My mother

This is sort of a response to midgetwangler's post about her parents aging. I can so understand the feeling of fear of the parental role reversing. My husband has felt quite responsible for his parents since he was young - I think he started his first job at the age of about 13, bought his mother the electric shower, gas oven etc. whereas I come for an overpriviledged, middle class background which equipped me for nothing but high minded conversation, I think.

My mother died almost 5 years ago, on the 28th of June. The short version of the story is that she got sick a week or so before my wedding, and died a week later, not having been able to attend. It was a horrible, fraught, bewildering, agonising time. She had had breast cancer for 8 years, but being a homoeopath refused to go to hospital with it, and in fairness had 8 years of good, pretty normal health. Few people knew about this, and I followed her wishes and sort of left her to it. She had no interest in being a cancer patient, in being treated as such by family, friends or above all, doctors. She had no idea she would get so sick, so fast, in fact I think she thought her health was improving. I'm sure it's hard for a lot of people to understand, and certainly many have judged her for the way she managed her illness, but she felt, and I think it's true, that if she had gone to hospital she would have been dead three months after getting a proper diagnosis - a combination of fear of the diagnosis itself and of the way she would have been treated. I'm not sure she would have changed that if she could do it all over again.

We had a very close relationship, and after my father started seeing someone else when I was 15, she had few people to lean on. In my first year of college, after I'd moved out, he decided he wanted her to leave, and she moved to another house, in deep shock and grief the whole thing. her life changed a lot, and she didn't really know how to handle it.



I gave her a lot of support, though not really enough, and she in turn was my confident, Friend, homoeopath. She was really my go-to person.

She knew a huge amount about a huge amount of things and had an analytical and searching mind. In many ways she was better at being cerebral than emotional, which could be difficult a times. But we talked almost every day. She spoiled me too, bought me lots of things, treated me on my birthday, helped me out if I needed a little extra money. She was enormously generous, and thoughtful.

A year or so ago, my then vice principal got a call from his own mother saying she was in Aldi and they had that wine he liked, and would he like a case. That reminded me so much of my own mother! I miss being thought of, being in someones mind as special, being considered. I so miss having someone really care about me on my birthday and make an effort to make me happy.

I found it very hard to come to terms with the idea of having a baby without my mother there in her emotional capacity as mother, and as my homoeopath. And yet I somehow managed to get pregnant two months after she had died (yes, why not run the entire gamut of human stressful experience in a couple months: buy a house, get married, lose a parent and get pregnant, all over the course of one summer, why stretch it out?).

It was such a horrible, hard time, and after my daughter was born I felt my grief even more acutely. I have a little wooden hairbrush my mother bought me once, and when I asked her what it was for she said, in an uncharacteristically cutesy voice, 'It's for brushing the soft little hair of a soft little baby, what else?'. She would have loved my daughter so much, and been such a support. I think she would have understood her very well. I hope on some plane she can see her, and can know who and what she is, it seems unbearable to think that she is just completely gone, or separate from this world now.

Four and five years have made such a difference to the whole grief process. This pregnancy is very healing, it's so different to my last - it's planned and managed, I don't have the whole terrible hysteria over where and how to give birth, I have a midwife who is going to look after me in her famously motherly fashion after the birth, so I feel, well, looked after, cared for, safe, I hope. Mothered.

But to come back to my original point, I lost my mother before our roles switched, though to a certain extent I did provide a lot of emotional support for her, especially as she was without a partner. I feel so guilty now, for all the ways in which I was selfish, that I didn't look after her enough. But things are how they are. I suppose we should all take care how we raise our children, perhaps you get back what you created, in your later years!

Perhaps it's easier to not have to undergo that process though, I do wonder about that - I wish for my mother so much now, during my pregnancy, but what if she were here and were sick now, or undergoing chemotherapy, or simply getting infirm? That would be an extra stress and pressure in my life, that many find it so hard to deal with, with all the best will in the world. Obviously I would chose to have her here in almost any capacity other than invalided and sick in a hospital, or whatever, but it might be no easier than not having her at all.

We were both young - she was only 57 when she died, I was 26, which felt pretty young to me. I wasn't ready! But maybe you never are, I don't know. My father's mother is going to be ninety in a couple months - imagine having your mother for that long - but she said yesterday that it breaks her heart to see him squinting to read without his reading glasses, or to see how old her and his brother are getting, greying, or balding or going thick around the middle, with back trouble etc. There's a different angle - do I want to see my daughter grow into an old person? I can't really imagine it yet.

My granny says she wouldn't wish old age on anyone. But it's hard to see dying young as a mercy nevertheless.

It is very hard to be motherless. It leaves a huge gap, a foundering, lost feeling, if I'm being honest. I feel the urge to go out and find myself a mother-substitute. it would be so nice to have parents I could rely on, to feel like there is someone there with answers, and unconditional love. People whose job it is to look after me. I suppose that's a romanticised view, but I'm not trying to be adult with this post. Of course I have a lot of other angles on the whole thing. I'm the mother in my real life, god help my poor daughter. I wonder if I'll ever stop feeling like a freaked out child underneath?