‘MY MOTHER WAS ALIVE BUT BEYOND MY REACH’
A writer tells how her mothers riding accident hit her hardest when her own children came along
She didn’t look like my mother any more. She couldn’t smile or laugh
It was my mother I wanted more than anything when the test said I was pregnant. I was sick and terrified, but I’d always wanted to have babies, even when I was still almost a baby myself. I’d talked to Mum about it sometimes and she’d always liked the thought. ‘We’re going to have so much fun together, buying nappies and muslins. You’ll just love having a baby,’ she would say. So when those two blue lines appeared, and she wasn’t there for me, I was furious with her. I could have killed her because I wanted her so much.
When Jimmy was a month old, I took him to see Mum in her nursing home. The staff loved it, taking it in turns to pass him around so that they could coo at him. Mum was less infatuated. She looked at him in my arms, then back at me, studying my face as her eyes flicked back and forth to the baby. She muttered inaudible sounds and turned her face away.
‘ This is Jimmy, Mum. Isn’t he beautiful? Would you like to hold him?’
Mum turned her shoulders away from me, reaching towards the teacup, then slumped back in her seat. ‘I could help you support him. Please will you hold him?’
She looked at me again and made a groaning noise. Then she slipped her hands beneath her legs, very deliberately sitting on them. I swallowed and felt like I was about to cry.
‘OK, we’ll sit here and you can just look at him. It’s so lovely having him, Mum. You were right. Do you think he looks like me? Did I look like this when I was ➤
➤ a baby?’ I smiled at her, like we were a mother and daughter having a chat in the sitting room at home. Mum stared out through the french windows to the nursing home garden, where the late summer leaves were turning brown. She sighed, tapping her foot gently, her hands tucked beneath her.
***** I’d go through a phase of seeing Mum at least every month, then at other times I’d feel defeated by the hours and years I’d spent sitting beside her, telling her about my life passing as she stared at me in silence.
Mum was alive but always beyond reach. My longing for her, and my desire to return to the space called home that she had created for me, made me feel like a baby, crying unheard by a mother who never comes. Sitting beside her, and holding her hand as I talked about Jimmy’s first day at school or my second child Dolly’s birthday, made me feel violently cut off from the person she had been. Sometimes friends would ask if there was some part of her that was familiar, some essential, internal jewel of the mother and woman she once was. Mum’s nurses saw it, they said, but I think my siblings and I struggled.
‘I know you’re not supposed to say this, but Charlotte is our favourite,’ one of the nurses told me. ‘She loves a joke and will often squeeze my hand when I’m making her bed or changing her pad. She’s a real sweetheart.’
Somehow, in her damaged state, Mum reached out to those angels who looked after her. None of them had ever known the person she had been, but all of them saw something light and loving in her that had been there before. From her family, though, that was often hidden. Sometimes she completely blanked me as I sat beside her. At other times, she’d pull at my shirt like she might rip it, or squeeze my hand so hard it would hurt. She would never kiss me when I lowered my face to kiss her and she’d usually push away the cards Jimmy and Dolly made for her, or the photographs I’d taken to show her.
About ten years after the accident, I stopped believing that if I prayed hard enough Mum would get better, and started wanting her to die. Driving to her nursing home made me grip the steering wheel, my breath quickening and heart pounding. My mind boggled with slow-motion grief when I imagined another five, ten, 20, even 40 years of sitting beside her while living behind the smashed mirror of what had happened.
She didn’t look like my mother any more, and when I saw her, I felt so sorry for her: a woman in deep pain, terribly damaged, who had no pleasures in life. Her medical notes detailed one physical and emotional catastrophe after another. She couldn’t smile or laugh, except in a strange choking imitation of the sound. The noises she made were like someone who is very distressed and reminded me of the way I felt, the sounds I wanted to make when I thought of her. There were calls every week from her nurses with news of a urinary tract infection, insomnia that caused her to fall in the night, an epileptic fit that had put her in hospital. When her GP called to explain calmly that she’d developed eczema all over her body, bloody and raw where it had become infected due to her incontinence, I put the phone down and screamed into the silence of the room, My God, hasn’t she suffered enough?
