Mothers’ Day mourning

Mothers’ Day tastes of grief, to me.

I went to a teeny rural school. The other kids came from conservative families, traditional, married parents in stereotypical gender roles. My family was likewise conservative but there was one stark difference: my parents were divorced and I did not have — at least visibly, for the purposes of tuckshop duty and sports day cheering or even braiding my hair — a ‘real’ mother. I was teased for it.

Ours was a thrown-together family; my stepmother and father married suddenly when I was barely five years old and it never really felt like she fit into a maternal-shaped space in my life. So each year when we crafted glittery cards and picked chrysanthemums from the school garden for our mummies in that first week of May there was a hollowness in it, for me. Not that I didn’t love and appreciate the woman who fed and clothed me and administered band-aids; of course I did. But it was ambivalent love.

A wounded child needs her love to be unflinchingly returned. That is what we mean by the unconditional love of good mothers: it is not just that they love but that they know and accept children in all their faltering fragility, and that they know, most of all, that affection offered however ungracefully by a child is not a thing you should swat away. I saw my stepmother extend openness and warmth to her biological children but not to me, and that is how I learned to feel a little bitter about the chrysanthemums. (It was only recently when I saw how my own daughter was embraced by my partner in a starkly different way — different because my partner is consistently open and kind and loving with Bean — that I understood more fully the pithy root of that bitterness.)

When I was a child pretending to be normal at school, making a Mothers’ Day card was not optional. Ambivalence was not tolerated. Compounding the hurt was the failure of those around me to acknowledge that I had suffered any meaningful loss. My biological mother had wrenched herself from having a permanent presence in my life with such brutal surprise that there had never been time, or permission, to grieve. Everyone around us had rallied behind my father; they had pitied him in his imprudent first marriage and I grew up with the implicit knowledge that my dad was a good person and therefore my mother must have, somehow, been bad. I was not meant to cry over a bad person.

It’s not so simple. If she was, is, anything, it’s closer to broken than bad.

As an adult I became more cynical about Mothers’ Day. It’s a commercial invention. It makes money from the perpetuation of the myth of the perfect mother and the infuriating pinkification of everything. If you watch the TV commercials, it’s apparently about receiving slippers and nightgowns — or worse, domestic appliances — as if they magically compensate for being the designated toilet-cleaner for most of one’s life.

Of course, there are families for whom Mothers’ Day is an opportunity for genuine expressions of love; the kind that could come on any day but so often get lost in the rush. These are families I have struggled not to envy, pushing down the unbearable feeling of missing-out with critique and yes, cynicism.

It’s a hard day for a lot of women, certainly for anyone coping with infertility or pregnancy loss. When I desperately wanted a baby and was facing month after month of negative pregnancy tests, Mothers’ Day ads with images of fresh-faced children offering burnt-toast breakfasts in bed had me sobbing. It pretty much felt like a conspiracy designed to torment people like me: not only motherless, or childless, but both.

I guess I thought that a baby of my own would anesthetise me against the pain of past Sundays in May. And don’t mistake my meaning: Bean and the day she was born and everything about her is my Best Thing. Mothers’ Day gifts and cuddles are blessings like gifts and cuddles on any day are. And tomorrow I will steal a little of her weekend with her dad to smoosh her to my chest and catch a bit of joy.

But the joy of mothering, though healing, cannot really compensate for motherlessness.

I have a maternal shadow over my life: shadow, because it is absence more than presence that causes the greatest pain (although both of my mothers have inflicted pain more directly, too). It is hard to write about this loss, about the way it seeps into everything, the way it never fully recedes, without sounding ungrateful for the blessings I do have. It is difficult to admit the depth of my pain without seeming melodramatic. But I persist in trying to express it because I know there are others feeling it too.

On social media at this time of year, we motherless women huddle together in a wary kind of sisterhood.

I wish there more spaces for us to carve out alternative narratives to counter the nauseating Hallmark celebration of mundane maternal stereotypes. And mostly I wish there was safe harbour for those of us who find the bombardment of reminders of what we lost, or never had, particularly cruel. I am thinking of the abused and abandoned, the aching and bereaved. I am thinking of the lonely and bitter and grief-stricken ones. Lost girls. Adult orphans. Cast-offs from a would-be chain of maternal inheritance.

