Relationships don't stop growing when a person is no longer here
Reflections on the anniversary of my Mum's death
Before I get into it, I feel it is important to point out that some people might find this piece hard to read, especially those who knew and loved my Mum. I know for many people anniversaries can be really really hard, a day where they are given little choice but to reflect on what is one of the most painful experiences of their life. For me, this hasn’t been the case. I don’t know why, but my guess is that it’s because I feel very disconnected from the metrics of time generally. I’ve always been terrible at remembering dates, often have a limited awareness of the passing of time, and always feel constrained by how these measures of time dictate our lives. Yet I did want to acknowledge the significance of this date by doing something, and the thoughts below are what have been swirling around in my head for the last little bit.
I had a complicated relationship with my Mum. This is something that her death doesn’t erase. It is a part of my story and has impacted the course of my life, and I wanted to share how that has been the case. I understand though that timing is important and for some this might be a difficult thing to read on what is already a heavy day, so I thought it was the kind thing to do to give a warning before launching into the sticky stuff.
With that being said, here it goes.
I have tried to write this so many times.
Months ago, I started jotting down some thoughts. However I didn’t really know how to elaborate on them nor tie them together, so they sat untouched in my drafts for a while. I reengaged with them over a week ago and have been working on them ever since. Yet I was still having the same problems as I was before. This is partly due to my body not respecting my wishes to write and choosing to do it’s own thing, which involves scrambling my thoughts and making it difficult to string sentences together. I had an idea of what I wanted to get across, and yet every time I typed out the words, they didn’t seem to come together in a way that encapsulated what I was trying to get at. Over and over again I have sat here writing, only to delete what I have put down. It’s been an infuriating process. But I had to remind myself that this year I said I’d really start to tackle my perfectionism head on, so giving up wasn’t an option.
However, I think it’s mostly hard to write this because this topic is just really hard. I feel as though there is a lot at stake because some of what I have to say doesn’t paint my Mum in the best light. It can be seen as disrespectful to say anything but positive things about someone once they are no longer with us, especially if that person was a good person at their core. What I’ve learned from my short writing journey so far, however, is that people really connect with vulnerability. Putting together my thoughts around this had to be one of the most vulnerable things I have ever done. So I decided to swallow my fear and just try and get on with the task.
The reason I was determined to publish this today is because today is the ten year anniversary of my mother’s death. I’ve had a lot of things I’ve wanted to say on the topic of losing a parent over the years, especially after having a decade to reflect on what it means to lose the person who brought you into this world. But I don’t think I’ve been at the point where I’ve had enough perspective on things to really make sense of it all. I feel as though I’ve done enough growth and learning at this point to be able to do so in a way that feels acceptable…for me, anyway.
Something that helped me connect all the pieces was a book I recently read. Clementine Ford’s third book, How We Love, is a memoir of sorts, consisting of seven essays. I loved the book and think it is worth adding the book to your reading list. However there was one essay in particular that really hit me in the guts and left me doing some serious reflecting. In ‘The Starship are Burning’, Ford explores the tumultuous relationship she had with her mother, interwoven with the story of her mother’s cancer diagnosis and eventual death. This was the first time that I had really seen someone write about their relationship with their mother when they were a teenager in the way that she had, a way that resonated with me so deeply. And to make it even more eerily similar, she had then gone on to lose that mother around the same time I had (I was 22, Ford was 25).
Yet Ford’s story was different to mine in that she writes that she and her mother ‘[became] friends again’. Ford was given enough time for this to happen. They were able to talk about the hard times, Ford now mature enough to reflect on her experiences with more clarity, and her mother vulnerable enough to admit how her own struggles coloured how she interacted with her children at times. In a way, despite the awfulness of her situation, Ford got some sort of resolution. In my case, I didn’t mature quick enough to feel I really got that chance. I did get a glimpse though.
In the last conversation I ever had with my Mum I apologised for how I had treated her throughout the years. I was overseas at the time, and for reasons that are not really important, I had been forced to do a lot of reflecting on how my behaviour likely affected those around me. I can’t remember much of the specifics of the conversation, but I do remember I’d gone in with the goal of apologising, despite how intolerable the shame that accompanied an apology was for me at the time. I remember after my stumbling apology watching the pixellated video image of my Mum over Zoom, trying to figure out whether I’d done it right. She tilted her head into her palm, arm resting on the desk, and smiled at me, a sweet smile that told me that my words had had the intended impact. I know she said things in response, but I cannot remember what they were. It is just that image of her that is there. It is one I will cherish forever.
