I, mother

My mum was a single working mother, a divorcee, in rural towns in the 1970s and 80s. I never really considered, until I had a child of my own, what that must have meant. She was talked about, certainly (Loretta Lynn was characteristically accurate about what it was to be ‘Rated X’ back then) and she was patronised — and sleazed on — by men who felt they were doing her a great favour. She was judged by other parents, discriminated against by landlords, and my brother was pitied for being a latch-key kid but rarely invited over to play.

I wonder, now, how much of her identity as a mother was about the fighting-for, the missing-out, the trauma. And whether that might explain, in some small measure, how she was able finally to give up mothering altogether.

Bean’s father moved out a few weeks ago. Unlike my mother’s relationship breakdowns, our split is what they call amicable. It’s a useful word: in my imagined etymology it means able to be kind to each other. The anger has evapourated. The drive, for both of us, is to protect Bean as much as we can as we try to start anew, apart.

But there were, as there always must be, some difficult moments. For me there was the wrenching fear of losing my child. Divorce meant the termination of my mother’s parental rights and that is some dark baggage to carry into my own custody negotiations.

I am quite comfortable being apart from Bean. I do paid work full time and she is well cared for at kindergarten. She has a loving and competent father. But I realised, in setting down my baggage and riffling through, that I don’t know who I am, if not foremost a mother. I don’t know who I would be, without my child. The thought of no longer having ‘Bean’s primary carer’ at the core of my position description for life gives me vertigo.

The loss of self that our culture promotes as inevitable for parents is, it’s possible, at work here.

But isn’t it also possible that the narrative of loss is entirely inappropriate? Only if one favours individualism above connection could it seem that being transformed by parental love is equivalent to losing one’s self. I rather think my self, in this mother-love, has been found.

In shedding some anchoring points — wife/partner — my identity clearly has to shift and grow. But lately I have felt more centred and confident in the knowledge that I am, that I will always be, a mother, a friend, a teacher, a writer.

My own mother inadvertently gave me significant gifts: a strong desire for independence and the requisite resilience. So I think in this next chapter, Bean and I are going to be fine.

I’m still writing.

The how of getting through

Telling stories matters.

Giving voice to truth counts. Refusing to allow others to frame fears and pain as private matters only, as faintly shameful, is important to me. I believe that my friends who have told me that to share how one lives and copes is to help other women, are right. And yet, I hesitate to speak freely out of respect for others and out of respect for my own need to withdraw and retreat.

I want to talk though. I want to say: here is what is cobbling my parts together, pushing me from one moment into the next, softening the tightness in my chest so that my heart may beat I am, tempting me to smile, allowing me to cry, seeing me through.

I don’t want to forget.

The first is Bean. Like her mama, she knows that creating is expressing is processing is coping. After a trying day, she will say, I need to do artwork. In her drawings and paintings she inhabits a world filled with so much love and joy that I can’t help but feel soothed too.

Bean's family: me walking Sally with Bean and her dad and a sun that fills the sky with only a smile

The second is kindness.

I had thought to write ‘communications and connections’: phone calls, emails, Twitter. I had thought to pay tribute to the ways in which being simply allowed to talk have smoothed over the roughest of hours. But it is not that, really, at the core of it. What is a friendship but a promise of kindness? In the end, only kindness matters.

I am heavy (not weighed down but plumped up) with gratitude for the many kindnesses that have been extended to me — and to Bean. Loaded with provisions for the next leg.

I am grateful too for meaningful and rewarding work. For purposeful days. For the stoicism my father bequeathed to me.

One can survive on only small morsels of beauty; and so music and wonder and wise and touching words and the sheer bloody-minded livingness of life in all its forms are keeping me replete with hope.

So, probably, are you. Thank you.

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.

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.

On work

A while ago I came to one of those realisations that sneak up on you sometimes when you’re really not looking (maybe even trying rather hard not to see, like by distracting yourself when they creep into the periphery of your thoughts). You know those ones? The realisations that actually make a lot of sense but are not always so easy to face up to. The upsetting (in the sense of apple-carts) ones.