I tried not to show the children the scars inside me, although sometimes I couldn’t hide them. Snatches of a certain song, the words from a childhood book she had read to me, even the sudden flash of yellow kingcups in a ditch or a blanket of bluebells in woodland could make me cry. Then Jimmy would hug me, burying his head that always smells of digestive biscuits into my neck, hugging me closer with his warm pudgy hands. ‘It’s OK, Mum, to be sad.’ He was four years old and he understood it all.
***** After Clover’s marriage broke down when she was 27, she supported herself and her children by working as a freelance journalist for several years. Then she fell in love with Pete and became pregnant again… Becoming a mother for the third time brought memories of my own mum rushing back to me, mind, heart and soul, and I longed for her.
I was in the kitchen, having fed Evangeline and put her back to bed for a rest. She was eight months old. I was starving and had made a poached egg on toast. I had been feeling better. The sadness and violent thoughts of my postnatal depression hadn’t gone away, but they were now like a tide that went in and out. I’d had regular sessions with a cognitive behavioural therapist who helped me to calm the panic in my head. Yet there were still mornings when I had to hide the tears that sprang, as if from nowhere, when I heard Dolly singing a song to herself that Mum had taught me. My longing for Mum was constant.
As I sat down to eat, Mum’s doctor called. ‘Your ➤
➤ mother has a tumour,’ he said. ‘It’s pressing on her kidneys, which is causing them to fail. We hope we can stabilise her, but we don’t feel that surgery would be appropriate. Do you think that you and your family would agree?’
I looked out at the weeping willow beyond the kitchen, and a small patch of purple crocuses growing beneath it – flowers Mum had loved. I remembered being eight or nine and telling her that crocuses looked like cows’ hooves because they were cleft. After that we always called them cows’ hooves and I still thought of that every time I saw them.
‘I am so sorry to bring you this news,’ the doctor continued, ‘but the tumour is serious. Your mother is dying.’
I threw the toast and egg into the bin, as the grief of 22 years started pressing inside me, urgent and painful and wanting to get out. Pete and I rushed to her nursing home that afternoon, hastily concocting plans for a friend to look after Evangeline and make supper for Jimmy and Dolly, as if the phone call from her doctor had brought new urgency to a situation that was unchanged after two decades.
In my mind I’d imagined she might be in bed or look weaker or somehow have a sense of death close to her. She didn’t. She looked just as she had done all the way through my 20s and 30s: very sweet, her wiry hair a fuzz of peppery grey, her skin still smooth and pale, unmarked by the outside air.
She stared around the room, then looked back at me, tugging at a frayed thread of cotton on my jersey, as if she was doing an imitation of looking after me. Something of Mum was there, but so far away it felt like the deepest echo of a real life. I showed her a picture of Evangeline on my phone, holding out the screen while she stared at it then pushed it back to me, and I told her about Dolly’s new school. We drank milky tea, Mum wiping the inside of her cup with her thumb when she had finished.
Bright sunlight and rain greeted us as we left a little later. The sky was blue and cold like the best April day as raindrops glittered through the light. Emotions collided inside me. The accident had been the moment when life and death had twisted around each other and then my mum, and the idea of them disentangling made my mind shudder. I did not know how to arrange my thoughts as shock, relief and something new – perhaps grief or perhaps something indeterminate
I couldn’t grieve for my mother because she was still alive
– bumped one off another, failing to find a place to settle inside me.
It was almost impossible to think of this journey ending. Until 25 November 1991, the day of her accident, I’d been a child and the thought of Mum dying was the most terrible thing I could possibly imagine. Now that thought was knotted and frayed, as guilt – and something so wicked as to dream of her death – gripped me.
