Kate Mosse on the true meaning of being a mother
From being cared for to being a carer, the author Kate Mosse fondly reflects on her changing relationship with her dearly departed mother
the sun is milky in a hazy blue sky. It’s 3.20 on a Thursday afternoon, at the end of a school day in early July.
I am nearly seven years old, small for my age, baggy in my green-and-white-check summer dress with buttons up the front. My emerald-green cardigan is shoved in a ball at the bottom of my satchel. White ankle socks and black Mary-Janes, a drab blonde plait down my back.
These images are slightly blurred, an artist’s impression put together like a patchwork from photographs and memories, but I remember the sort of child I was. How I felt. An ordinary girl, at an ordinary primary school in Chichester, in summer: assembly, choir practice, spelling tests, PE and grey mashed potato swimming in red beetroot in the Nissen hut on the playing field. Put up as a temporary measure in the 1950s; the smell of school dinners and mince seeps into every corner.
It’s 1968: the Prague Spring, Vietnam, Martin Luther King preaching in Memphis and Robert Kennedy dead in Los Angeles, Sergeant Pepper and Mrs Robinson, the world is crazy and loud – politics, protests, assassinations, bombings and demands for change – but I am only vaguely aware of this. My life is small and safe and contained, bounded by family and friends, homework and church on Sundays. I didn’t, then, realise how exceptional this quiet, ordered childhood was and how precious. But I knew I was loved. And because of those very many years of being loved unconditionally, and supported unconditionally, what was to come later would be both possible and a privilege. It’s an odd situation when you are called upon to care for the people who had cared for you. Your father, your mother-in-law and your mother. Especially, your mother.
On that afternoon in July, the bell rings, an old-fashioned handbell that is carried through the covered way and halls. It’s going-home time. The silence of the classroom shatters into sound: chairs scraping, wooden desk lids snapping shut, teachers raising their voices to control their charges. ‘Calmly, ladies and gentlemen, no running in the corridors.’ An explosion of chatter and laughter and freedom after a hot day of English and geography and recorder lessons.
It’s 3.25 and my mother and sisters are waiting at the gate where, 40 years earlier, my mother-in-law and her twin sister had waited for their mother and, in 30 years to come, I will wait for my own children.
Then, as now, black railings give onto a narrow twitten where mothers – only mothers in those days of the late 1960s – wait. My sisters are in T-shirts and shorts and sandals. My mother looks like a young Elizabeth Taylor, black curly hair framing her heart-shaped
face. In my memory, she’s wearing a sleeveless shirt-waister and sunglasses with white frames. She is beautiful.
Now it’s 3.30, but we’re not going home. Instead, my mother is taking us to the beach at West Wittering. Packed in the back of our Morris Minor are swimming costumes, a picnic tea, towels and hats and sun-cream lotion, buckets and spades. An adventure, a treat, a something that was unexpected.
Was the tide high or a long way out, requiring us to wander over expanses of ribbed sand to a shallow sea? Did we build sandcastles or swim or play Swingball? Did we eat bread and butter with fingers crusted with sand, with our skinny legs stretched out straight on our towels? My memories of that day – and all the other days of childhood – are composites, a gathering together of the things that defined and distinguished – and define still – one long summer. And it won’t be until I’m a mother myself, collecting children hungry and restless from school, that I will truly understand how amazing my mother was to do this, on that hot July afternoon way back when. That she, after a working day of her own of childcare and volunteering, scooped up three children under 10 and took us all to the beach to see the sun set.
It’s a tricky verb, ‘to mother’. The verb ‘to father’ brings with it the suggestion of a single moment – of love, of release, of triumph – whereas ‘to mother’ is longer term. It shimmers with the promise of caring and nurturing and looking after for a lifetime. At the same time, it is often used derogatively, bringing it the notion of smothering, of overwhelming, of a lack of agency. In some circumstances, it is weaponised – a way of keeping women in their place, defining our experiences solely in relation to whether we have had, or care for, children.