My realisation was this: I needed to work. Not run a house or do mothering or occupy my brain with studying or by writing a blog. I mean, work.

I suppose that was a revelatory thought because it’s somewhat at odds with how I’d like things to be. I’d like it not to matter that people’s eyes glaze over at a full-time parent’s response to the ‘so, what do you do?’ query. I’d like it not to matter that our bank account enjoys only withdrawal from me (take, take, take) because after all, without unpaid contributions of time and love we’d not have a family at all. Also, I’d like it not to matter that some days at home I could literally cry at the thought of one more minute of play-dough and could literally shriek at the injustice of even briefly losing my access to the adult world of Twitter so that Bean could play games on the iPod (who’s the two year old, again?). But it matters. I matter.

With this new clarity, it ended up being remarkably easy to find a part-time job through contacts that I had. Change came swiftly and it’s now my fourth week in this position. It feels like my brain is plumping up on all the nutrient-rich talking and reading and the spaces in the day where I know I won’t find a toddler clinging to my leg. It’s been a slightly bumpy transition (for instance, I’ve been so tired I’ve neglected readers of my blog appallingly) but the bumps seem to have all been felt by me. Bean loves the child care centre and she adores the two full-time carers she’s with three days a week. I’m constantly regaled with stories about the other children. Frankly, I suspect she’s been quite bored all this time. What a relief to know it isn’t only me!

I don’t like martyrdom talk, I don’t like rhetoric about the noble sacrifices of motherhood. Even so, there is a danger in failing to acknowledge exactly what it takes to be a parent, and what it takes to stay in domestic spaces day in day out raising offspring. Personally I don’t believe we were ever meant to do it this way, the mother–child dyad was never meant to be so exclusive and so consuming. Still, I am very happy to have been with Bean (almost) full-time for her first two and a half years, and it’s very likely that within a matter of months we will again be spending most days together. A non-linear career path and intermittent engagement with paid work is on the agenda for me, as for many women, and I hope one day for more men too.

For now, at this moment, I’m a ‘working mother’. (But don’t call me that, or I might rant at you about how all mothers work, and about how you rarely hear ‘working father’ even though some fathers do not do paid work, and about how anything that contributes to creating artificial divisions between women is really not helpful, especially if those are class-based or part of the execrable ‘mummy wars’ discourse. Just sayin’.)

Two years, five months

Bean has started to sing songs, like this

Eeyore! Eeyore!
Poor Eeyore lost his tail, sad!
Eeyore, Eeyore! Lost his tail.
Doodoodoodoodoo say the magpies!
Doodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoo say the magpies!
Doodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoo!

I don’t recall any magpies in the Hundred Acre Wood but, there it is.

Sometimes I overhear her talking to her Teddy, cradling it like a baby and saying ‘stars coming out now, time to go sleep’. Sometimes she tells us that Teddy is a baby, and that he’s crying, and that he needs some milk so he’ll feel better. And then she drinks the milk.

Her favourite toy is a doctor’s set. We all submit to being ill. The stethoscope is called ‘stripey goat’, I can only assume because she can’t bear to mumble or use baby-talk but can’t quite master the correct word. She listens to our chests and our backs (and her toys’) and prescribes medicine in the form of sloppy affection and multiple needles and bandaids, always the bandaids.

At some point, I must have told her that I was putting petrol in the car because it was hungry, because this week when I said we were stopping at the petrol station, our conversation veered thus
‘Car hungry! Poor car. Petrol tastes yummy!’
‘Well, the car likes petrol. But people can’t drink petrol. And it smells really bad.’
‘[Bean] very sick! Get a sore tummy.’
‘Yes, you would get a sore tummy. Actually you’d have to go to hospital.’
‘That’s okay. Doctor kiss it better.’
The world where kissing-it-better is legitimate and effective medicine must be a lovely place.

