Aug 24/ 2011
Today is the anniversary of my Mother’s death. She died nine years ago and last week would have been her
Mum and Dad on their 70th Wedding Anniversary
This morning I lit a candle and it has burned all day beside me on my desk. I do this each year to mark my mother’s passing.
On her birthday I do something she would have liked to do. I make scones and eat them with fresh butter and tea or I watch a movie in the afternoon and eat dark chocolates.
Oh dear, that makes her sound so frivolous. The truth is I am not capable of doing so many of the other things she could do.
I cannot turn an old piano into music or a plot of unruly dirt into a magical garden and even though she taught me how when I was five, I seem to have forgotten how to knit a cable knit Irish fisherman’s sweater. And I seem to have had trouble keeping a marriage together too, well I am hoping this latest one sticks but I will never live long enough to match my parents 70 years of conjugal coexistence. For them it was not always bliss but my observation was it was always love.
The loss of our parents is a thread pulled from our tapestry. It leaves a space forever. The space we previously filled with calls home just to hear the sound of the voice that resonated reassurance even if the actual problem was not shared.
The space we used to fill with the pride that swelled when we shared our latest achievement. When the publisher accepted my first book draft, who did I want to tell first? All is right in the world when we have made Mum and Dad proud, still.
I believe that the mother daughter relationship is a strange combination of trouble and joy. In the growing up days there is inevitable conflict and some scars do remain forever, on both sides. But so does the sense that this person has knowledge about you which no one else has, as if you whispered secrets to mum when you were in the womb or maybe later during the night feedings.
Maybe it is those body spaces in common that causes the conflict and at the same time bonds us for life, what perfection in form and function.
The father daughter relationship can also be a complicated recipe of tension and adoration but in a healthy relationship the mix is over salted with protectiveness and for me at least, that is the warm feeling I am left with even though I do remember the ego and independence battles which raged.
The loss of our mother and our father can be a rite of passage, a loss which takes us off the bench and onto the field of life. Suddenly some invisible but perceptible barrier that existed between us and life is removed.
It shocked me when I felt it because I believed I was quite fully involved in life, thank you very much. I had raised two children, worked full time, owned my own house, negotiated multiple new car purchases and travelled alone outside the country.
When it was removed, I realized I had lived over an invisible safety net and then it was gone and I was swinging high without anyone on the other end of the line, without the illusory option of just going home if it all came apart. A few times in the eight years since the thread was pulled from my tapestry I have come close to feeling my world come apart and it took my breath away when I looked down and realized the net was gone.
But I did then,in those difficult times,what we women are so good at doing, what the lucky ones have learned from the men and women who raised them… I kept going.
Today my daughter phoned. She said, “I just wanted to call you today.” I am so grateful for her gesture. I could hear the missing in her voice too,she adored her nanny. It is a tribute to my mother that we both feel the space today, so many years after she left us behind, left us with just one direction… “Keep going.”
