During one of my regular Sunday phone calls, a few years before she died, my mother bemoaned her rapidly fading grasp on reality. “I know I was never very bright,” she laughed, but with a slightly sarcastic edge to her voice. “Still, you’d think the good Lord would see fit to leave me a few brain cells.” She painstakingly wrote down, in her child-like hand, the things she felt she had to remember, and then spent hours trying to find the scraps of paper on which they were scribbled. After she died, some of them were found, tucked into drawers and books.
“Tell Anne about Auntie May,” was one of them. Auntie May had died twenty years before and my sister Anne had been living in Sweden since the 1960s. “Get cigarettes from Jim Byrne,” said another. He was the greengrocer in the Dublin suburb where we grew up. He, too, had long been dead, and my mother had not smoked for decades.
It was always understood between us that I was her least favourite child, and I returned the favour with knobs on. In a community where appearances counted for everything, I got great pleasure from driving her crazy by scandalizing the neighbours. We rarely spoke to each other for twenty years after I grew up and left home, and it wasn’t until I became a mother myself, that I began to understand her. I’m not sure she ever learned to understand me; but she was such a terrific grandmother, I eventually came to love the woman reflected in my son’s eyes.
She’d had a harsh childhood. Although my grandfather was an alcoholic, he was a gentle and loving man, not at all the drunken father of legend. My grandmother was another matter. Embittered by her husband’s alcoholism, which caused him to lose his business and end up as a jobbing mechanic, she was a ruthless taskmaster to their five children, flogging them for every transgression, however minor. And, in one of those Moebius loops of heredity, my mother was her least favourite child. Mainly to get away from her mother’s anger, she married an army officer from the city. But she was to find herself a prisoner still, tied down by the babies who came along all too soon after the wedding, and the narrow social constraints of army life. Like her father before her, she developed a fondness for drink, as a means of coping.
I flew back to Ireland to see her when she was dying. Her mind was completely gone, and the morphine was no match for the cancer that was killing her. I sat by her hospital bed for a week, burying myself in the Irish Times crossword, while she carried on an intermittent and garbled conversation with someone she could see standing behind my chair. I had tried to talk to her at first, but gave up when I realised that she had no idea who I was, or why I was there.
Before leaving for the airport to fly home to Canada, I went to see her for the last time. As I bent to kiss her goodbye, she opened her eyes very wide, smiled beatifically, and said “I know who you are! Safe home, love.” Then she closed her eyes and slipped into sleep. My husband came to meet me when I landed in Toronto. He told me she had died while I was flying over the Atlantic, safely on my way home.
Oh Tessa!
So poignant, so beautifully written! How we all desperately want to be loved by those that brung us. We gain our strength when we realize we can only learn to love ourselves. It took me years and years to let go of my father saying to me one time that he loved his younger daughter, my sister, best as she had the attributes our dead mother had.
{{{Hugs}}}
XO
WWW
Thanks, Mary. You put it so well, this wanting to be loved. I don’t know if it was the times we lived in, or my parents were particularly restrained, but neither of them ever said “I love you” to any of us. It was just not in their makeup to do so. Which damaged them as much as it damaged me and my siblings.
That was beautifully written.
My brother was always my mother’s favorite; I guess as the only son out of the four of us, that could be expected. My sisters and I never had a problem with it growing up; it wasn’t until we were grown that the real disparity in how she treated us began.
Mom and I weren’t on good terms when she died and it’s been one of the hardest things for me to come to grips with the fact that it doesn’t matter if she’d approve of me or my life now – I do, and that’s all that matters.
I will be eternally grateful that she and I buried our differences. They were still always there, but we managed to skate over them, usually. But, to the day she died, she retained the ability to make me see everything through a red mist with just one careless word. Philip Larkin had it right: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
Oh Tessa…I knew some of this already, but your final paragraph just grabbed me by the throat…as I am sure it must have for you at the time…As independent as we all proclaim to be, we are all constantly seeking love and approval from ourselves and others…but especially from our mothers…beautifully rendered.
Thank you, Marylou. Birthday and Mother’s Day on the same day—it does a number on you!
That was beautifully written. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you, Erin. And thanks for coming by.
I’m going to jump on the wagon and say also; beautifully written. How wonderful that she remembered you at the last. I know how much that meant. During Lucy’s illness, I was (for her) a lot of people. It was always a relief and a joy when she recognized me as ME.
Hugs!
You had a mother who was beyond pearls, SMB. I envy you, especially for the fact that, after she died, you had no missed opportunities to regret, as I do. Hugs!
What extraordinary closure from a woman who had otherwise lost her wits by then. I’m sure that sentence alone made your trip worthwhile, and was more valued by you for being said to you, rather than any of your siblings.
Tragic how people can become imprisoned by old patterns, almost inherited like that. Thank goodness you had the intelligence to realise it was nothing personal really, though I’m sure you had your moments of hurt and anger when younger.
I hae never been close to my parents but accept that’s because of who they are and when I think about it, neither of them were close to their parents either. It really doesn’t traumatise me though and seems more of an issue for my mother.
I know exactly what you mean about a lack of closeness. You seem quite sanguine about it, Laura, but you have to admit that it’s not natural that, the very first time in my life that I heard the words “I love you” they came from some guy who was trying to get me into bed at the time!
Beautiful. Hugs from another non-favourite. As J Rivers said there never was a female comic who was a pretty girl – I reckon there isn’t a female writer out there who was the ‘favourite’ x
You’re right! Favourites live in a rarefied atmosphere that needs no writing out!
I believe it’s a cruel twist of fate to finally come to understand our Mother’s demons only after we’ve spent a lifetime being scarred by their actions. But aren’t you thankful it made you a totally different kind of mother to your own? I know I am and sometimes I remember to silently give her credit for doing something right.
You nailed that one right on the head, MLS. Everything I am as a mother is the opposite of what I learned from my own mother.
Just lovely, Tessa, and so haunting.
Thank you, Ruth. Unlike you, I did not experience the disintegration of her mind at first hand. I cannot begin to imagine how hard it is for you, with your father.