There had been days immediately after the accident, when she was strapped to machines in intensive care, when death had seemed very close. We were told many times, during those first few weeks, that the chances of her making it through the next operation were slim. And we had prayed and hoped that she would, and it worked. The years since the accident had been dotted with the presence of her possible death. But the doctors had always been wrong and Mum had held on.
In the end her death overlapped with new life. I found out I was pregnant with my fourth child Dash just a week after that call from her doctor in the early spring. The thought of the ball of life rolling onwards with another child made me feel happy, blurring the growing sense I had of grief approaching.
For a while after the diagnosis, Mum held on to life harder than ever before. She was brighter than she had been in months.
When I visited, she’d sometimes hold my gaze for several minutes at a time as I spoke to her, rather than looking away or pulling her hand out of mine.
Each time I left the home I felt I had to tell her, more emphatically than ever, how much I loved her, but I also felt like a rubber band stretched tight by the effort of living by her deathbed. Remaining poised, constantly ready for death, was exhausting, and I felt confused by the tension between how I thought I should be feeling and how I really felt. I’d wrestled with grief in a relentless rugby scrum for all my adult life, resisting it, loathing it, yet craving it, but never, ever being able to realise it, since my mother was alive and I could not grieve a person who was not dead.
In April the doctors had suggested ‘a couple of months’, but Mum held on very tightly until midwinter. Pete and I visited her on the first Sunday in December, greeted by the cheer of Christmas songs playing in the nursing home. She was very thin, her skin grey and translucent. Her eyes were narrowed but she still looked towards the children, pointing to Evangeline. We sat and talked to her until my tales of our Christmas plans ran out.
There were mince pies on the tea tray that afternoon and we sat with Mum, simply being together as a family. Quietly I felt a longing I’d carried for so many years seep away from me. I’d spent so much of my life in fantasy, thinking about what my relationship with Mum would have been like without the accident. I had spent hours running through in my head how I would arrive at her house as an adult, with my own children, to spend the afternoon with her. I knew she’d have a beautiful garden and that somewhere there would be a pony in a paddock she’d tack up for one of my children to ride. I had lived through these dreams so many times they were like a film I could rewind and pause and play again and again, over and over, and it never bored me.
But as I sat beside Mum in a nursing home chair, surrounded by the flat smell of weak tea and cooked food, as she silently moved her eyes over my children playing at her feet before looking away, I let the fantasy go. The yearning for that version of my mother shifted, and I saw my relationship with her in that moment alone, not overshadowed by the past. It was a million miles from the life I’d imagined having with Mum and the children, but it was a real moment together, and that was infinitely precious.
She seemed peaceful when we left that evening, so I wasn’t expecting the call that came the next morning at 5am, telling me to come quickly. I pulled on my clothes, calling my brother and sisters so that I had a sense, too, of them dressing in the darkness and starting the journey towards Mum.
I was lucky: mine was the shortest and it was still inky dark as I drove there.
As I got closer to the home, the black sky streaked into dawn and at 6am, as I ran from the car park into Mum’s room, I heard the sound of a blackbird in the thick hedge along the edge of the garden.
Mum’s breath was shallow and her eyes were closed. I took her hand, which felt cooler, stroking her cheeks, telling her again and again that I loved her. And I remembered being a child, when Mum would read to my sister Nell and me before we went to bed, and how when we begged her to stay just a little longer, she’d say, ‘Look, girls, look at the angels. They’re standing around your bed and they’re watching you and keeping you safe even when it’s dark.’
Quiet morning light slipped into the room as the spaces between her breaths grew longer.
‘Look, Mum, the angels are waiting for you. They are waiting for you with their soft golden wings outstretched, go to them,’ I whispered to her, trying to hide the cracks in my voice. ‘I love you, Mum. Look at the angels. I love you.’
This is an edited extract from The Wild Other by Clover Stroud, which will be published by Hodder & Stoughton on 9 February, price €28.