A MOTHER, WITHOUT THE MOTHERING

When my mother died, I felt nothing. She was 62. A short life, lived hard, cancer taking her well before old age did.

I worried I was heartless. 

Inside I was a white canvas, a hollow devoid of feeling. Where there should have been a riot of grief and emotion, there was only blankness.

I wanted to call this hollow a calmness built on the back of wisdom – I’d spent 40 years learning to live with and love a mother wrecked by alcohol and drug addiction. 

But something feels wrong with feeling nothing. 

People, who know me and know her, murmured their condolences. 

“I’m not sad,” I said and I’m sure I meant it. 

“No matter what, she’s still your mother,” they’d reply. 

It’s a line I got stuck on. Because she is, she was my mother, without the mothering.

I visited her three weeks before she died. The throat cancer was a lump the size of a golf ball sticking out from the side of her neck. After a biopsy it was covered by a bandage which did nothing to make it less visible. I had a hard time not staring at it.

Her frame, always small, had shrunk to half its size. She was bird-like and frail and the size of a child under the hospital blanket. Her face was drawn thin and the haggardness was there in deep lines, telling me what I already knew about her life.

There had always been a hardness to her face which I had often mistaken for something bordering on meanness.  When I was a little girl I saw that meanness in her eyes and was afraid of it. It took me years to realise that what I was looking at was likely only her own fears and insecurities.

She had every right to those fears and insecurities. Her own childhood was one which hurt to hear. I garnered only snippets here and there over the years.

She was the eldest of six children living poor in a small country town. Her own father drank too much and while he worked hard as a labourer, he was also a hard man. My mother was sexually abused at a young age, did poorly at school and ended up married young to the wrong man with two children by the age of 19.

She went on to have five children to three different men. My twin brother and I were the two she kept by her side as she journeyed through a life of addiction and dysfunction.

She told us we were the lucky ones not to be given away. In her darker moments she threatened to abandon us to foster care. We sometimes silently wished yes – thinking, there has got to be better than this. Then in some twisted logic, we were terribly grateful when she chose to keep us and stay on as mother.  Better the devil you know.

She was never physically abusive yet her neglect stands out as violent as any visible scar.

She wasn’t one to share. I had the briefest glimpses into her past, enough to give me understanding about why she became the person she was and the mother she wasn’t.

Her cancer spread quickly and she died within weeks. At her funeral the celebrant talked up a good life. Really? I felt for the celebrant. She had little to work with.

How to honour the life of a woman who gave so little of herself, with those little bits mostly vague or venom. I couldn’t help the celebrant write any better eulogy because I was stuck myself.

How can death be peaceful when peace was never made? Did I miss the miracle of a deathbed confession, some cleansing to free her spirit to move on to a better place? No, I don’t think that happened. I don’t know where she’s gone.

At her funeral, my twin said it best when he chose to speak, not about our mother at all.  He spoke to the grandchildren instead. He told them to make good choices in the big things and especially in the small things. 

Strangers may remember you for the glorious act or the huge achievement. However, what really counts to those you love and surround yourself with every day is the small kind things you do – every day.

My mother reaped the consequences of a life lived hard. It was never my job to make her into something different from what she was.  Perhaps she was capable of change but the insidious nature of addiction, to alcohol, to drugs, to men, stole her willingness.

Ours was a relationship with fragile layers, complicated and at times overwhelming in its emotional dysfunction. Those intense troughs of my early years when my mother wasn’t there or didn’t care, drove me to the edge of sanity. 

While we never stepped over that cliff, I know how violence happens.  

I grew up frustrated and sometimes desperate. My saving grace was an inexplicable core of hope and belief that things would get better.

The time I spent at her hospital bedside was strained and shallow. I’d spent our life together pretending nothing was wrong. I’d spent our time apart dwelling on everything that was wrong. 

Why did I think it was going to be different at the end?

In those last minutes together, I made my own peace with her by acting kind. I made ordinary conversation about the things I knew she was interested in, her plants, her dog. I avoided the topics we should have, if we could have, resolved many years earlier.

As I walked out of her hospital room, I told her I loved her. I’m not sure I meant it. Despite the chasm of things left unsaid churning inside, my shallow words would have brought her some kind of peace and I know, despite the acting, I did good.

That empty void I felt after her death was disturbing but also welcome. 

After all, if I’m not burying things from the past, then perhaps the hollow wasn’t heartlessness, but a canvas made blank by some anaesthetic salve I’m going to choose to call forgiveness and healing.