Ain’t no river wide enough, baby
Every Mother’s Day, the Instagram grid transforms into a love letter to the women who’ve given us all life. Beloved matriarchs who hold a family together. Powerhouse single mothers who’ve brought up an entire brood on one wage. Step-mums that’ve welcomed another woman’s children as their own. The mums that double as best friends, cheerleaders, and life navigators. This is a love letter to the in-between — a candle to the grey area.
This Mother’s Day, my mum and I weren’t speaking. We still aren’t. This isn’t the first time, and it probably won’t be the last. The time before, it was me who said I won’t continue to commit myself to this cycle of having my hopes dashed when every time we go to meet one another, the person we were expecting isn’t there. Almost a lifetime of screaming phone calls, and then silence. This time it was her decision, a single text that I’ve still not replied to.
Growing up is calling the doctor yourself and remembering to check the pockets of your jeans before you do the laundry. It’s shedding childhood simplicity and accepting you’ll be wrong a lot of the time — and that when those days dawn, there won’t always be someone on your side to pick up the pieces. In adulthood, your role as a child means recognising that your parents are human. They’re not the omniscient, invincible beings you presumed them to be back when you asked what does God look like and why do people die, and they hauled you out of the road and put you on their shoulders. They’re fallible and messy. You can hurt their feelings. They’ll hurt yours.
At the age of around nine or ten, I went through a phase of having intense nightmares, sleepwalking, and violently spewing for hours. Everyone refers to it as my “Exorcist era.” Mum took me to the doctor’s about the vivid nightmares and the sleepwalking, and they told her not to wake me from my slumber. So she put my little brother’s toddler gate on the stairs, and when I vaulted it and lay crumpled on the landing — my body awake but my mind still sleeping — she picked me up and carried me back to bed. She taught me to vomit over the side of my top bunk because I couldn’t get down the ladder fast enough and she could clean the laminate floor more easily than the walls and my bedding. When I came into her room in the middle of the night, soaked with sweat and shaking from pure terror about something made-up that I couldn’t remember, she rearranged the bed so that I could climb in-between. Days off work and school followed, watching daytime television together while mum patiently trialled me with dry toast and water that I’d inevitably reproduce.
As a teenager, my recklessness and stupidity brought us both to A&E — me out of my mind after being carted off from a party in an ambulance, mum holding my hair back while I decorated the linoleum with those carrot-like pieces that’re somehow always present in puke. Dad arrived and hit the roof, and mum covered me instinctively, ordering him to leave. He did as he was told. Sometimes I can sense her visceral need to claim me as her own — a lioness and her cub fumbling to find shade in the desert — she says it’s me and you against the world, and I feel her teeth at the scruff of my neck. Now, whenever I need her, I’m spewing my guts up.
Mum used to tell us parenting isn’t straightforward and no one gives you a rule book at the beginning, just all the responsibility and none of the tools. But we were just kids, and in the next breath she told us we arrived when she was too young and she should’ve been a doctor. Sometimes, I look at my friends’ parents and wonder where they found the manual for loving their children.
A few years ago, when things were good again, mum took me out for tea and cocktails and got the bill for a change, pulling me close to her and brushing her fingers through my hair — somehow effortlessly making me feel like a tiny child that could be taken care of all over again. So I moved back in and wrote that she was right about me acquiring red wine eventually, and right about a lot of other things too. Then I moved out again and deleted the second part.
I have this theory that if you crawl through a window into someone’s life and bear witness to all their quiet complexities — the things they do when no one else is around that aren’t particularly cute or attractive but in this private, stolen context are somehow adorable – you won’t be able to help falling a little bit in love with them. I do this on public transport sometimes — a man letting tomato juice from a hurried sandwich fall onto the pages of his book as he studies a paragraph; a woman unapologetically bobbing her head to whatever’s pulsing through her headphones. You can do it in the Aldi queue when the person ahead of you is doing their best to feign adulthood with their four-item shop: red wine Greek olives assorted nuts porridge oats.
Sometimes, I think of my mum like this. Last year when she asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said a mustard shade beret and on Christmas Day, I opened a mustard scarf, and she said it’s meant to be a pair and the beret is coming and I’m chasing it up. Something about the hat and the scarf set painfully endears her to me out of the blue, and I end up crying silently in a public place – the opposite of resurrecting a laugh from an old funny memory.