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.
I have never seen my mother cry.
I have never seen my mother cry.
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.