Mothering

Realising that you were not loved by your mother when you were a child is physically painful. I am sore. I am compressed. A dense, acrid liquid has invaded my thoracic cavity. Unset cement is pouring into and filling the spaces around my heart and stomach. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to breathe now? No room for ribs to expand when the cement is setting, the realisation getting heavier, breath shorter, the world shifting, castles crumbling. 

It amazes me that people can’t see it on my face. That they can’t smell the vile mortar. That my chest doesn’t crack open, and little black rocks don’t shoot out like shrapnel, causing a scene. Her mother didn’t love her, someone will explain. No, I just go about my day. I forget for a minute and I speak to someone at the Nespresso machine. They smile at me, but then I remember oh yeah my mother didn’t love me, and now I can’t hear what they’re saying anymore, and my voice box sinks into the well between my shoulder blades, but I must be saying something too, because they are nodding, and we are saying goodbye. 

I know! I will go to the emergency room and say Help me please, I think I am having a slow-motion heart attack. All the white coats within earshot will glance at each other, all in her head, then ‘ok, let’s take a look in there, just to be safe’. But the scan will be clear, the doctor unequivocal. No heart attack, no cement, big old empty spaces, right where they should be, 58bpm, tip-top guts. ‘Invisible intercostal discomfort,’ he will declare. Nothing to worry about. Two ibuprofen and so on. Ok, I will say. But I might die.

My mother did not love me when I was a child. This is neither exaggeration nor misunderstanding. It is fact. 

‘But of course she loved you, deep down I’m sure she did’

‘Maybe she just didn’t know how to show it’

‘Impossible. A mother’s love for her child is the surest thing in the universe, an animal instinct, an unstoppable force of nature’

Don’t say that saccharine shit to me. Put down the Disney and all together now, repeat after me… some mothers don’t love their children. It is a fact that some mothers don’t love their children. I am not a freak and some mothers don’t love their children.

**

The most I can manage, the only edit I am willing to concede, is modal; my mother couldn’t love me when I was a child. 

Therese was the youngest of eleven surviving children. By the time she came along, her eldest brother was a grown man of twenty-five. The cold farmhouse she was born into was home to a strange continuum of persons; a handful of serious men and women at the top, then a shot of teenagers who all looked the same to her, next a couple of young boys and a set of girl twins who were always just there, not doing much, and finally herself, on the bottom. When she looked up the continuum, she could see no separate generations: the younger lot were all so close in age they seemed to blend into one another, and the older ones were already all ancient in her eyes, in the way that everyone over sixteen is old to a child. Unsurprising then that, for the first few years of her life, Therese wasn’t sure which ones were the Mother and the Father. It was probably one of the older ones. But she couldn’t be certain. Those older ones weren’t around much after all, they were always out in the fields, or in the yard with the animals. And when they were at home, they didn’t seem to have much interest in her. 

When she was small, it was the middle of the continuum that tended to her basic needs. They fed and washed her, on occasion made her laugh, wondered where she was when they hadn’t seen her for a while. 

Later of course, she knew which ones were the Mother and the Father. But ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ were never more than labels; there were too many people, with too much to do, too many names to remember, even. And all of them, from the eldest to the youngest, were too completely immersed in the business of survival to be worrying about roles. Who to change a nappy? Whoever was there. Which one to cook dinner? Whoever was tall enough to see over the top of the range. Who to put the child to bed? Shur she’s old enough now to do it herself, isn’t she?

Therese didn’t cry like a child until she was a teenager, for that was when her brothers and sisters started to emigrate to England. One after the other, and as soon as they could, they fled the family home for the brighter horizons of minimum-wage jobs in Birmingham or Derby. Therese was bereft. The only hugs, jokes and nurturing she had ever known were off on the boat. She could not say that any of them had raised her, but those brothers and sisters had come the closest. She wept for weeks each time one departed, her slight frame buckling under the grief. 

When Therese became a woman and found herself with two children of her own to raise, she was adrift. She had absolutely no blueprint for child-rearing and there was no flock of siblings to help her drag them up. It was just her and two small people and she had no fucking clue what she was doing. On top of that, she was filled with anger; her husband was useless, her feet were sore, the world owed her something, she stayed up half the night doing housework, she hated waitressing, the world owed her more, her children wouldn’t sit still, they were always making a mess, they had ruined her body, they preferred their father, she would never go to art school and the world owed her so much more, the car wouldn’t start, it never stopped raining, the cat under her feet again, no time for fun, and so, so alone.

How could my mother love me when I was a child?

**

We are not born knowing how to mother. 

When things go right, it is nurtured into us. We are brought up by healthy, unstressed, emotionally-stable parents. They smile at us, hold our eye contact, ask us how we are, make mistakes and own up to them, show us the way and never leave. Our synapses fire, hormones secrete, we feel good, so safe, certain of our place in the world. On top of all that, we have inherited the blueprint and one day will be able to love our own children. Divinity in full flow, the circle of life, Disney abounds, the surest thing in the universe, that animal instinct, an unstoppable force of nature.

But it does not always go as mother nature intended. Many, many things can get in the way. And when they do, the circle is broken, the blueprint lost, and an entirely different cycle is perpetuated. An unsure child becomes an unhappy mother who has an unhappy child who becomes an angry mother, and so on and so on until someone comes along who says ‘enough is enough! It ends with me’. 

**

Love has to be more than a feeling. If it only exists deep down inside, it is worth exactly nothing. Love must be an answer to a cry, it must not look away. Love is showing it. There is no love in the things we sweep under the carpet. Love is in saying yes, or no, but saying something for God’s sake. There is no could or couldn’t in love, only did. Love is in coming home, staying, singing, holding. Love is always, always doing something. There are no adjectives worthy of love. Love is in the verbs.

**

Katie flapped out of the sea, sprinted up the beach and launched herself into a towel, draped over the arms of her Mother, who was stood there waiting, just for her, her smile saying

My love, my girleen. Let me remember how it feels to hold you like this, forever.

Still dripping, shivering, Katie climbed into the passenger seat and the Mother fastened the seatbelt across her. Katie was only four, she should be in the carseat in the back, but the Mother wanted her girl near her that day. She turned the radio up, cranked the heater, and took off with the sun shining in through the rear window, a backdrop painted just for them.

Is Pop home from work?

Yes, my love.

And can we have hake for dinner again?

Yes, my love.

They couldn’t really afford hake again, she knew. But today was not a day for saving the pennies. Not a day for nos. Today was a day for swimming and holding and yeses and hake.

**

I hope, as always, that you have found something true for yourself in what you have read here.

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash