Dear Mamma - remix

My mum died. It’s a contorted and convoluted grief. We need so much from our mothers but our mothers are merely human. They have their own shit to deal with in a screwed up world but it's a relation so viscerally personal as to obscure the social and political. For all the time I knew her, my mother was prone to depression in social circles which had no word for it and which hushed it and hid it at home. My mum had no-one to mother her in that private realm. When you’re depressed it’s hard to care for yourself. My mother’s story is not a story of great courage against the odds. It is not a story of love rising above adversity. Some days getting out of bed probably felt courageous. My mamma’s love for us was genuine but erratic, frequently tainted by a vague resentment that immersed us although it was not exactly about us, and sometimes self-centred. The ways in which she was a good mother – her encouragement for my childhood drawings and my adult degrees - were partly to do with her own small but even so frustrated ambitions.

The bittersweet cliche is that our mothers' love fills us despite its imperfections. That is neither entirely true, nor the cliché I am wrestling with. The unintentional fickleness of my mother’s depressive love bequeathed me a subterranean but insistent emotional uncertainty which has not served me well in later life. During the most difficult period of my life as an adult I began to understand from the inside why my mum was like she was, but I am my mother's child and instead of feeling more compassion I was enraged by the mirror. When I was overwhelmed by loneliness and I'd exhausted the patience of all my friends, my last resort was to phone her - not for comfort but because it seemed she was to blame for the perverted relationship style that dumped me in that dark well. Long after I was done cursing that inheritance, I struggled to mother her the way she needed. I’d slip too easily into a mode learned long ago from her, scolding her for not exercising while she patiently built a wall of reasons behind which to curl up and wait for death.
My deepest grief is this twisted and selfish one: I had already lost my mother a while before she died. Before I left home, long before I recognised and raged against her love's subtle treacheries, before I knew any better, my mum had been my absolute refuge, and she will always be indelibly the one who was. But she had not been that for some years and never would be again, and her death merely emphasized that. (In some dark hour, contemplating this, my selfish grief is compounded by knowing that she - for whom I was for many years a willing warm human to hold through her dark times, one who worked for her love when she withdrew into herself, with little presents sewn of felt - must have felt the seismic shift in our relationship. I snap out of half-sleep fretting that I thus helped finish her life.)

Social convention aside, this is not the churlish eulogy I want to make. But neither can I bring myself to commit the truthful insincerity of listing a few platitudes that this woman reliably bathed me, fed me, cleaned up my vomit, hugged me, praised me, encouraged me to read, and occasionally defended my tiny rebellions, as if we and our mum were not also warped in this process. The premise of ‘Speaker for the Dead’. (wikipedia. Speaker for the Dead) is that a eulogy should neither gild nor condemn a person, but tell their life whole so we can understand how they lived it. I am ill-suited to this task, because my mum was half-way through her life when I first met her. I have no direct experience of how she came to be the woman I knew. My view of her is further distorted because my being is entangled with the latter part of her life. Still, its the only way I can reconcile the woman who infuriated me with the woman who loved me.

I imagine that she craved excitement and love when she was younger, as I do, but that could be childish projection. Maybe she would have been utterly content with housewifery had she felt loved. By the time I arrived with the December rain (Psychologically coloured), well into her married life, she had neither. She was trapped at home by religion and convention in a troubled marriage in the tiny worlds of a series of white mining towns, with four children and no income of her own. She thirsted to be seen as refined and cultured but managed a household with less money than most of her English-speaking friends. (No-one would have thought to compare us to the Afrikaans speakers around us, who were considered always a hair's breadth away from becoming poor whites, and still less to the black households that struggled along far beyond our field of vision.) My mum slipped into a strange crack: our household was not poor enough to force my mother out to work, but not rich enough that she could subcontract the housework and choose to go out.

Last night I found, on her bedroom dresser, a primitive felt pincushion in the shape of a cat that I made some 35 years ago from scraps. It was dusty and manky and falling apart. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. I wasn’t sure if I should feel loved, or sad about a life lived vicariously through a daughter who did modestly well through school and then, in adulthood, manifested the rebellious streak my mother gradually beat out of herself.

Undoubtedly one of my most painful childhood memories about my mother is how she tried to leave my dad, when I was about 12 years old. Unconsciously I call it the time she tried to run away from home, because of how it turned out. She told me she was leaving and that she couldn’t tell me where she was going. I was to tell no-one she was gone until my dad got home from work. I understood that this was to give her time to get away. She promised to fetch me to join her some day in the future, and left. I don’t remember clearly how I felt that afternoon, abandoned to that huge mute responsibility. But then she came home with my dad. The car had broken down no further than the town library and she didn’t know who else to call and had no money for a mechanic. She was mortified. My father had no idea, even after all these years, that she had been trying to leave. I used to laugh about this episode ironically with my feminist friends. When I was a child, it was painful for me not only because I felt abandoned but also because she failed. Her great escape simply underlined helplessness. Maybe that’s why I learned something about cars.