My formerly shy and clingy babe has grown into such sociable creature. At a restaurant for a family celebration on the weekend, she spoke up to ask the waitress for juice and left my side to be with other relatives without a backwards glance. This, from the same girl who would wail and scream when a person other than her parent dared look into her face. And she is courageous: we let her play in the park outside the restaurant with her ten year old aunt, running and sliding and swinging. I doubt she even noticed we weren’t there – but I noticed, as I ate my dessert uninterrupted.

Planned obsolescence is already coming into effect: yesterday, after bumping herself painfully, she disappeared off to the freezer to retrieve her little icepack and then settled down on the couch with it held to her face, all without being prompted. Some moments I can only sit back and stare with wonder at this little person, this bright and busy little person, that we have made.

It probably says something about me, that it is her great independence of which I am most proud.

Retrospection

For two years I have thought almost constantly of the past; is it the immediacy of living in ever-changing motherhood that leaves me grasping for perspective? I don’t know.

I think of the future, too.

Here is a piece I wrote three years ago, during my pregnancy. I post it now because pregnancy is on my mind (not in my belly, don’t get too excited) and because it is the past and the future; and it is the beginning of the story we live now in this little house.

Dear Little Bean,

Today we ventured to the ultrasound clinic so that they could use soundscapes to look at you again.

At home I already have three collections of ultrasound photos. Two are of my uterus, empty of life beyond its own red vigour which I know must be there, although in the image it looks like an inert, grey blur. In these series of images are ghostly orbs: ovaries.

The first set were taken eight years ago by a kind woman who apologized for the coldness of the gel and the internal probe, who confided that her report would say all was in order, and that anyway I was too young for her to find anything. She meant well but it was small comfort for one longing for an explanation for the pain that incapacitated me each month.

The second series also shows oval orbs, unrecognizable to my untrained eyes, but nevertheless labeled as ovaries. These have shadows and marks, like moonscapes. There is a little cursor printed across the image, a measurement of the width of the largest moon-crater. In the envelope is a note to the doctor: both ovaries polycystic. These later images represent the beginning of a parade of intrusions into my body: syringes taking blood; gloved hands palpating organs; dieticians probing and dictating; acupuncture needles prickling the skin on my ankles, my feet, my abdomen; friends’ questions about baby plans flippantly thrown into conversation and falling into a black hole of awkward silence; a thermometer assessing me each morning at the same time; the dark knowledge of litres and litres of vainly tested urine; the secret, ecstatic meeting of flesh into flesh practiced in our marriage bed rendered clinical, routine, depressing. Especially the last of these intrusions, I cannot abide for long.

But now I have a third set of soundpictures of my insides. This time they show a little creature, twelve weeks old, nestled deep inside. My parasitic joy.

Today we come to the clinic with great anticipation. We clamour to know you. The sonographer is late and a little impatient, and she jostles you in the hope you’ll move and show her your heart and all its chambers. We laugh at you resisting. ‘She’s not a morning person. Like her mother,’ your father says. His voice is already full of love and pride, for you. Lucky you.

Eventually you twist and squirm for us and we see your spine, curled slightly but stark white on the screen and strong and sure looking. You have ribs, a heartbeat, blood flow, kidneys, toes. The pieces of your skull hold together delicately – in some ways you look ghostly, ghastly even. But your father looks up at the screen with shining eyes as if you are the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. When she has finished checking you over like a second-hand car and declares you healthy, we ask the question.

‘I see female genitals’, the sonographer says.

One day, you’ll be a woman.

The first thing your father says after we have left the clinic clutching your ‘photos’ and our happiness is ‘maybe one day I’ll give her away at her wedding. That is if she wants to get married. And if she’s not a lesbian. And if she doesn’t elope.’ I laugh at his wordiness. What he wants to say really is what we are both thinking; our daughter ought to be free. Whoever you are we already love you.

Mostly, I want you to be strong. I want you to be spirited. I want your first smile to drive me out of my own head.

I just want you.

Mother cupboard

*this post is my first contribution to the Writing Workshop over at Sleep is for the Weak. I chose Prompt #4, clear out a cupboard.