My Mum went into hospital the next day because of a burst aneurysm. By the time I arrived home about a week or so later (she hadn’t wanted me to come home initially, and I’ll admit that I was glad that she wished that), she was already in an induced coma. When I entered my bedroom after arriving home, before I’d been to the hospital, I found on my bed my Christmas sac, filled with presents that I hadn’t expected to get. You see, I’d been away for Christmas for the first time ever, and I was due home right after my family was to set off for our annual two week summer holiday. I was meant to fly up there to meet them, after I’d had a few days to get over my jet lag.
Inside the Christmas sac was a note from Mum, telling me that she had wanted me to have some nice clothes for the upcoming beach holiday (that had now been cancelled). Inside was a collection of dresses, skirts and tops that were carefully folded. She said she’d taken my cousin and aunty shopping because she knew she was ‘a dag’, and that she was so looking forward to seeing me again. She knew I was going to be sad about my first overseas holiday coming to an end and wanted to cheer me up with a surprise.
A dag.
That phrase sliced into my soul. There was proof that my constant insults over the years about her lack of fashion savvy had been internalised. My throat tightened. I felt sick. The shame. The shame. I berated myself for my cruelty as I lay sobbing on my bed.
At this stage, when there was still a possibility that she might survive this ordeal, I vowed that I would never take her for granted again. I don’t really believe in God, but in that time I promised someone out there that I would be better. That this was the wake up call that I needed. I would spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to her. I was determined to be a better daughter.
She never woke up from the coma and I never got my redemption arc. I spent most of the next ten years focusing on this fact. Angry with the memories that I was left with, that the chance at newer, better ones, had been ripped from me. I dwelled on the dark moments, and it slowly infected the image I had of her.
Like many teenage girls, I took a lot of my rage out on my Mum. I was scared and lonely and overcome with emotions that I didn’t understand or know how to control. I was drowning in all my responsibilities, many of which I had brought upon myself in my desperate desire to prove that I was all the things people said I was: intelligent, organised, empathetic, high-achieving, self-sufficient. The more I tried to live up to this identity, the harder it became to keep balancing all the plates, and things began to slip. During this time my self-loathing morphed into a beast I have struggled to control ever since. Everyone else seemed to manage well enough, so why couldn’t I?
I didn’t understand my anxiety then and had no idea how to deal with it. I couldn’t recognise that my body was desperately trying to tell me that it was too much (a message I continued to ignore until a few years ago, with pretty dire consequences it now seems), that I needed to slow down and let my feelings be, rather than trying to run away from them. But I didn’t have the skills, nor the right guidance, to be able to do that. I became a pressure cooker, overflowing, ready to explode at the rims. And the only way I knew how to release the valve was to pick fights with the people I felt safe enough to do so with, the people who would continue to love me despite my spiteful treatment of them. Mum was the primary target.
She could usually be counted on to take the bait. I poked and prodded and eye-rolled and spewed out words that were meant to inflict pain. I knew what her insecurities were and I used them against her. Sometimes she had more patience with me and could let it go. But I was relentless. Eventually, no longer having the the patience to withstand my ongoing attacks, Mum would meet me head on, and a stream of rage would come back at me full force. When a crescendo had been reached, we would both retreat into our rooms and cry. Relieved of the tension, sure, but only for it to be replaced with guilt and shame. There would eventually be an apology, a reminder that we both loved each other. Rinse and repeat, for almost ten years.
If you haven’t experienced this kind of dynamic with anyone, you might not realise that this kind of behaviour is addictive. It helps in the moment, but the more you do it the more of it you seek. Like alcohol can numb pain momentarily but lead to dependence down the track. If it is the only coping mechanism one has, you eventually need more and more of it to cope. The more I fought with my Mum, the more I needed to do it. I didn’t know any other way to extinguish the fire within me. It was a vicious cycle that neither of us had the means or energy to break at that point. I was only starting to realise it for what it was when Mum was forced to leave us.
