My mother died, of suicide, on the 18th March 2016. This post was written during the days before her funeral.
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A week after my mother died, I read an article by the single, career-focused, forty-something daughter of a regretful housewife, exploring the generational ebb and flow of female priorities and choices. For these two women, the dichotomy was clear: family versus career - cultural expectations as they entered adulthood leading each woman down a different path.
This is far from my own experience, but I am keenly aware that my life has not paralleled my mother's. She was the first in her family to go to university; I am studying for my BSc in my thirties. I was born - the first of four - to a pair of married, mortgaged 27 year olds; I gave birth to my only child in my chaotic teens. So, while I certainly found the article enjoyable and thought-provoking, it did not resonate with me in the same way it surely would have with many of my generation.
What has stayed with me though, looping through my mind in the days since, are the words of Gloria Steinem (from this recording of Desert Island Discs), quoted by the author: “I suspect, like many women, I'm living the unlived life of my mother”.
The unlived life of my mother. My mother's unlived life, left behind, unwanted. Not figuratively, but literally. The life that my mother elected, irreversibly, to cease to live.
I find myself, now, drowning in my mother's unlived life. It hangs in the air of her home, syrup-thick, filling the space where she is not. I open the wardrobe of clothes she will never wear again, and more spills out, drenching me in spent possibilities and tears. I am cooking in her kitchen, sleeping in her bed. I am running her errands, fulfilling her responsibilities. Hers, not mine. Although inheritance and circumstance dictates that they now are. I open my eyes in the morning to her favourite photograph of my recently dead father. Am I crying her tears for him, or are they mine?
The boundaries are blurring.
But can I live her life, and at the same time my own?
This is an amazingly resonant piece of writing for me. I had to leave my mother for 12 years to separate myself from her, i didn't know if my emotions were hers or mine. i'm now reconnected with her and sometimes i feel myself drowning, being sucked back into that. but i am now myself too. I am working on the sexual abuse by my grandfather, her father who also abused her as well as other female members of the family. my feelings about men, are they truly all my feelings or are some of them hers. How indoctrinated am I of her disappointments, her pain, her anger, her vision. I'm a lot more separate than I was but the pain links us together. the same person who abused us and then the secondary neglect and abuse from her and my father neither could show true compassion and love for us children. I feel so sorry for your loss and the boundary confusion. And you said the Gloria Steinem quote and that resonated. my mother didn't want children or a husband, she wanted to work on a farm outdoors be her own woman in that way, but she kept running away from home. she married my dad at 17 to escape her father. it was 1958. I'm unable to have relationships, I have become an artist, I am ill, I have had no children in this sense I am free. am I living my mothers life too. I have a relationship with her but she isn't a cuddly person, i'm less angry and i can see she was a victim of her own circumstances in society at the time as well as her father.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your comment.
ReplyDeleteYou touched on something that is very current for me: now that my mother is gone, I need to unpick all the thoughts, beliefs, fears of hers that became woven into me over the years. And then what will be left? I just wish I had had the strength to do it while she was still alive!
Maybe five years ago, I had to distance myself from her for a few months. I had become very aware of repeating patterns in my grandmother, in her, and in myself - I wanted to try to break the cycle. And I'm so glad that I don't have a daughter (I have one son), but maybe if I did, that relationship could provide a lot of healing? It would be a big risk, and I don't think I'll ever get to find out.
I also blog about sexual violence, so (if it's not too tacky to suggest it?!) here's the link, if you're interested: notmysecrets.blogspot.com