Mothers – Rant and Roll

And that’s how the story goes

It’s my mum’s anniversary in a week and I can’t stop dreaming about her.

I’ve written about this before – how my dreams are always the same: I realize that she hasn’t died, but I know that she is, in fact dying, and I am consumed with a frantic panic, a feverish need to tell her how much I love her.

Mama, I love you.

Mama, I won’t leave you.

Mama, just hang on.

I’m here.

I sometimes think – it’s been seven years. When do I get to start dreaming something new?

Tonight, at dinner, “Of Monsters and Men” came on. I usually ask Marc to skip through their songs because they’re too raw a reminder of the trip I took with her in 2016, when we adventured across the north of Europe. Every night, after we had talked and laughed ourselves into easy, exhausted silence, she would tuck herself into her twin bed, just a foot from my own, and fall asleep.

I would stay up later, writing about our day.

Her soft, rhythmic breathing a gentle juxtaposition to the frenetic pace of my fingers, flying across the keyboard.

Every night I’d write to “My Head is an Animal”.

Every night, I’d write a part of our story to life.

The story that was – and will always be – my mother and me.

Sharing information about the town we’d biked through, it’s history, beauty. The secrets we shared. The wine we’d drank. The indescribable moment of witnessing a forever dusk and the evenings that left us sun-stained and aglow.

The love that I felt for her in those moments – next to her – felt like it would swallow me whole. It was a love so big it hurt, and I swear when I hear “Dirty Paws” I am back there, in that bed.

And I can feel my heart breaking and mending, breaking and mending, over and over again, like a two-piece jigsaw puzzle, so fragile in my clumsy hands.

The night before I left Halifax, after she finished her chemotherapy, I wrote her a card. On the front it said “Fuck Cancer”. In it, I wrote about my big love. About the importance of our story. About our trip and my fears and my need for her to know – mama, to know, I’m here.

After she died, I found that card behind her bedside table – the envelope only half opened. She had likely been distracted and forgotten about it in the moment, and it had fallen out of sight.

She never read it.

I hardly slept that night, terrified that she didn’t know all of those things I had written to her.

Mama.

I don’t think this anymore. I know that you knew my big love – that you felt it in your bones.

How you knew each and every story of us – maybe written by me. Always written in the stars.

So tonight, I’ll send a whisper up to you – that maybe this year I’ll dream something big.

I’ll dream something new.

Can you imagine, momma?

When I lived with my mum we talked about a lot of things: old boyfriends, jobs, sex, politics, family, cancer, growing up in the Maritimes.

Strangely, the one thing we didn’t talk about was death. Maybe because it was always just there, hanging about our day to day. Curling the corners of all other conversations, colouring our lives with the faintest, but most discernible of hues.

I can remember one night sitting in her kitchen. It was the beginning of October and while we could feel the faint scratch of autumn’s fingertips, we still laughed as we turned on her little electric fireplace.

My mother sat with her tiny frame engulfed in an oversized white knit sweater, her hand loosely curled around a glass of red wine.

“If you don’t have children, that’s totally fine with me,” she said. “You and Marc don’t have to have a baby.”

I had been talking to her about the fact that I didn’t know if I wanted to have kids, and the fact that I was struggling with my indecision. I had always assumed that as I got older something would just click inside of me and I would suddenly want to have a baby.

“That’s what happened to you, isn’t it?” I asked her. “How you knew you wanted kids?”

My mother nodded as she tried to work out of a piece of food from her teeth. “I just woke up one day and knew I wanted a baby. That it was something I needed in my life,” she said.

“See?” I said. “That’s what I’m looking for.”

I shifted in my seat as I told her that my waffling was also something that worried me in terms of my relationship with Marc. How my husband definitely wanted kids, and when we got married, I had assured him that it was something that would happen – not right away, but yes, definitely, someday.

But there I was, early thirties, still hoping for that “a ha!” moment that I had been so sure would happen when I made him those promises – to spend the rest of my life with him, and that our life would at some point include another little life that we would make together.

“I worry about what it could do to us,” I told her. “If I end up not wanting kids.”

She looked at me with her discerning eye, before taking a sip of her wine.

“It’s something you’ll get through,” she offered. “But as I said – I can imagine it.”