“Only a mother could love that face!” You know that your mother doesn’t love you, before you have words to say what it is that you know. “Remember, at least one person loves him – his mother!” It’s an ugly kind of knowing; a shameful kind. “There is no love like a mother’s love.” You push the knowledge right to the back of the forgetting cupboard. “God could not be everywhere, so he made mothers.” It is knowledge that sets you apart, marks you as unlovable. It is better not to show that you know.

***

When I was about three years old my parents held some sort of party at our house. My mother, annoyed that I had interrupted her talking, deliberately dropped the hot ash off the end of her cigarette as I stood between her and a friend. It hit the delicate skin of my shoulder and burned me. I don’t think I retain this memory because of the searing ash. What I remember is her intently watching the ash fall, the look on her face, as she realised she had actually hurt me. Blank. And the look as I began to protest, bottom lip quivering. I knew at that moment, as she vehemently denied burning me at all, let alone on purpose, that there was nothing – nothing – I could say to make her feel sorry.

This reads like a melodrama, or a twisted and childish fantasy. Don’t think I don’t know it.

I wore the cigarette scar for many years, and I would show it to people, sometimes. There was no one who would accept it. It was an invented story altogether, or it was an accident, but evidence of callous disregard from the woman who was meant to care the most? You need to show a lot more than a few little white marks to prove that. Some people won’t ever believe that lack of mother-love exists in nature, searching for alternative explanations even when a child dies.

Beyond what was acceptable as discipline in the early eighties, I wasn’t beaten. Beyond what was acceptable in fat-shaming at that time, I wasn’t starved. I had things, I had sunshiny days and icecreams. Some days, I had love, or an indistinguishable facsimile.

One of my other earliest memories? My mother wiping my bottom. Being so young that I needed help with toileting, I remember calling for her, I remember her careful touch. I also recall the day I had my first serious asthma attack, when I was left in the corner at kindergarten, terrified and wheezing. Picking me up at the usual time (they hadn’t called for her to come get me, despite me turning blue) was the maternal lion you’d expect: the furiously protective and anxiously attentive mother I know I would be if Bean became ill when out of my care. But that kind of mother only made fleeting appearances for me.

It was probably self-defensiveness as well as mental illness which turned this sporadic affection into an even rarer disposition after my parents became estranged. Eventually the wounds of separation formed a callous against further sentiment. Blank unfeelingness became the default setting, punctuated by cruelty.

I believe she burned me that day, and abandoned me not long after, and inflicted me with hateful words over the ensuing years, because she was ill. I believe if she could have loved me: if her narcissism wasn’t so overwhelming, her grip on ‘normal’ thinking so tenuous, then this would be a different story.

But this is not a Choose Your Own Adventure. This is how the story went – and goes – and I cannot change it, no matter how far back into the cupboard I push these dusty memories.

I too am ill, though differently. Although there doesn’t seem to be a permanent way to change that, there is no choice for this mother but to write a radically different narrative. And so I am, crafting our days in ways that I hope won’t have to be pushed into dark memory-cupboards in years to come. Sometimes, this task seems unspeakably difficult. And there is no thing in this world that is more terrifying to admit to feel to say to hear to write
to live
than that.

**
I owe a debt of inspiration to isabelthespy for this post. This wonderful piece from her helped me to unjumble some of my thoughts around parental love.

A visitor

I have quite a thing for strange and unusual animals. The cute/furry kind delight me – but I’m also the kind of person who is cheered by a huntsman taking residence in the corner, or a skink flashing through the grass. This morning I trudged out of the house (slow to wake, slow to move, slow to warm up to life these days) but my step got springier when I saw one of these little fellows on the front steps.

Stick insect on our house

(I took this photo a few years back, after we first moved in, but the stick insect we saw today looks very similar. It’s been that long since another chose to visit. This one’s about 25cm long.)

Bean was pretty nonplussed – fair enough, since I was clearly getting overexcited about a stick. But then, by happy coincidence, the episode of Playschool we watched together this afternoon was all about garden animals and featured some stick insects in a museum. So out we trotted to look again at this remarkable creature, and this time Bean obliged me with a few interested noises.