Many writers have tried to find a definition for motherhood that is neither prescriptive, nor dishonest, one that contains multitudes and contradictions. The great American activist, poet, feminist Adrienne Rich has come closest. In her 1976 collection of essays – Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and
Institution – she captures absolutely the pull and tug at the heart of being a mother. On the one hand, the willingness to do everything, at any time and in any way, for your child. That abnegation of self, that is both suffocating and liberating. On the other hand, the ways in which the institution of motherhood is used to subjugate women as individuals: ‘In order for all women to have real choices all along the line,’ Rich wrote, ‘we need fully to understand the power and powerlessness embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture.’
Forty-five years later, and this contradiction is still evident in every insidious newspaper headline, every description: ‘Mother of four’, ‘grandmother of six’ – there is always this underlining narrative that for a woman to be a mother is a fulfilment of primary purpose. But what of those women who are not mothers, either by choice or by circumstance? What of those women who have lost a child or who have rejected the role? What of those of us who love being parents, but don’t want to be held up as an example?
The majority of us who choose to become mothers do so out of love, or need, or commitment. Mostly, we do not consider the wider political implications or the social ones. My first book in 1993 was a pregnancy book – Becoming a Mother – which I wrote, in part, to make sense of my own wild and contradictory emotions while I was expecting my first child. I spoke to 30 other mothers about their thoughts and feelings, not the medicine of it, and realised that most of us were shocked at how immediately our sense of self changed. So much of our politics and our theories of nature/nurture, who should do what, how women should hold fast to their own identities and not be swallowed up in motherhood, disappeared the instant we held our babies in our arms. For others, it was an even harder challenge: post-natal depression, the tragedy of not falling in love with one’s child, doing it on one’s own – there is a desperate loneliness when the story does not play out as it is supposed to.
I’m a mother to adult children now, not yet a grandmother. For the past 12 years, on and off, I’ve been a carer: first, helping my heroic mother care for my wonderful father who had Parkinson’s; then keeping a watching brief for her after he had died in 2011; more recently, after my mother’s death just before Christmas in 2014, as a full-time carer for my mother-in-law, Granny Rosie. For more than a decade, we all of us lived together in a house on the corner, where three roads meet. We negotiated new roles – where I became the one caring, the one looking after – a shift of perspective and of balance.
I never ‘mothered’ my mother and, although Granny Rosie often says ‘All right, Mum!’ – when I’m nagging her to eat, or to sleep, or to let me help – we hold fast to the shape of the relationships we always knew. It is a great privilege to be able to repay a lifetime of care and support – to get to know your mother and father as themselves, before they were your parents – but it’s also important that the changing relationship doesn’t define who you are. My mother was still my mother, I was still her daughter, even if the ways in which we were living our interconnected lives changed.
It’s why I wrote An Extra Pair of Hands. A sense of wanting both to pay tribute to my mother – and my father and mother-in-law – but also because so many of us are mothers, daughters, daughters-inlaw, sisters, friends and are negotiating these boundaries. How not to lose yourself in motherhood, how not to obscure someone else, how to support without taking over. You do not become less of a daughter when you care for your own mother, in the same way as you do not become less of a mother when your child no longer needs you. Rather, it’s part of being a mother to tell the truth of the conflicting emotions that come with it. As Adrienne Rich put it: ‘When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.’
That one day on the beach in July 1968 remains vivid in my memory, its colours still sharp and true, even though there were many such adventures on other shimmering afternoons. It’s because, I think I understood even then, without being conscious of it, that it was of such memories that life would be made. My mother was, quite simply, wonderful and she is much missed. But, more than that, she was herself – brilliant, dazzling, complicated, beautiful and always there.
In memory of Barbara Mary Mosse (15 September 1931 to 21 December 2014).
‘An Extra Pair of Hands’ by Kate Mosse (£12.99, Wellcome Collection/ Profile Books) is out now.
Many writers have tried to find a definition of motherhood that contains multitudes and contradictions