I didn’t have a response to this. I just shifted in my seat, again, hoping that perhaps I could adjust my discomfort as easy as I could my body.

What is funny – and completely devastating – about this memory and conversation with my mother, is that I can without a doubt pinpoint the exact moment when I knew that I wanted – nay, needed – to have a child.

It was four days after she had been admitted to the hospital. Marc and I were driving back from her house to spend the afternoon and evening with her. I was in the passenger side of the car – her car – and I felt a sudden surge of grief pour over and through me.

These emotional tsunamis had been happening since I first received a text from my sister at 5:40 in the morning telling me an ambulance was on its way.

Most of the time it would feel as though I was going to explosively vomit up my heart. Like my skin was a gaping wound, my entire body over. Like the only thing I could possibly do was cry and scream at the entire ugly, stupid world until I turned to dust.

But this time, instead, I just looked down. I looked down into my lap and there, in my hands, saw the entirety of my love for my mother.

A tangible, pulsing, incandescent love.

Its warmth soothing my broken skin, its strong beat calming the mania of my heart.

And that was it.

That’s when I knew. That there was no other option but to put that love somewhere, into a tiny little life, made by Marc and me.

And then I cried. Great, heaping tears of love and loss – of the greatest happiness, of my boundless relief and a most infinite sadness.

They are the same tears I shed when wee Elanor Marie was welcomed by the world last August. When we now dance together, slowly in the early afternoon sun. When she reaches for my face as I kiss her cheeks and ears and lips and eyes.

When I watch as she marvels at the wide world over.

When I wish with all of my heart that my mum could be here.

That she could imagine all of this, too.

The beauty of your day, momma

Hi Momma.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Today is beautiful – sunny, and warm – a day where the sky seems to stretch forever, and the trees all vibrate with a green one shade away from surreal.

The world always seems to shine a little brighter on your day.

Momma, it’s Mother’s Day and I am just past 7 months pregnant. I sometimes get really scared that I won’t know how to be a momma because you aren’t here anymore.

I can’t phone you when I’m worried about things (silly or serious) or ask you about pregnancy symptoms.

(At week 28 did it feel like someone did a wind-up soccer kick straight to your right groin?)

We can’t share stories, laughs and tears as I muddle my way through this wonderful and bizarre journey.

And you can’t come and visit me after this wee babe is born. To hold and to sing to them.

To continue to share stories, laughs and tears.

Sometimes I get so jealous of other women who are newly pregnant or mums themselves – both friends and strangers – who get this chance.

In these moments it feels like I have lightning in my belly and sand in my eyes and I want to scream, “You don’t know how lucky you are!”

What’s funny is that, in order to get myself out of this space, I have to do my yoga breathing (the yoga breathing you taught me to do, over and over and over again).

Momma, you are with me when I am upset about not having you.

That’s a pretty good trick you have.

Momma, it’s also that I am blessed to know so many amazing mums who are keeping close and showing me many beautiful examples of motherhood.

They also help clear the sand from my eyes.

Four of these mothers are also my sisters:

Jessi, who has the strength of a tiger, the endurance of an ostrich and the iron will of a wolf, so that no matter what is happening in the world – micro or macro – she leads and loves like a warrior. (I’ll let you guess which of these animals is also representative of her beauty.)

Kate, whose patience and calm floor me each and every day, whose quiet and understated, but never underrepresented, compassion and kindness has brought me back from the brink too many times to count, and who sees the gentle beauty and humour in everything.

Mel, whose big heart burns with such a tangible love, you swear you can see it colour the corners of a room – a magic only matched by her creativity and unique characteristics that leave her kids (and everyone else) is stitches.

Vanessa, who radiates a love and an authenticity so nurturing and nourishing, she makes it impossible to feel alone or like you’ve done something wrong. (She also brings this light to the world on a chronic lack of sleep, which makes her words, laughter and heart ever the more special.)

So there you go momma.

It’s Mother’s Day.

Thanks for helping me see the beauty of your day.

And the beauty of all mothers just a little brighter too.

Happy birthday momma. It’s a party.

Today is my momma’s birthday.

She would have been 70.

The last time I visited her, in February of 2018, I asked her, “what do you want to do for your 70^th? Maybe we could do something as a family – like go on a trip together or organize a big party?”