I’m kinda hoping that Mister Sticky will hang around with us a little bit longer. It’s not quite Tony Soprano and his ducks, but there’s definitely a feeling that this Ent-like little guy is good for my wellbeing.

Sometimes the good things are gentle and slow. And very well camouflaged.

On mental illness

Let me talk to you about my brain.

It’s not working so good right now. It’s soldiering on and getting me through the days but on the whole, it’s pretty down and a bit anxious. I’m more aware now of the ways in which this is different to feeling normally down and feeling normally anxious and I want to talk some more about that. Because, I guess, sad and negative feelings and worry are natural human emotions and everyone experiences them so it can be difficult to understand how this is different when they are caused by an illness rather than just occuring in response to life. And the way I recognise and understand that is through experience. Like this

* It is 2 pm and Bean is finally asleep, which is good for me, because my head feels foggy and everything is a little tough today. Someone raps on the door and I go down to answer it; a woman is there from an electricity provider, trying to sell me service. Because things are foggy in my head, it takes me a while to understand what she is actually saying so when she asks me for a copy of our bill I decide that the easiest thing is to just go fetch one, because then I can get a moment to think. Of course this is a mistake, because she takes it from me and tucks it on her clipboard and it’s clear that the speil she gave me about ‘not really needing to change companies’ was a total lie, and she wants me to go through the whole process of switching supplier. I don’t want to do this, and I tell her so. She ignores me. The conversation goes on and I start to disassociate a little: I can see myself just standing there like a big lump, not knowing what to say. I’m thinking what if I had a disability that made standing here difficult for me? What about elderly people, she could frighten them half to death. Why won’t she just leave me alone, this is my time to rest and I need to rest and she’s in my personal space. I try to say these things to her: that she’s intrusive, she’s bossy, she’s not welcome, she’s wasting my time. But I don’t because I know I will cry if I do. I feel about four years old. It is only when she raises her voice and wakes Bean that I have the strength to grab back my document and close the door on her. Bean has a tantrum because she was woken up, and I am so angry at myself for letting it come to this. For hours afterwards I feel pathetic, cowed, weepy. I’m big and smart and articulate and three decades old but none of that matters because I can’t even fight through the fog to say what I mean out loud.

* It is some time in the morning and I’m trying to get Bean dressed to go out. She wants to go, she’s been begging me, but she won’t lie still and I can’t dress her. She’s jumping naked on the bed, squealing, laughing: it’s a game. But not to me – today I am all hardness. Sudden rage bubbles up, and I yell and yell until she cries and lies still. In a moment she’s bouncing and happy again but for me, the shame smarts all day. (Actually, it still does now, still makes me weep). I want to tell her: that wasn’t me. I’m never that angry at you, I would never hurt you, I never want to frighten you. And I do say it, but she’s two years old so there’s no way of knowing what she’ll remember.

* I have had a difficult day. Everything got on top of me, the house was a mess, The Fireman was late home, dinner was late and disastrous and not the right thing to satisfy my hungry body. But that is okay, I think, because I’m off to a study meeting and I will be out of my house and out of my own head for a few hours. Adult time. Except that I’m still reeling from the day but I don’t know it, and the night is dark and the street I have to park on unknown, narrow, windy and steep. I can’t see where I could park my car safely, another driver blinds me with highbeams, I’m not as early as I hoped, but none of these things is insurmountable. I’m a grown-up, I can drive just fine, I can meet new people, I can get on with it. Except that I can’t. My teeth start to tingle which is the first sign that I’ve been hyperventilating without even noticing and so I have to do breathing exercises and try to navigate my car at the same time because there is nowhere to pull over. I feel light-headed and nothing seems real. And then I am crying and shaking and ashamed and I just drive home and sit in the driveway and weep because what kind of pathetic person can’t even do a simple thing like go to a meeting and when will I ever be able to do anything in my life if I can’t even do that?

I’m getting some professional help for my brain really soon; and although I feel worse than I have for months and months, it’s not so awful, really. Except that I am exhausted from limping through the days. Some cruising would be nice. Some sunshine.