My mother

In response to

Gloves by Hannah Lowe

My mother wore a thimble made of copper.

My mother was a seamstress or a chamber-maid,

or market-girl or nurse or cotton picker,

or a washerwoman, fingers blistered red

from strangling sheets in lime and washtub water.

She disappeared through linen on the line

and like a mocking bird, I heard her laughter –

a teaspoon on good china, lady-fine.

My mother was a photograph. Her name

was Longing or Desire. She stumbled south

along the Parish Road, barefoot and shamed

in dirty lace, gin bottle to her mouth.

My mother was a hand in a long white glove,

the moment before the glove was pulled off –

There’s a song, “My Mother’s Eyes.” It’s in praise of the path-setting guidance given by a mother at the start of her child’s journey through life. I regret the circumstances that created the emotional gap between my mother and me. They didn’t allow for the development of a sufficiently strong memory of the love, concern and aspirations she once had had for me. I don’t remember seeing these feelings shining on me from My Mother’s Eyes. Time can’t be rolled back to give me the chance to show her my appreciate of how she was then, just that, a Mother. I don’t, I can’t, blame her for the way our paths diverged or for the loss of her parental guidance. But now, looking back, I can and do value the patience with which she dealt with my waywardness, once we were reunited. My Mother worked physically hard for her family but not hard enough to provide me with a moral compass. My Mother, therefore, left me directionless !

My mother. I feel I have written so much about her, felt so much about her, I recoil at this prompt. My mother. Void and ripples. Throwing a stone into an empty pond, or a well that fall’s forever. Nothing ever lands in her. Yet the falling forever reaches out and echoes endlessly inside. Almost unbearable. A hand reaching – in or out? A bony grasping hand on my arm and I recoil. Clutching desperately, seeking something to hold onto, someone. Happy to drag you in with her, anything not to be alone. Can’t come out to you with any openness, any joy. Just a clutching and dragging, a descent, a hauling into dark lair. Wild beast with prey. Crocodile taking me down beneath the water, drowning. Writing. Not wanting to write as I feel the cortisol running up my arm, my neck, into my jaw, the tension creeps, the fear, the horror, the ghastliness. Ghastliness of shame. The shame of failed love. Carrying a sense of failure with me. More comforting than the maternal embrace. Don’t want to write. Hate this prompt. Hated my mother for so long. But now less hate, more void. Hate is too passionate for the absence of love. I buried my mother long ago, an empty coffin, she haunts me still. Marley’s ghost. Past, present, future. No escape. She threads her way through my lifetime. Gravel. Gravel. Gravel. Burnt remains of my father, scattered. Trees don’t like the dusty ash, too much and it kills them. No life. No nurturing. Dry, dusty, dead. The walking dead. Xmas with my mother beckons. My siblings and I trying to work out how it could be, circling around her, resentfully, yet trying to accommodate her desire, her longing, though none of it can ever be filled. Not by any of us. Her longing or desire has never extended to any of us, other than as handmaidens, kneeling at her feet, doing her bidding. Servility. Civility. Cold. No room, no breath, for warmth, for love. Cold slabs of paving stones, gravestones laid over the hearts of us all. Stamping on the grave keeps the feet warm at least. See my breath fill the cold air, hover and find its own shape. I am alive. The breath rises in me still.

My mother’s white gloves were stained with nicotine, like my brother’s are now. His gloves complete his performance. Daily he selects a new pair from the gentleman’s clothing store where they treat him like a lord despite the smell of him, despite the food lodged in his lapels and the crumbling life plastered across his sad shirt. Now he is where you wanted him, Mum, in his half-way house, having a go, eh, in as much as any of us have a go, have a stab, make the most of things, make a meal. Half-way house. Half way between here and there. Where you come from and onward toward the ferry man. He has his white gloves ready but the real question is, how did it happen like this? Was there an alternative or was his path, like my path or even your path, pre-determined? By his name, perhaps, or by the sweetness he carried in his heart or by his ‘done thing’ ie. what you did to him. Now you are gone and we can’t ask. While you were alive, you wouldn’t tell, so all we can do is make it up, make do and mend. Blanket stitch folds over the edge. Your knitted blankets wrap our babies. Your pinafores and washing lines peg our childhoods. He was safe in piles of folded linen. Now he is safe again in his half-way house. Broken heart. I cannot be you, now. Where did you go?

Mother. Mum. Rose. All versions of the same person. Someone I used to love unconditionally. Someone I started detecting a long time ago. I cut and cut and snip and struggle to find what I need. I pick up all the different parts but I can't make anything different out of what I've got. I can't see my mother the way I used to anymore. I have accepted this, but I can't embrace who she is.

My mother is the woman who stayed in an abusive marriage. She'll tell you she did it for her children, but no child should witness the constant hatred and physical abuse, the violence that comes from being trapped in a doomed relationship. My mother is the woman who suffered for her children, but she can't see how much her children suffered because of decisions she made. My mother is the victim, the drama queen, the self-centred artist with a skewed view of the world. My mother is the woman who sits waiting for someone else to come and fix the mess life can become. My mother is the tiny resentful woman who once stubbed cigarettes on her husband's skin. My mother is hopeless, incapable, unhuggable.

Nobody else sees her like this, I know. It is me. Just me, and perhaps I am the one who's wrong, the one who's angry and stubborn and useless. Things could change if I could only tell her, if I could speak to her about this, about this monster she has created with her refusal to look at the past differently. But she will not hear it. She cannot accept any version of reality that's not her own.

So I keep hold of my resentment. Keep it down. Wait for it to dissipate with time. Wait for her to go somewhere where I won't be able to see her for who she is anymore.