I remember she was flossing her teeth – something she took very seriously. She paused before looking straight at me.

“If I even make it that long,” she laughed half-heartedly.

Her comment left me upended – as though I had just missed a step at the bottom of a staircase.

I had somehow kept believing that – despite the stage four metastasized breast cancer – she would live forever.

It was the first time I heard her acknowledging the opposite. Her words were like a knife to my heart.

“Of course you will make it!” I blurted out, wanting desperately to erase this subtle, yet momentous shift that had just occurred.

She shrugged and went back to flossing her teeth.

I went to bed dreaming of a birthday party abroad.

…

When I talk about my mum, which I do all the time, it’s always to marvel at and impress upon just how well, and how often she lived.

It’s why I had such a hard time imagining her dying – and why I have such a hard time remembering that she is dead – because no matter how sick she got, she never stopped.

She never stopped working, and she never stopped working out; doing yoga and volunteering; helping with her grandkids and with her daughters’ professional and personal pursuits.

She hosted the most brilliant and boisterous dinner parties, marched in solidarity with other women, challenged herself to know more about reconciliation and how to be a better ally. Debated her friends who held competing views. Loved and nurtured and believed in the incredibly unique and beautiful community that she built and that she held close in her heart.

It is these people who have consistently reached out to myself and my sisters over the past year. On Mother’s Day, Christmas, the day of her death. To tell me: I see you. I am hurting too. I miss her. I miss and think of her every day.

I get so angry sometimes, thinking of others who have remained silent and conspicuously so. I feel like I have been cut off, like a gangrenous limb. Severed from a family who no longer thinks or feels about her, or her daughters, or what it’s like to live every day without your North Star. And the painful journey of reorientation that reminds me every day: she died.

Especially on days like today.

But then I hear a gentle voice at the back of my head: a voice that pipes up, mid-floss, reminding me to hold close the community that she held in her heart. Because those are the people who held her.

And to celebrate today.

So happy birthday, momma. I know you’re somewhere beautiful.

And that’s it’s a party.

This moment. This.

When I was thirteen years old, I started going to bed with ropes and scarves tied tightly around my waist, believing that it would stop me from gaining weight in my sleep.

I would tie them so tightly that they would cut into my skin, forming a ridge of angry red scars along the tops of my hipbones and the small of my back.

I don’t know how my mother found out about what I was doing, but she did.

Obviously horrified and desperate to get me to stop, she was sensitive enough to know that depending on how she broached the subject, I might shrink further inside of myself.

So her approach was simple.

Instead of getting angry with me, or throwing out all of the things I used to harm myself, she would wait until I had gotten ready for sleep, and then gently knock on my bedroom door.

Sitting on the side of my bed, she would stroke my hair and softly ask if I had wrapped anything around my waist.

I would squirm and fight, never wanting to admit that I had, or confess how ugly and hated I felt on nights when I couldn’t bring myself to bind my skin.

Sometimes she would ask to see my stomach, although never in a confrontational or accusatory way. In a way that ached with a stark and simple love and sadness. The heartbreaking futility of knowing that your teenage daughter finds such monumental faults in the skin that you helped make and shape.

After I had either showed her my bare skin, or grudgingly removed the ties, she would take my hand in hers and ask me to tell her one thing that I loved about myself.

For many nights I dreaded this moment. A slight, cold sweat would break out on the back on my neck. I would push my face into my pillow and half-heartedly murmur something into its folds; gnash my teeth and force out a canned answer.

“The A on my math test,” was my garbled response.

But she would sit there, patient as a stone as I wrestled with the question, until finally, exhausted, I would whisper a truth.

“I love my hair.”

“I’m funny.”

“My friends.”

Even after I stopped going to bed with the scarves, my mother would come see me. Stroke my hair. Hold my hand. And ask me:

“Tell me one thing you love about yourself.”

As I grew older, I forgot about this nightly ritual. I left home, adopted new routines, and practiced new methods of self care.

But every so often, when my anxiety is particularly high, and I wake in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, I lie in bed, and breathe deeply.

And I imagine my mothers hand on mine, the tone of her voice, soothing.

And I tell her.

My hair.

I’m funny.

This moment.

This.