Mother is a verb

On finding and making families

Last night, as I slept close to my dying mother-in-law, I dreamt of two very different women: one light with hope, the other dragging with despair.

The hopeful woman was young, perhaps early twenties, and she moved with a taken-for-granted fluidity as we walked through the twisting streets of an old European town together. Her clothes were androgynous and accessorized with a quirky flair and, quite unaware of her beauty, she thought it was her gamine-meets-banarama style that made heads turn. We stopped so that she could unlock her bicycle from the metal railings, and I saw it was the ten-speed men’s racer I’d had as a teenager, the one that required a balletic kick over the crossbar to mount. She cycled away, throwing me a jaunty wave over her shoulder as she went, the only gesture she could manage at the same time as balancing the skinny wheels downhill over the cobbles. Her hope was as invisible to her as her beauty; it was the air she breathed and she knew no other. I remember her well, that spunky eighties girl that my first husband was captivated by, fixing me, ‘sprawling on a pin’¹ until I left, my heart and health broken by betrayal, addiction, heartbreak and infertility, my almost forty-year-old wings faded and shredded...

I walked on, and further down the dream street, I met the other woman. She was collapsed onto a park bench, her bones, body and clothes a bloated puddle, and yet rose into human form as I passed, latching onto me with the wretchedness of a banshee, begging me in wordless moans for more of the energy I’d once given her. I tried to brush her aside but she clung to me until a man, her keeper, apologetically took her and guided her back to the bench. Her despair was long past shame, and its rawness had an attraction that urged me to give into her need; to pour into her the light, love and knowledge that I’d traded my forties for as I’d scraped myself off life’s floor. But I understood that I couldn’t help her without losing myself; that I’d given her all that I could, many years ago, and she hadn’t been able to use it. I walked away and did not look back; I would not be Orpheus nor Lot’s wife…

*

I was awoken by the sound of my mother-in-law emerging groggily from sleep and I went to her. It was four o’clock in the morning and we stayed together in the preciousness of this time-out-of-time, witnessing her as she gathers the skirts of life around her and prepares to make her exit. It was a while until I went back to bed in the next-door room, the connecting door ajar. And just before I slid back into sleep the dream women rose up to meet me, and I wondered what message they had for me, the one so light with hope, the other so heavy with despair?

Be careful which one you feed², came the response from somewhere mythic and I dropped down into sleep holding onto it like a diver’s rope, and woke with it graven on my heart.

*

Here in rainy Ireland, the light is changing as spring tentatively announces her presence. As I walk the country lanes, I scan the hedgerows, eager to see the first buds of hawthorn, but all is still a spiky weave of black and brown. And then I am reminded that only a decade ago I was still angry with spring, taking her gleeful and gorgeous fecundity personally as a snarky comment on my childlessness: even the bloody trees are fertile! I’d mutter to myself, kicking through the blossom drifting across the London pavement. And yet, here I am, nudging sixty and deeply at peace with how things have worked out. It wasn't easy getting to this place, and it took a lot more than ‘time’ to get here, something I wrote about in one of my recent Substack essays, Shouldn't you be over that at your age? But now, it’s Mother’s Day…

Today is the UK & Ireland’s ‘Mothering Sunday’, and for me, my first without either children or a mother.

And even though I've come to terms with both non-motherhood and my difficult relationship with my own recently deceased mother, knowing that my 93-year-old mother-in-law, with whom I’ve shared a home for almost seven years, is leaving us too, is quite the trifecta. We’ve lived together, holidayed together and she’s never failed to call me out if I’ve been ageist. Thanks to her, I no longer see old people as a homogeneous ‘other’, a group to be ‘taken care of’, but as individuals who, after uniquely complex lifetimes, never to be repeated, are palaces of stories and experiences, most of which I will never glimpse, let alone know.

She was born in 1930 into a polite and proper English family and, at the age of twenty-one emigrated to South Africa with nothing but her wits, home-economic and secretarial qualifications. Over the next decade, she travelled and worked her way right through the African continent, met and married a British ex-soldier forever scarred and glamoured by the Second World War, and came home to rural England in her early thirties as a wife and mother. Since then, she’s travelled widely (often alone and made friends as she went), run businesses, raised her sons and raised eyebrows for her uncompromising forthrightness and her brilliantly unladylike snorting honk of a laugh.

We couldn’t be more different, except at our core there is something very similar about us: both of us were expected to fit into the box of ‘womanhood’ set out for us; neither of us agreed to do so. And even though she was not impressed about her son, ‘Bringing a Guardian reader into our home,’ it’s something we can laugh about together now. There’s never been anything other than respect between us; a respect which became trust; a trust which became love. Spending these last weeks with her has allowed us both to show that love to each other, and she will leave a huge hole in my heart when she takes off for her next big adventure.

Before my own mother’s dementia took her into private halls where only she could wander, there were times when she was startlingly honest with me. ‘You’ve been finding other families all your life,’ she said to me one day. And she was right: from the parents of my Jackie³ Pen-Pal who were so mystified when my family didn’t bother to collect me after a month’s visit turned into three that they enrolled me in school; to the mothers of teenage boyfriends who took me under their wings, and the hoard of nieces and nephews by-love-not-blood that remain a part of my life, more than twenty years after my divorce from their uncle. It seems I inherited a strong survival instinct from my mother, including surviving loving her.

I may not be a mother or grandmother in this lifetime; I may not have been well-mothered and grandmothered in this lifetime. But I have been loved uncomplicatedly by mothers other than my own, and I have given widely and unstintingly of my own mothering heart. I hope that when the day comes that time softens, and my ties with this world loosen, this will prove to have been enough.

And that I will have fed the right one.

---

1. From ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T. S. Eliot. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

2. ‘The story of the Two Wolves is a popular metaphor whose origin can be traced to several Christian Evangelical authors, who tell a story about some protagonist fixing dog fights, but the story is now usually presented as a Cherokee legend.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Wolves

3. Jackie was a weekly British magazine for girls 1964-1993 and the best-selling teen magazine in Britain in the 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_(magazine)