Solidarity, sisters.

Say hello, Sally

I don’t often post personal updates on my blog (so if it’s not your thing, you know, click away).

A few years ago our dog Ferris died. I wrote about it at the time, but it was an awful time, marred by burned landscapes and fractured nerves, and I don’t think even the writing helped me properly process my grief in amongst sharper traumas.

Ferris is, I admit sadly, still in a dusty little box in the back of a cupboard.

But for the first time, yesterday, I was able to talk about what to do with those ashes without too much heaviness because we’ve welcomed a new dog into our home and somehow it feels safe to acknowledge what we’ve lost.

Sally and Bean, BFFs

We adopted Sally from an RSPCA shelter. She is a ‘bitsa’ — the best kind! — and like Rosy in the beautiful Let’s Get A Pup, she radiates Good Intention.

Sally's scar

Sally (already her name when we met her) has had a difficult life. We don’t know how she got her scar but shelter staff suggested that she was a victim of cruelty (I feel tight in the chest just thinking about it so I won’t elaborate): this is not the first time she’s been ‘rescued’ and adopted. Her immediate past owner must have been gentle with her because, although timid, she has lost the raw edge of fearfulness. But he died, and so Sally is recently bereaved, and she comes to us with so much neediness that it soothes us all just to be together.

The simplest things make a good life; a soft bed, a full stomach, a kind word. It’s a gift to be reminded.

Mother, daughter

My father died almost ten years ago. I have done my grieving in fits and starts. I think grieving is, perversely, rather like housework. It’s an inevitable, inexorable task. Some clean out their grief in a fairly regular, even constant, fashion. Others of us let it build, then binge, then rest a while.

Like housework, it never ends. But it gets easier with practice.

A few weeks ago, Bean asked me where my father is. He died, I told her. She let that pass without comment and I had assumed, as we so often do assume about the very young, that such a concept was really too far beyond her comprehension.

I should know my daughter better, by now. She had been taking some time to turn the notion over in her mind and waiting, it seems, for a quiet space.

Today we went for a walk together and she found that space. Into our companionable silence she spoke, Mama, is your daddy dead?

Yes, he died. He got very sick, and he died. It was a long time ago.

That’s not good. Oh mama, that’s not very good.

No. It was awful. I miss him, and I feel sad sometimes.

Yes Mama, that’s sad. But now you have me, and you don’t have to worry about your daddy. If you feel sad, you can always cuddle me. I will always be here for you to cuddle, any time.

I have been trying to compose a sentence that will properly express how much this confidently uttered and completely sincere statement of compassion and support, coming from a child of only three years of age, stunned and shocked me into heart-swelling, tear-welling joy, but I can’t manage to do it.

This — this, this is not the post I was planning to publish today. And this is not the kind of post I was going to be writing at all, anymore. But some stories tell themselves.

Before Christmas, a letter came from my mother. Like the other times, her words inconveniently inked their way under my skin. But I have, now, the requisite strength to offer my compassion. At a point in my still-short enough life when I am questioning almost everything, I can believe in kindness. And so I did what I thought would be kind, and eased some of the anxiety I know my mother could not adequately express, and sent her a Christmas card. It’s okay, I wrote. It’s okay.

Today, another letter, and a handful of old photos, and a row of kisses across the bottom of the page, and a child-like expression of hope.

I do not know how, from here, I should write on, but I do know that in kindness there can be solace.

And I know, because Bean showed me today, that a daughter can mother her mother for a moment and come away beaming, satisfied, ready to skip into the sunlight.

Disaster response

It’s the time of year when I start thinking about bushfires.

Lately I have been pondering the ways in which large-scale trauma endures past the initial minutes and hours and days. Grief is a kind of flesh-memory and the landscape a kind of flesh. Trees and house-blocks literally bear scars; communities and families bear empty spaces left by the dead. Fear, once felt, is easily recalled. Anniversaries weigh down the calendar. Here, hot nights grow very long.

Last night wasn’t hot but I could not sleep as the news trickled in from Toowoomba. The floods afflicting Queensland have been an unfolding tragedy for weeks now but yesterday’s raging ‘inland tsunami’ was a truly fast-moving catastrophe.

