feet. I have to be really cold at home before I resort to socks or slippers. I walk my garden barefoot, except when I'm cutting back nettles and brambles or trampling the gravel or stoney areas, or using machinery.
My parents grew up when bare feet were a sign of poverty - they couldn't possibly understand it as a sign of freedom, of earth connection, of simply not wanting to wear shoes. My being barefoot most of the time is not a statement of any kind. I just don't see the point of wearing socks or shoes when I don't need them. I like feeling the surfaces beneath my feet. Carpet. Wood. Concrete. Grass. Sand.
Socks are for warmth. Shoes are for protection. If I don't need warmth or protection, I go without.
The rest of my body is also a work in progress. I put on a lot of weight, which I am now slowly discarding. I'm sure Mam would have something to say about both: the gaining and the shedding.
My hair is long and scrappy because I’m growing out the dye-colour I can’t continue. I’ve developed an allergy to the chemicals, so am forced to go au naturel against my wishes. It’s going to take a while, because I’m not going short in the meantime. The blonde will gradually fade, and at the ends will very gradually get cut away. We’re talking years here.
I’ve always wanted long hair, but during the decades it has come and gone. It has always been too fine to carry the styles I wanted. It never grew quite long enough, but when I had it cut short, it didn’t feel like me. I don’t look like me in those photos. I remember telling someone that my hair was like his sunglasses: it’s something to hide behind. It was. It isn’t now. Now most of the time I have it pulled back off my face. I wear plaits and pony-tails and lose buns, but then again I also wear it loose whenever I can. My hair is a bit like my garden. Mostly, I let it do what it wants. It’s semi-wild, and I’m happy with that. Every so often it manages to look amazing – the hair and the garden – and for the rest of the time, we manage.
My mother would not condone long hair at my age. Especially not such untended tresses. I remember her honesty when I went through my ‘red’ phase – auburn to be more precise – “do you like it?” I asked. “No,not really,” she said.
She’d hate that I then went blonde. Perhaps she’ll like it better when it’s all grown out.
She’d also hate my tendency to shunt meal-times around, to eat what I fancy, and when, that lunch might as easily be half past ten in the morning or three o’clock in the afternoon. She’d abhor my predilection for eating with my fingers – especially that I don’t restrain this for eating at home. I have no refinement.
Though, on reflection, to be honest, I think she would secretly approve that I do this. Much as she would want me to be, let's say, "genteel" - I have a sneaking suspicion that she'd love my rejection of it. My Dad once asked me to consider the possibility that she might be jealous of me. If that were so, the only thing I can imagine her being jealous of is my utter freedom to live my life any which way...to wear what I like, to walk onto a dance floor alone and move with the music, to eat with my fingers, to cook or not on any given day of the week, to travel, to stay home, to be here now, doing this.
This room, where I sit at a keyboard, she would consider a waste of space. She would not understand that all those shelves of books are things that I have not yet got to or want to go back to. She wouldn’t realise that no-one comes to stay so a spare bed isn’t needed, that even the sofa bed hasn’t been used in the six years I’ve been here, that the space where
I’ve pushed back tables and stools is for tai chi practice when I can’t go outside. She has almost certainly never heard of tai chi. She would worry that no-one comes to stay. I do too, sometimes, but mostly I'm happy with knowing I don't need to cater to anyone else's whims.
She won’t understand why I type up all these random thoughts and put them out there into the void.
She might have a point there.
I’m not sure I do either.
I like to think the reason I dream about my mother is that she is still watching over me. I like to think there is a dimension in which she understands me, better than she did when we shared space and time. I like to think she knows that I know what we both got wrong about each other.
I like to think what we got wrong doesn't matter.
I like to think we're ok. Now.
