Chapters

A letter came from my mother today.

It’s been, approximately, eight years since I’ve received mail from her. This came via my childhood home, forwarded by my step-mum, who it should be said, gave me fair warning.

At first I was thrown by the improvement in her handwriting despite her increased age but then, I remembered: she drafts. She was always a prolific letter-writer and equally good at filling waste paper bins. One summer that I visited she embarked upon an autobiography and splurged most of a pay-cheque on a second-hand typewriter. I was excited because my mother was going to be a famous author – as I wanted to be – but my brother scoffed and was, of course, proved right. Her mood turned and she gave up after two days, the typewriter hefted out onto the pavement beside the bins in the caravan park they were calling home. I had read the first few pages of her failed memoir and had found it cloying and stilted compared with the novels I enjoyed. But I do recall the central theme which touched and unsettled me even then: the opening anecdote was something about a memory of shopping with her own mother and of coming to the realisation that no one, not even her mother, loved her. In the memory she was about five years old: I, the reader, was ten.

Two decades later and she has written to admonish me for not knowing her and yet, her words spill out all over my skin and under it and there is nothing of them I do not already know. A careful reining-in of impulse here, a sentence fragment there, an imperious judgment over the page and then finally a breaking free of the draft to add extra exclamation marks and to literally underline the evidence of her goodness in contrast to my own character … none of it, none of it, is unfamiliar. I don’t doubt that in the twenty-seven years since she left dwell huge gaps in knowledge and understanding. There is an unshared lifetime between us. But I recognise her syntax, I remember her posture as she keeps cigarette ash off the page, I see how she writes her Xs and Os just so. I know her.

She is written on me; she is writing on me.

The surprise tonight is that even after all I have learned and done, even though my rational brain tells me not to heed it, her criticism still smarts. I don’t want to write that I felt ‘crushed’ or ‘deflated’ or ‘wounded’ but nothing serves as a better descriptor. I have adapted to living without a mother’s love but that doesn’t mean I can live happily with her disdain.

Yet, this does not feel as bad as other times. Tonight I looked at my precious Bean all fresh and shiny from her shower, her blue eyes so wide and open, her hands grasping at my shirt, and I was reminded.

I write letters. I draft. I write of my daughter and to her, I wrote my genes into her, I write my stories onto her experience. And I have a certain syntax and a way of writing Xs and Os, and I don’t know what the end of the story will be, even if I do know very well what it won’t be.

But from here the plot only moves forward. From here, I write on.

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