This compilation of footage gives a sense of the level of devastation.

At present, at least eight people are confirmed dead and over seventy people are missing. Homes, businesses, pets and livestock have been destroyed or are in peril. Thousands of people have been displaced. The crisis will be an ongoing one and the trauma long-remembered.

If you are in a position to help, information on how you can donate is here.
ABC News Online is giving fairly good updates as they arise.

Some fatosphere bloggers live in South-East Queensland — I am sending my best atheist prayers of hope that they remain safe.

Motherless mothering

When I was pregnant with Bean, I wrote an extended letter to her as part of an assessment for a Life Writing class. I wrote extensively about her grandfather; the sadness I felt over him not living to see his grandchild was easily expressed. It’s a sad thing. It’s a normal kind of sad that most people understand. And it’s really and truly unfair and also Nobody’s Fault At All. Cancer sucks is a narrative that fits well into our collective psyche because, sadly, most of us have some verifying experience of it.

What I didn’t include in my assignment was how I was feeling about being motherless at the time I was becoming a mother. And I wonder, now, if my inablity to even write about that was because I can’t categorically say that this particular fucked-up state of affairs is Nobody’s Fault. Getting angry is scary and I was, up until quite recently, extremely angry. After Bean was born I got so angry, in fact, that I shouted and ranted all the time. All the time I wasn’t crying, or sleeping, or breastfeeding, or trying not to shout.

Yeah, it was loads of fun, those weeks.

I don’t even really know where I’m going with this post except that I want to say this: I am a motherless mother. I am only just beginning to define the ways in which this affects me and I can’t yet explain it very clearly. But the fact that I feel this loss no less keenly for it having been nearly three decades since she left me behind is something I am now willing to admit.

There are support groups, google tells me, for motherless mothers. But these are for the bereaved. These are for the orphans of breast cancer and car accidents. These are not for me.

I remember crying for my mother one night. I must have been around six. I sobbed with the conviction all children can muster but few adults seem able to sustain – until I was hushed. Grieving the living was not allowed. Now, I grieve the hypothetical and magical. I grieve the tug of the psychic umbilicus.

First and Last

I think I first learned to appreciate the lasts when I was finishing up six years of boarding school. The last time we had a water balloon fight against the boys. The last time we sat up all night in our pyjamas talking and eating Milo out of the tin. The last time they made us eat ham steaks and rubber jellies for dinner. As much as we like to think we’re fascinatingly complicated, when it comes down to it humans are creatures of habit. We like to have time to make our transitions in life and as such, the lasts take on a significance that is rarely based on their own merit.

I was pondering this as I vacuumed the loungeroom yesterday.

(Don’t you love how I’ve dropped that in to make it sound as if vacuuming the loungeroom is something I do regularly – even daily? But of course you, my three dear readers, know better by now. I only vacuum under one of three circumstances: we are expecting visitors; I am genuinely curious about what colour the carpet is since I can no longer remember; I am confined to the house with a sick child and extremely bored. Yesterday it was the third circumstance.)

Anyway, the previous time I had vacuumed had been a little emotional. It was the last time I’d be vacuuming up bales of golden retriever fur. Or so I thought. Because you see, there is just so much Ferris hair in this house that despite having done a fairly thorough job last week (no, really!), yesterday I still filled half the Dyson up with golden hair. Ferris is haunting us with fur bunnies. What cheek! What an adorably infuriating way to remind us that every inch of this house is filled with doggy memories.

The other thing about the lasts is that they stack up on each other and this seems to make them even bigger. So I was particularly emotional about another last this morning.

The Bean had her last drink of breastmilk. I still had one lot left in the freezer. I’d been saving it for when she got ill, in the hope that a bit of extra nourishment would be of use then. Since someone so very thoughtfully brought a sick child to her party and so generously gave her a cold for her birthday, that time was now. Instead of a cup of cows’ milk she had my expressed milk this morning. I was secretly afraid that she wouldn’t drink it, having become accustomed to the taste of the bovine version. But she gulped it down in doubletime and handed the cup back expectantly: the universal toddler-language for ‘More please.’

