I don't know what it is to have a mother

I never want to think about Mother’s Day.

And I didn’t want to again today.

Not this grey cold day where I’ve stayed alone at home because I can’t face the freezing wind.

And then a post came through from my amazingly gifted daughter Katie

Writing about her mum, the love of my life.

And about me and about my other amazingly gifted daughter Rebecca.

Katie's post

And she writes so beautifully, and I found myself crying, crying so bitterly again at the loss of my mother.

And I think of Susie, and losing her, and of how both our parents did their best

But never managed to be altogether what we needed.

And I think we both tried to heal from that by being mother and father to our children and loving them as best we could.

I am so proud of them.

And it gave me the courage, somehow, to face the wind.

And when I got back 

This, dear friends, is what I write to you:

I don’t know what it is to have a mother

I must have once.

Look, there she is, loving, happy,

With a little boy they say was me.

But I don’t know him,

And I can’t find her.

I don’t know how many realms of pain

I’d need to cross

To somehow find her again.

Perhaps this is the pain locked in my ankles now

The pain that makes it hard to walk forwards into the future

The first thing I ever wrote was about the pain of losing her:

“I've heard it said that if you cut off someone's hand 

The sense goes numb. 

They feel nothing. Not at first. 

They sit & stare at the object on the ground

& think: Is that a hand? Did it belong to me? 

Certain things I just don't understand.

Why light still shines in the sky

Or grass grows or birds still sing in the tree 

Why life goes on. 

Why won't it stop

Why won't it stop & attend to me?

But the world still turns. 

I try to understand 

What I've been told & I try to believe

The ground is still supporting me.

Somehow these things seem contradictory. 

And a voice says: Its true. Its happening. 

Its happening to you. Not a cruel voice, 

Just cold. Indifferent as the sea.”

That’s me using it, about 20 years later, in my INES.

In the pressure of the moment it must have risen to the surface of my memory.

I had to only a few days to write that play.

This was a moment when Ines has just been told her children have been murdered.

So I used the experience of a child who had just lost their mother to describe a mother who had just lost her child.

I could use anything those days.

Perhaps she taught me that.

Later still, when it came to EVE, I wrote it about it more directly:

“The room’s so hot.

The boy’s dad is looking so sad 

Sitting in an armchair by a roaring fire

The boy thinks: What have I done wrong? 

And in his hand he has a letter from his mum. 

It says: Show you’re pleased to see daddy

So he tries. The boy tries to give his dad a little smile .B

ut his dad does not smile back

They sit the boy down far too close to the fire

And the dad says: 

Mummy’s been ill. Mummy’s been so very ill 

So very very ill that she’s died.

And the boy thinks that’s impossible I only saw her yesterday.

The boy is 12 years old

His mum had come down to visit him at school as a special treat

And it was all so lovely

But there’s a kind of darkness in the father’s eye 

And the boy knows that this is happening

Only he can’t feel it somehow, as if it’s happening to someone else 

Only it’s happening to him.

They go out for a walk. It’s so cold. They have a cream tea

And then they go back to the school

with its dormitories named after famous generals 

and the father leaves his son there

in Montgomery.

And it’s me. It’s my dad. My mum. Me.

And I know now

when the really bad things happen you have to deal with them alone.”

I’m struck by the fact that there I could not write in the first person.

I could not write “I”.

The only thing I could own was the sense of abandonment at the end…

Looking around all this I found another poem I’d forgotten.

In 2020, during lockdown, I was involved in a beautiful collaboration with Skye Reynolds, the dancer.

When we couldn’t meet, each day I’d film myself dancing for 5 minutes and send it her.

And she’d send me a poem that she wrote.

It was lovely the work we did together.

At some point I was able to visit her, I guess, or perhaps I only dreamt I could.

Any how, I wrote this. To her, and mothers everywhere

I DREAM OF MY MOTHER

I walk out of  Skye’s door.

My body feels good. I’ve been inhabiting it.

I walk down the worn steps to go home.

I think of all the people walking down these stairs

All the people living behind these doors.

I pause on the landing thinking of all the stories

Stories of the past the present and the future

The stories I cannot unlock

And I have the strangest feeling 

As if the door in front of me is open.

Not open with a door handle, not even solid,

Kind of misty, it’s as if I can walk through it

As if I don’t need it to open

As if I can just walk through

And so I do walk through

And there’s my mum

In her sewing room beside the coal fire

So incredibly close and so impossibly gone

And my heart leaps in my chest and I look at her

fifty eight years since I last saw her

She hasn’t got older, it seems, but she has changed

In the sense that she’s more herself, somehow,

Impossibly solid and real

She calls me darling and I weep

You remember when I was so worried about you because you weren’t making friends

And i say yes

I thought you might have to go to dancing classes, do you remember/

And i say yes

And she says You’re dancing now

And i say yes

And she says You’re not lonely any more

And i say no

And we look at each other in silence for a while

Because words don’t matter

And from upstairs come the sound of the saxophone

Daddy disapproves

She says, smiling,

Disapproves of the saxophone,

But I don’t see him any more.

And i say, do you miss him?

And she says no.

You see, I’m dancing too.

And she lifts up her arms like a ballerina

And is gone.

26TH MAY 2020

Thank you, as ever, for reading. I so sppreciate you being here.