Motherhood

My mother died this year, but we still go for walks together, as we did for many years, over the fields of the farm, to the beach and back again for tea. I imagine her at my shoulder. We have the same conversations we had, over and over, the kids and the weather and what to have for tea and the latest annoying thing my father might have done.

My mother and I were close. For many years, I lived next door and my kids ran across whenever they wanted. She told me that she would never babysit. She never had to. The kids ran constantly in and out of her house, for fresh cookies and apples for school lunches, for tea and long conversations and for the toys that their mother wouldn't buy but grandma would.

But these days, when I think about her, I wonder how well I knew her. She was often sad, often depressed. Her marriage was difficult and she and my father struggled with money issues their whole lives. She had left school at 12 to work and help her own mother. As a young, single parent wanna-be writer with a murky future, I had my own depression to deal with. Rather than long heart-to-heart talks, my mother and I tried both to comfort each other and to protect each other. Sometimes we succeeded.

Her life got smaller

My mother was the apple pie and cookies and kindness mother and grandmother, always there in the kitchen, cooking or cleaning. She rarely sat down, except after dinner. She was often in pain. She had a bad heart and arthritic hands and poor circulation in her legs but rarely complained. And she sang. She had trained as an opera singer in the one brief period of freedom she had when she lived in Vancouver, worked during the war in an aircraft factory, had her own money, and took singing lessons. But the war ended, she ran out of money, went home and married my father. Her children, her family, her house, her family, were her life. As she grew older, the boundaries of her life shrank, so that finally, it became a struggle for her to even leave her house and go outside for a walk.

And yet, she had an intense inner life that I rarely had access to. I know this because she took a couple of writing courses with me at the local community hall. The few poems she wrote were emotional and beautiful, but she never wrote any more after the class finished. She came from a generation that had been taught to keep their troubles and their feelings to themselves. She was sadly embarrassed by the beauty and emotional intensity of her own work.

My children and I are also close; we phone and talk and Facebook each other. I have four children and four grandchildren as well, and being with my grandchildren is the closest thing to pure unsullied joy I have ever experienced.

In addition, my daughter, Dorothy Woodend, and I are both writers and so we have access to stories and thoughts about each other's lives that perhaps other mother-daughter combos might not have. And yet, I wonder still, how well I knew my mother and how well my children really know me?

How well can you ever know your mother? Because no matter how mixed your feelings might be about her, she is the person that you are and will always be part of; the person whose body produced you and whose voice, whose DNA, whose blood, will always influence you. Can you ever really see your mother when she lives inside you? No matter how close or distanced you might be, she is more than a person; she is this iconic image as well. She is your deep need, your love, your sorrow, your solace, your reaction, and your history.

The night she died

Although I have 'lost' my mother, in fact she lives inside me, her voice, her stories, her songs, the memories of 61 years of my life with her. Love is almost too anemic a word to describe the tangled complexity that binds mothers and their children. When my children were younger, and even today, I felt -- and feel, that they are very much still part of me, as much as my arm or leg, so that any harm to them was and is harm to me. After they were born, I knew that there was nothing I wouldn't do to keep them safe and happy. And yet I was often an inattentive, bored, restless, irritable mother. I wanted to write and read and go to school and so I dragged them along with me and somehow we survived each other and they brought me up and taught me responsibility.

And now at 61, I know with some terrible finality, the two things I can't protect or save them from; my death and their own.

I sat beside my mother the night she died; I held her hand and talked to her. I was, in an odd way, relieved by her death. She was 87 and had been in a care home for six years. After she died, my brother and his wife and I cleaned the house that had been her house, the house my father had built for her, had built out of love for her. We talked about how we could bring her home at last. We would make her a memorial garden. We re-told the stories she had taught us, and sang her favourite songs and we celebrated the gifts and the lives she had given us.

Every day, when I listen to the news, I think of all the mothers, all over the world, holding their children, trying to keep them safe, warm, fed, loved, not just human mothers but all those non-human mothers as well. I wish I could do more to keep them all safe.

Happy mother's day to all mothers, and to all their children.