I don’t have any more.

And thus ended for good our breastfeeding relationship: The Bean throwing a mini-tantrum and me throwing one of my own, on the inside.

Now I’m done with the lasts. Their distant cousins the firsts are a much more cheerful bunch so I’m going to hang out with them for a while.

A Good Dog

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks.

Before the region I live on the edge of was ravaged by a firestorm, and before I started to have sleepless nights waiting up for The Fireman who was out there doing his bit round the clock, and before I had to bake Little Bean’s birthday cake and get organised for her first birthday bash, I had to take my dog to the vet and hold him while they put an IV in his leg and injected him with green liquid in order to kill him.

Ferris was a five year old golden retriever and he was my shadow, my comforter, my jester; my hairiest, sweetest friend. He had been ill for a while. We found out just before Bean was born that he had congenitally small kidneys and eventually renal failure would kill him. He was wasting. Impossibly good-natured, he remained cheerful through most of it.

Need to stick me with some more needles? No problem! Need to stop feeding me food I actually like and give me this prescription guff? Okay! Need to stop taking me for walks because I’m too weary to handle it? It’s fine! Need to pay more attention to that pink screaming thing in one hour than you’ve given me all week? No worries! I’ll just sit here and sleep at your feet. Or outside the shower door. Or right here next to your bed.

His decline, in the end, was steep. It was too much to ask of us, to see him like that. And too much to ask of him. We made the decision to euthanase him on Friday the 6th February. It wasn’t his fault that it would have been my late father’s birthday that day, but it made it harder for me all the same. I couldn’t – can’t – stop conflating the images in my mind:  My father, grey with pain. Thin. Hollowed from the inside out. A supreme effort to remain composed and stoic in his final hours and to say All The Right Things in order to please us before morphine brought relief and release and peace. My Ferris, so emaciated his whole pelvis showed through as if his skin were simply draped on bone. So exhausted he couldn’t walk up one step and so sick he couldn’t drink water. Until the end, battling to raise a tailwag to show us that it was okay.

My grief for a dog is nothing to my grief for a much-loved father but the mechanics are much the same.

Except this time there hasn’t been space for it.

I feel almost ashamed of this small, personal sense of loss in the face of mass tragedy. What right have I to mourn when I have my home and my family? And how can one go about the business of mourning when the evidence of life and joy is bounding about the loungeroom in her birthday dress?

The fact remains that we owe it to Ferris to mourn him well. He earned the highest of titles he could have hoped for: he was a Good Dog.

A friend in need

Today I met a man with no worldly possessions except his singed car and the clothes and shoes he is still wearing.

We were collecting my new glasses from the optometrist and he saw that my husband was wearing a CFA t-shirt and  came over to offer gratitude, and perhaps also to connect with a person he knew would have seen some of the things he had seen.

This man had a slightly weathered face and kind eyes and he could have been a friend of my father. He spoke calmly of terror and quietly of raging death. To him, the fires weren’t natural, they were Napalm. He kept saying that no one should be, can be, blamed. He smiled. I don’t know how.

He was at the optometrist because when the heat hit his home in Kinglake the metal in his glasses expanded and the lenses fell out. He still managed to drive safely through the chaos. Lucky, or blessed. He and my husband talked together of cars that crashed into trees as their drivers panicked and then perished and I stood there listening but not understanding. Their minds share images that I can only see if I watch the television news but the mediating screen makes it unreal, for me and most of us. Another thing to be grateful for.

As I paid for my glasses the man commented that he wasn’t sure how he’d organise things, since he doesn’t have a medicare card. Or anything.

The person who was serving me simply explained that they would be giving free glasses to all bushfire victims and that they would be prioritised ahead of everyone. I found myself welling up with tears for the umpteenth time. She turned to me and said ‘we have to do something and this is the only thing we can do.’

I am yet to speak to someone who isn’t similarly determined to help. And as horrific as it is that we have come to this state of loving and giving through such trauma, I still want to celebrate it. Because it proves to me that I’m not wrong to believe that we are basically all better off connected. Better off kind.

Victoria is shrouded in smoke and unfathomable sadness. But it’s a shroud that forces us to huddle together for comfort and out of that we can salvage something.