JOURNEY AROUND MY MOTHER
How one writer reconnected with her mum
Most people, when offered a trip to Italy, would leap with excitement. Not my mother. Instead, she fixed me with a steely gaze and said, ‘What are you going to do about your hair?’ Hair. Hair was the yardstick by which she measured me. To her, my slightly dishevelled hair signalled a dishevelled personality, and she preferred things and people she could control. Even the promise of six weeks in Italy could not arrest criticism from her. It was as though she needed to deny me the chance to make her happy, to show I cared. It crystallised everything about our relationship.
In my 20s I began to meet women like me who had difficult mothers: mothers who undermined their daughters’ self-esteem, who were hypercritical, who could not muster a warm embrace. Yet how we tried to change the way things were. I bore my mother’s relentless criticism and wooed her with compliments, lunches out, interest in her life. In response, she compared me to her friends’ daughters: prettier, more personable, more accomplished than I, they had better husbands, careers, homes, hair and clothes.
My father was not blind to any of this, but he did not intervene. On his deathbed, he implored me to make friends with my mother. I wanted to scream: ‘Can’t you just ask me to win the Nobel Prize for medicine? That would be easier!’
Before we left for Italy I suggested to Mum that we use our trip to get to the heart of our relationship, and as homework for that discussion I asked her to come up with three things that irked her about me. I would do likewise.
‘You won’t have much of a list,’ she harrumphed. ‘I was a perfect mother.’ I smiled indulgently, and jotted down ‘delusions of being a perfect mother’.
Italy cast its charm on us. For weeks we oohed and ahhed at the undulating landscape, the whitewashed trulli, the hilltop towns, the staggering abundance of art. We paid attention to everything except our fraying relationship. Like Etna and Vesuvius, we heaved and boiled beneath benign façades.
One night in Viterbo, I seized the opportunity. A significant piece of our carefully organised itinerary had fallen through (‘I knew that would happen,’ said Mum) when the medieval townhouse that looked perfect on the internet was not so in reality: it had too many stairs for Mum’s limited mobility. We checked into a hotel where I could work on Plan B. As we tugged at a takeaway pizza I blurted, ‘Remember the three grievances I asked you to draw up? Feel like talking about them now?’
Without batting an eyelid, Mum snapped open her handbag, pulled out a small piece of white paper – it looked as if it had been folded and
[continued from previous page] refolded many times – and plunged in. ‘You were indifferent to me and your father when you were growing up,’ she began without so much as a preamble. ‘You never listened to our advice. You were so single-minded.’
I opened my mouth to respond but she was already on item number two: I had changed, she said, when I came home from university – a good 35 years ago – and it had displeased her. Her third point was my choice of husbands: ‘You were reckless and, well, you made some very poor choices.’
She went on. ‘Even when you were little you never bonded with us,’ she said, gathering momentum and changing the rules of engagement by broaching reason number four. ‘Whenever we went on holidays you would find another family on the beach and stick with them. You ignored us.’ I did? ‘What did you do about it?’ I asked. ‘What could we do?’ she said, shaking her head. ‘We tried to laugh it off, chalked it up to your personality. But it caused us a lot of pain. It really hurt your father.’
She played the Dad card: whenever she wanted to drive home a point, my mother would mention my father. In the end I did what I always did: I apologised – for growing up, for marrying men she disapproved of, for not being the daughter she wanted. Within minutes we were in bed and the lights were out. In the darkness, her words replayed in my head. Mum had not asked to see my list. Why did I lack the guts to tell her she had been demanding, intimidating and rarely had a positive thing to say about me? Why could I not accept that ours was a dysfunctional relationship and leave it at that?
A few days later we arrived in Rome. While out for a stroll alone I passed the Galleria Nazionale d’arte Moderna and went in. As I meandered through the gallery my eyes landed on a ghostly white marble statue. La Vedova (The Widow) was sculpted in 1888 by Ernesto Bazzaro. It depicts a girl of about eight trying to get her mother’s attention. The mother is lost in a trance of worry: Bills? Loss? How to be smarter? More stylish? How to get to the end of the week without slitting her wrists? The expressions of both mother and daughter were achingly familiar.
Mum had been distracted during my childhood – by her weight, her career, her volunteer work, her ambition for upward mobility. I was the child in the statue begging for her attention. But had I not also been a distracted mother? Are we not all distracted during early marriage and motherhood? Do we not all stress about how to make ends meet, how to make our children’s lives better, how to maintain our other relationships without losing ourselves? In the midst of this juggling act we let slide the relationships we take for granted: the most important ones.
My mind tunnelled back 10 years to when my children would come bounding out of school at the
‘I wanted to have it out with my mother, but I also wanted peace with her, and you cannot have it both ways’
end of the day and race across the schoolyard into my waiting arms. I was so swamped with the pressing matters of single parenthood that I did not always return their devotion. I would hear them excitedly spill out the events of their day but I did not always listen. Why does it take us so long to realise the value of our undivided attention?
I stood before Bazzaro’s statue and decided at that precise moment that I did not want to be controlled by the past. As much as I wanted to have it out with my mother, I also wanted peace with her, and you cannot have it both ways. I had spent years hanging on to old hurts, coaxing them like tender plants, watering them with my resentments, allowing the bitterness to keep blooming. The statue allowed me to see the work I had to do to make peace at my end. How my mother chose to deal with the past was her business. I reached into my handbag, took out the paper on which I had jotted down my three grievances, ripped it up, and tossed the pieces into a nearby bin.
On Easter Sunday in St Peter’s Square I barely noticed that we were sitting 20 rows from the Pope. What mattered was the relief I felt at having let go of the past; of deciding not to see my mum as the hectoring antagonist from my past but as the warrior-spirited woman who gave me life; of acknowledging that, for all my disappointment in her, I was not perfect myself.
Our relationship improved somewhat after that trip. I gained a new appreciation of Mum’s physical struggles and took an active role in her care. I treated her more gently. I began to mother my mother.
She died four years ago. It surprises me how much I miss her: whether this is love or Stockholm syndrome I do not know or care, for my focus has turned to my own adult children. I never want them to regard me as an adversary, nor do I want them to assume that relationships magically happen; they have to be tended, nurtured.
After Mum’s funeral I heard from the daughters of some of her friends. They adored her style, humour, advice; how she showered them with encouragement and notes of congratulation when they graduated from school or were promoted at work. And then a few of them told me how Mum would gush about my accomplishments. ‘She was so proud of you,’ said one. ‘It is sad that she could never tell you this herself.’ The comment was both touching and bittersweet.
Nowadays, when I leaf through photos from that Italian trip, it is telling that so few are of Mum and me. It is as if the journey’s purpose was to confront Italy rather than our relationship; that if directed at us the camera might reveal the discord we laboured to sidestep. Then again, art and scenery can soothe the heart in ways that words cannot.