I have never seen my mother cry.
I’ve heard her, just once. In the darkness of a hotel room, I lay on the sofa-bed staring at the ceiling listening to her sob, quietly, so as not to disturb either myself, or my father.
I was fully grown. Forty something, and we’d travelled north because I was working on a poetry project that required a re-visit of the seaside town where I’d spent my summer holidays; the shifting sands I’d built my castles upon, an iron-grey North Sea and windswept pier, trailing behind my paternal grandmother, eyes fixed on the back of her calves always, no matter how warm, clad in American Tan tights.
Whitley Bay, on the North East coast of England. A town in its prime when my parents were in theirs. When post-war summers meant it swelled with trainloads of Scots, down for the day. Carousel horses at the Spanish City, ices at the Rendezvous Café and a queue for the train home that snaked all the way back to the beach.
My summers, of course, were later. Were those of the 1970s. Trains replaced by Ford Cortinas, Dodgem cars rather than horses, flares and denim jackets, Karen Carpenter's mournfully beautiful voice on the radio.
And now here we were, back again. Because fully grown or not, my mother had insisted that the drive was too long for me to undertake on my own. Of course, I knew, she just wanted to go home.
We’d made a weekend of it and on the day I heard her cry, my parents had left me to wander the beach, while they drove to a nearby village so my mother could lay flowers on both her fathers’ and her younger brother's grave.
She was sixteen when her father died. Fourteen when she lost her brother.
He’d been eleven. Diagnosed with kidney failure in March, dead by April. There were no dialysis machines back then, nor the hope of a transplant and for nearly all of my life, the details of his illness and subsequent death, had remained scant to barely existent.
My mother simply never talked about it. Even now I only know three facts.
I know that she was called home from school the afternoon he died.
I know that he whispered to her that he didn’t want to die. (My mother has given voice to these words just once, and only to me, although she’s lived with them in her head for over seventy years.)
And I know that her mother, my maternal grandmother, wrote on the back of a grainy back and white photograph, May God forgive me. The photograph was taken on a summer’s day, and only my grandmother is in the frame, smiling as she stands underneath a cherry tree in bloom. My mother remembers it being taken. She remembers because her mother had shouted at her, at all of her children, to Get out of the way, to leave her in peace so she could just have this one photograph. Hence the penciled, May God Forgive Me, because I suppose, my grandmother remembered the moment too.
Go away. Leave me in peace.
Like my grandmother, my mother and I are also guilty of those words. I think every mother in the world is - if not saying them, at least thinking them - and if indeed it’s actually a thing to be guilty of.
Because no one tells us, do they? No one tells us about the constancy of motherhood, the sudden and permanent swerve of perspective that has your own needs and dreams, unceremoniously packed up and dumped in the bottom drawer, under nappies and wet wipes and Book Day! Come as a Character! Volunteers needed for School Fete! Temperatures, rashes, pick-ups and drop-offs, sullen teenagers, life-long worry and laundry … always the laundry.
And barely ten years after losing her brother and her father, with a dysfunctional and often cruel role-model in her own mother, my mother was a mother herself. And until it happened to me, I had no concept of what that means and growing up, I almost lived in fear of her.
The rages that swept through with no warning, the disinterest for all things childish, the sheer un-obtainability of her.
She didn’t play board games, or join family cycling trips or go shopping for girly things with her daughters. (It was decades after, with my own children, that we eventually once persuaded her to join us in Cluedo. She was hopeless, guessing the murderer before any of us and then telling us! She’s a real-crime show addict.)
No, my childhood memories consist of my mother sunbathing in the garden, whilst reading Slimming Magazine, or lying on the settee watching Starsky & Hutch. All so very unlike the family of my best friend, who were always doing things together. I’d watch, nose pressed against the window, as they passed with their massive dog, convinced something terrible was amiss at the heart of my own family.
But my mother had had such a brief window of freedom, you see. A few short years sandwiched between the grief of losing her father and her brother, before the crushing responsibility of motherhood. A freedom bought by a wage earned in the typing pool. Revlon Fire & Ice lipstick, gossip with the girls and after, as many of them as possible squashed into a Ford Popular, whilst Jimmie who worked in production, and was driving them all home, blushed to the tips of his ears.
A few short years to be the first girl in Whitley Bay to wear a bikini, to travel to France and dance on a tabletop, the Pyrenees falling away at her feet, her hair styled to a peroxide blonde crop. To moonlight, as a cinema usherette and see South Pacific, twelve times, to meet the handsome, razor cheek-boned Frank Sinatra lookalike – my father.
A few short years before children and a move South, which in those days may as well have been to the opposite side of the moon.
They had no telephone. She’d push the pram a mile and half just to call her mother. She washed nappies by hand, baked fairy cakes and when my youngest sister was three weeks old, started a shift in the pub. Every evening she’d pass my father on the doorstep, him handing her the car keys, she handing him the baby, all four of us fed, washed and ready for bed. Mum with her lipstick back on.
Much later, I remember her travelling to the US, with the Johnny Mathis Fan club. I remember waiting at the airport on her return. I remember her coming around the corner of arrivals, huge artificial flowers sticking out of her trolley and a tan deeper than anyone else. And I remember what she said when we asked if she’d had fun. I would have had more, if you had all been with me.
And along with those tears overheard decades later, these may have been the only moments of vulnerability I’ve have ever seen my mother display.
But this was how it was. My parents are from a generation that didn’t say I love you, that didn’t ask How are you, that simply got on with the hand they had been dealt.
And the hand my mother had been dealt was poor by any standards. Of the brothers left, one was an alcoholic, the other estranged. Her own mother had been troubled, drinking herself too, into an early grave.
So lately I have started to say it to her. I love You. I’m not sure why. Maybe, at one time, I thought it was needed. But it always felt a little stilted and anyway I've changed my mind - about it being needed. She knows. I know. That's enough.
My children however say it breezily. And I say it breezily back to them. And, most wonderful of all, my mother says it to them as free and unencumbered as a child herself. I love you grandma, I love you too.
And this is the point.
With the ruined, almost non-existent example that she had, my mother forged her own pattern of motherhood, through commitment and selflessness. God knows it wasn't perfect. But it was repaired, so much so that I've been able to pass it onto my children in better shape than it ever was.
And now, on this Mother’s Day, she is 85. She still never leaves the house without a lick of lipstick. She's still finding pockets of fun, buying rubber eggs and tossing them over her shoulder to my astonished, giggly, 11-year-old.
The romantic poet Shelley once wrote, 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' And as much as I love and believe in the power of poetry, I don't think Shelley's right. I think mothers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And I think they become so just by turning up and muddling through, love and only love being their North Star.
So, thank you mum
And all mums who are tired and bored and lonely, and maybe a little sad and maybe a little regretful.
Happy Mother's Day.
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