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.
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.
This is very beautiful, jo. I couldn’t bring myself to read it yesterday - it’s always a turbulent day, Mother’s Day, for so many people. But today I gave myself space and it’s really worth the read. Solidarity. And love. x
Oh no! I made both you and Bex cry with my post. I hope it was clear that despite having had years where I’ve been upset by all the Mother’s Day crap I am now being able to pivot to a place where I can feel grateful to ALL the people in my life who support me, and have made me me. I love our tiny little family and wouldn’t wish for any different, and I love being parented by you and the years we had with mum. It’s wild how the constant messaging surrounding parenthood and motherhood makes us feel abs I now only want to rally against that and show other ways of being in a family that, like ours, are so so so so happy, and partly that happiness has been born out of our unhappiness… if that makes sense? Love you xxx