When someone dies who was so central to your world, your world shifts and crumbles in ways that you could never have foreseen. The shifting and crumbling is inevitable, as there is just no possible way to predict all the ways that your life will change. If I could go back to 22 year old me and give her any advice, it would be that the experience of grief is individual and there is no right or wrong way to do it. I’d say this because what was hardest for me in those first few months was not the loss I felt, but the guilt I felt about not feeling it as much as others seemed to be. This feeling added to my already towering shame wall. My journals are littered with pages of me trying to force myself to cry about my loss, so that I would feel that I was behaving normally and could rid myself of the feeling that I was an awful person. I expected anniversaries, especially the first one, to be hard, yet I was so busy just getting by in life that I barely had the space to think about it.
Looking back on it now, I realise that my grief worked differently. Rather than a constant, dull ache, my grief would bubble up at different moments, often triggered by things that made no sense. I can recall a recent moment where I was hysterically sobbing in the kitchen, my partner J having no idea what to do because I couldn’t verbalise what had released the flood gates. I can’t remember what it was even now, I just remember that it was the first time in a long time that my grief had caught me so off guard. There have been other times where my sadness has been more understandable. When I was my cousin’s bridesmaid a few years after my Mum had passed, I felt a longing for Mum as I watched my aunty dote over her daughter on her special day. I had little interest in getting married (I still don’t), but it fully hit me in that moment that this was an experience I could never recreate in my own life. Ditto when that same cousin was pregnant and then had a baby; it suddenly hit me that if I were ever to have children, Mum wouldn’t be there to share her wisdom, to navigate me through what would be a life-altering and terrifying experience.
It’s become clear to me now that my grief has been one of longing not for what was, but what could have been. When I lost my Mum, I lost the chance to mend a fractured relationship. It felt as though that branch on the tree that was my life has been savagely sawn off, a sharp stump left, nothing more to ever grow from it. I was left with so many unresolved feelings. I missed my Mum, but at the same time, I was haunted by the words, looks, tears and screams that came about in our thousands of battles. I felt so isolated. None of my three siblings had this same combative relationship with Mum, so their grief was entirely different. Everyone spoke lovingly about Mum, about how she was sweet and kind and funny. She was all those things. But I had experienced a meaner, darker side to her that I struggled to make sense of. Some of my friends got it, having had similar relationships with their own mothers, but their mothers were still here. I don’t think they knew what to do with my feelings, left to fester, other than offer assurances that it wasn’t my fault. The only person who could give me the answers I desperately wanted was gone. This reality ate at me for a long time. It was an incredibly isolating experience and rather than being able to work through it (although I tried), I tended to let pessimism take over. My relationship with my Mum was a failure, which for me meant a huge part of my life was a failure. I didn’t see any way of fixing that.
I am telling you all this because I want it to be clear why the following passage in Ford’s book had such an impact on me. She writes:
We consider hatred to be the prerogative of children. Angry words spat at parents are dismissed as being a natural part of youth. But now that I am a mother myself- and, more importantly, a woman with hopes and dreams and a rich interior landscape- I can finally hear what my mother was saying all those decades ago, when she was pulled out of a thought or a memory or a wistful daydream by a child who was beginning to test her boundaries. This is a message sent through time- thirty years of it in fact. A warning, but also a recognition: Motherhood can so often feel like a prison, with rage the only means of escape.
As a child and then a teenager, I thought the battleground of feelings, recriminations and blame were mine alone. But I understand now there were many times when my mother hated me too- moments when all mothers must hate their children- fiercely and passionately and for reasons far more complex than I was able to comprehend. For my mother, this hatred had no outlet or voice. Like so many of us, she was seen as a mother first, a wife second, and a woman last.
Ford reflects on how becoming a mother herself allowed her to see her relationship with her own mother through an entirely different lens. Because here’s the thing- we are sold the idea that motherhood is pure, unbridled love. That our parents, but especially our mothers, should love us unconditionally, no matter how retched our behaviour is. The reason these words were so profound to me is because it was an admission of something that I had recognised in my own Mum during our battles- hatred. I felt it towards her, and she knew it. She would often question me through her tears- why do you hate me so much? But I could have easily asked the same question back to her. Although I knew she loved me, I could also feel that she hated parts of me. As someone with such limited life experience, this felt like a betrayal. I believed the tale I was told that mothers were meant to love their children no matter what. I didn’t understand this at the time, but I now know that when I fought with Mum I was trying to prove to myself that I was unlovable. If I could make the person who was meant to love me the most hate me, then surely that was proof that I was a horrible person who didn’t deserve love. I relished in my success when my point seemed proven. See, I was right. You don’t love me. It allowed me to justify the hatred that I felt towards myself.
