I was born into a time of endings.
Taking the long view of Mother's Day
Note: Mother’s Day is in May in many places; in the UK/IE it’s March/April.
In the last six months, death has come to claim both my mother and my partner’s mother. I’ve had the privilege of sitting with them both as they took their last breaths; truly sacred moments yet also humdrummingly prosaic. It’s what happens to all living systems - we arise, we flourish, we peak, we decline, we end - nothing escapes the laws of nature, including human civilisations.
I was born into a time of endings.1
Since I was very young, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that there were civilisations that once existed but have long vanished; I used to dig for them in the garden, and look for them hiding in the dark mossy green of the woods. Had I been born to a mother and a family that held the privilege of being educated, or had known to prize education, I might have become an archaeologist or anthropologist.
Instead, my only real ambition as a teenager was to ‘get out of there’, which I did, arriving in London at nineteen knowing no one and with zero connections. My teenage boyfriend followed me, and we lived together for a while in a seedy North London bedsit, he furiously scribbling notes for novels he’d never write, me grafting my way up from fashion store assistant to design assistant and model at the fashion manufacturers, and from there into my first ‘proper’ job in PR.
Looking back on myself in my early twenties, I see a feral, angry young woman with few social graces and the casual ruthlessness of a rescue kitten. Yet the founder of that tiny but achingly trendy 1980s fashion PR agency saw something in me worth saving and she nurtured it, personally and professionally. Caroline Thomas was her name; she died too young from breast cancer and is now one of the ten thousand mothers who form part of my lineage. Biology only counts for so much it seems. Perhaps amongst the dead, it is only love that matters?
As a young woman, I was determined not to have children; determined not to repeat the ‘mistakes’ of my mother and grandmother and ‘ruin my life’ by having children, as they often reminded me, information backed up by the sex-education messages I’d received at school too. Pregnant at twenty-one, I chose to have an abortion as I was terrified that I would mother as I had been mothered. I didn’t know it then, but ripe with intergenerational mother-daughter trauma, my instincts were probably right. Sadly, I was then unable to conceive when my first husband and I tried to have a baby from my late twenties to my late thirties; an operation confirmed that my uterus was just fine and I was just another case of ‘unexplained infertility’. Still, despite the heartbreak of childlessness, I don’t regret not bringing that soul into the world at a time when I had nothing to give them; my childhood had taught me to see love and tenderness as weaknesses, and it would take many years more, and a heartbreaking divorce and therapy before I would learn how to let the right one in. And although I didn’t get to be a biological mother in this lifetime, I take comfort in knowing that the archetypal mother energy in me has found expression in other ways.
As Rebecca Solnit wrote in her 2015 Harper’s Magazine essay, The Mother of All Questions:
“People lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity in part from the belief that children are the best way to fulfill your capacity to love, even though the list of monstrous, ice-hearted mothers is extensive. But there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”
My mother-in-law was 93 when she died last month; her closest friend and, in recent years, our holiday travelling companion, is almost 80, born just a couple of years before my mother. I’ve got to know her well, and her warmth and care towards her dear old friend as her health declined, and towards all those around her got me wondering one day - what would it have been like to have had her for my mother? To have met softness instead of spikes; warmth instead of the cold drafts of doors shutting in my face; to have known nurture rather than, ‘Don’t bother me now!’ I know that ‘benign neglect’ seems to be a fairly common parenting style that we GenXers have experienced, but it still leaves invisible scars.
It was a simple realisation, but one that shifted the unconscious furniture: I would not be who I am, would not have developed the unique view I have on life, had I not been born to my biological mother - to this particular traumatised woman, at this particular moment in history. My mother is the first author of my autobiography.
Because, perhaps if I’d had a gentler mother, I would not have questioned everything, not have set to wondering how and why human beings are the way they are and, after a childhood of ruptures, abandonments and a range of disappointing parental figures, followed by my mid-life divorce and childlessness, I may not have been so prepared to live in a time of endings. The ground had never felt firm under my feet and perhaps that helped me to develop a reasonable sense of balance in these shifting times? To paraphrase the Buddhist Nun Pema Chodron, ‘Life is a continual process of having the rug pulled out from under your feet'.2 I wish it weren’t true, and at times of stability in my life, I’m just as capable as the next person of going into denial about it. Fucking rugs.
And so, I come full circle back to Mother’s Day. Compared to how I felt about this day thirteen years ago, when I first started writing publicly about my childlessness, I'm so grateful that it's now a fairly ‘neutral’ day for me (although it can still sucker-punch me for reasons that are never predictable). In fact, when I think back to the depths of my despair in years gone by, I could kneel and kiss the sweet earth for the healing of my broken childless heart, (in fact, I just did). Because there was a time when I felt that even the earth had deserted me, that nature had turned her back on me and that ‘mother’ nature was as out of reach for me as motherhood.
A turning point came (and I write about it in more depth in Chapter 4 of my book ‘Living the Life Unexpected’), was when I realised that although I wasn't part of the cycles of human reproduction, I was still part of the bigger ecological cycles of birth and death… and that one day, when I was dead and buried, my body would break down into food for new life. Perhaps that might sound morbid to some, but it was deeply comforting to me; I realised that as long as I remained fixated on the narrow human reproductive cycle, I was missing out on the larger ones I was nested within. That realisation also helped me to reframe my approach to ‘legacy’, seeing it now as less about what tangible footprint I might leave behind me, and more about the intangible echo of my life on the lives of others, both the human and more-than-human, and on this planet too. We all make an impact, just by being alive at this time. And as I move towards my sixtieth birthday later this year, I feel more and more that there are many ways to be a good ancestor… and that continuing my genetic lineage would have been only one of them.
I was born into a time of endings; we all were. So many things have happened in my life that I thought I couldn’t survive, or survive without, including motherhood, and I have. Perhaps my job as an emerging elder is to show how not to flinch from that, to accept that endings are a natural part of the cycle of life. That everything has limits, even if our culture tries to pretend otherwise. To use my mother’s heart to hospice this world as it rattles on its deathbed.
The end of the world is never the end of all worlds; the ruins of ancient civilisations know that, indigenous people who’ve survived those civilisations know that. My mother, mother-in-law, former boss Caroline and my ten thousand mothers know that. And with their support, so do I.
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This sentence paraphrases the work of philosopher Federico Campagna, as filtered through the work of eco-activist-philosopher Dougald Hine.
Pema Chodron (2005) When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. USA: Shambala
And know too, that this next chapter after the passing of our mothers is also a time of beginnings. Of emergence into the ‘modern matriarchy’ that is just beginning to rise as the first massive generation of educated, empowered women redefine age and step into mothering the future.
It’s a huge transition. Nurture it well, as you are. Beautifully.
I resonate with so much of this Jody. Leaving home to go to London at 18, because I couldn't bear to be in the atmosphere of my family anymore. Realising I couldn't have children and then a part of me feeling a sense of relief that I wouldn't have to navigate motherhood with the shadow of my own mother and her trauma. Knowing that all the wounds I have experienced were always mine to heal in this lifetime. That I leave this soul in a fitter place to live life even if I don't leave children. My ancestors benefit and so do future generation. I'm still doing more than my bit. Thank you, this was very life affirming for me.