It was this aspect of our relationship that I focused on for a long time. I spent thousands of hours thinking, talking and a writing about it. I think I believed that by analysing and deconstructing it enough, I would somehow be able to change it. I had no future to use to fix what was broken, so I felt I had no choice but to try and piece together the past. I did all this because I failed to recognise a fundamental truth- that two things can exists at once. Love and hate don’t have to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. They can coexist. One doesn’t have to cancel out the other.
It would have been easy for me to insert a clichéd spiel here about how time heals all wounds. But anyone who has experienced loss knows that this is bullshit. What time does allow for, however, is perspective. Whilst my mother’s life was ended, I went on living. And in that time I have learned so much more about what it means to be an adult, a woman, and a mother.
I can now make sense of the hatred my Mum most likely felt towards me at times. I was too immature and selfish at the time to understand that parents are people too. People who are dealing with the uncertainties of life, all the disappointments and worry that that can bring, and trying to manage the disappointments and worries of other little people at the same time. My Mum gave her whole life over to us and so there was a part of her that probably did resent us, especially when we seemed to throw it back in her face, as I did very regularly. She stayed in a job she didn’t enjoy, worked tirelessly to keep four children alive, sacrificed her body, put her own needs to the side, and received very little thanks for doing so. I completely understand that now. She isn’t here for me to ask, but if she was, I would like to ask if she was so mad at times because she was sold an idea of motherhood that wasn’t turning out the way she expected it would, because she didn’t realise how much she would have to give up, or how hard it would all be.
When it came to me, her first and most desperately wanted child, she was dealing with a child who was changing into someone she couldn’t recognise, a child whose struggles she didn’t always have the answers to, and one that seemed intent on hating her for her inability to adapt to their needs as quickly as they needed them to. I resented her for this for a long time. I only thought about how her behaviour had impacted me, very rarely reflecting on why she might have behaved the way she did.
I am almost three years older than my Mum was when she had me and I am far from a perfect person. I am finally learning to challenge my pessimistic ways and see the good that is in every situation, even if it is a little difficult to find at times. I can now see how much the good outweighed the bad in the time that my Mum and I had together. She and Dad worked so hard for us to have a good life, and they achieved that. My childhood is filled with endless memories of family holidays, play, laughter, safety, creativity and warmth. I can remember lying on the couch, nattering away to Mum whilst she did the ironing, I’m sure much preferring to watch her daytime soap operas than have a teenager go on and on about her problems. But she always listened. I remember enthusiastically offering to help her with beauty routines - make up application, eye brow plucking, outfit selecting - and her usually taking up the offer. I remember her and baby G cheering me on at my softball matches each week when I was 12. I have complete admiration for the variety of meals she managed to put together for 6 people - the planning, shopping, preparation and clean up that went into that. There is so much good to remember. The other stuff…I am able to put into perspective now.
Ultimately, what I’ve realised is that your relationship with a person doesn’t have to end when their life does. I anguished over what I had lost, and in the process of doing that, neglected to remember what I had. Time, and a lot of self-reflection, has allowed me to see that Mum and I didn’t require a future for good to come; it was already there. We just didn’t understand each other enough at the time for either of us to see it clearly. I get it now. I can forgive and move on. That has changed our relationship in a profound way, perhaps more than it would have had she still been here.
I have no way of knowing what our relationship would look like today if she was still here. I hope that it would be friendly and that we would have been able to understand each other better. I’ll never know. But I do know for certain that she did her best and that she loved me. And that is enough.
I love you Mum.
Lou xx
This brought tears to my eyes Louise. What I love about what you have shared is how you have rightly pointed out that grief is personal and individual, that forgiveness can come if we are willing to open our hearts to it and that even in retrospect, we can continue to learn and understand about ourselves and the relationships we share with those around us (past and present) and most importantly that compassion is a choice and a beautiful one at that xx