Too much of my mother’s life and its side-effects on ours were an unhappy hymn to the worst flaws of the nuclear family - her growing isolation as her depression deepened, her boredom with cooking, her endless hankering after things she could not afford and which did not make her happy, the gendered roles she tried to force on me even while she strained in those bonds, the way we kids were caught in the full glare of her frustrations and her love, the way neither she nor my father found their way out of an unloving marriage, settling at the end into a comfortable but not really comforting, bickering dependency. (Surely, surely having just one dysfunctional couple as a role model can't be good for children!) For a while after I became a marxist, I imagined my mother as a proto-feminist. There were grains of truth in that and maybe things would have been different if there had been a movement that touched that deep into the white community. But later I also realised how much of her life was simply a personal struggle to stay afloat. As a child I imagined my mother to be adventurous with food because we ate garlic, unlike our neighbours. I came to love experimenting with new foods. But as she aged she protested against the ‘exotic food’ (cous cous) I served when they came to dinner. My mum was a book-keeper before she married. She was always quick with numbers. Some time after we left home, she briefly found purpose and sociability in life as the church bookkeeper. But as she aged, those skills were turned inward to filing and locking away food, papers and a growing collection of trinkets. My mum and dad dragged me all over the country before I was 6 in a caravan (which my mum hated because it brought the housework along). I've loved to travel ever since. By the time she died she was actively resistant to getting out of her chair.

I can find plenty of memories of my mum happy and laughing. It was the sweetest surprise, as I eased into adolescence more than ever joined to her hip because my closest brother had made new friends, to discover that my catholic mother liked to laugh at her children's risque jokes. Some years back at my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, both my mother and my father gave a speech. My dad rambled. But my mum, at 74 years, was sharp and structured. She became emotional and fluffed the end but I was amazed. This was a routine part of my activist life that I’d imagined she would never be able to understand. I'd had no idea she had this ability. I was proud of her, then.

This is a warm and worthy memory. But it also underlines a suggestion of diverted potential. Mostly, when I grope for hope and achievement in my mother’s life story, I find meagre and reflected light. I can say that she was good with dogs. I can say that some of her flaws have, unexpectedly, proved useful. My mother’s children are defensively gifted at a slicing sarcasm which I frequently regret, but also therefore at witty repartee. My mother may accurately be remembered as stubborn and argumentative. The first turns out unexpectedly handy in resisting arrest and forcefully occupying a building, and the second came in handy for intellectual rigour in academic and activist life. Feeling unloved by my father, she hugged me plenty. I can point out that much of what I like about myself was shaped by my mother’s struggle with her narrow life. So much of what I am starts from balking at her fate, and that can't be separated from the fact that my mother, at least as I remember her, was never satisfied. That gave me an unsettling sense of permanent discontent, but I also deeply value how that set me on a path of expecting equality. And my mum helped me on that path, partly because she sympathised with her own frustrated self, whose schooling ended at age 16 but who could not go off to sea like her brothers. Despite the deep emotional insecurity she planted in me, while I was a child she also sowed in me a deep confidence - even an overconfidence - in my intellectual abilities and manual skills. My mum read voraciously, probably to escape, and I inherited her love of books, which gave me the tools to ground my intellectual development. We must not forget that, had we been a different race and social class, my alternatives to my mother’s life would have been much less palatable than mine actually were. As it was, both by accident and intention, her difficult and unhappy life produced at least one human who valued her mind more than her clothes - to my mother's perputual dismay - and who remains thirsty for justice and human equality.

The banal truth is that she mothered me the best she could under the circumstance, and it's neither entirely her fault, nor at all mine, that it wasn't quite good enough. It made me strong in unexpected ways. I can say without arrogance that one of the chief achievements of my mother's life was me, together with her other children.

But as the human sworn to independence that she made me, I feel discontented measuring my mum's life like this. It's not that I disdain the modest achievements humans make in lives narrowed by poverty and social stricture. It is far more worthy raising humans than crashing banks and prosecuting wars. It's possible that the burden of her kids also saved her life by forcing her out of bed in the mornings, and it must have been one of us - not me - who found her when she tried to kill herself. My mum rebuilt a circle of friends towards the end of her life. I know she was vicariously proud of all of our achievements, little and large, and I am pleased that she found discontented joy in her kids and the tiny horde of grandchildren my brothers produced. She may have become content with this outcome. But I remember that there was a time when my mum hated being identiified as this person's wife or that one's mother or this one's sister in law. If my mum had always been content to measure her life only through her flawed children, she would have been a different mother with different children. To tell my mother's story whole, therefore, I must face the second and less selfish part of my grief, that my mother’s life was after all a rather typical life in modern capitalism, not in any sense wasted or inferior for the mere reason that it produced only other people, but stunted and smothered and less than she wanted or might have had. This has been her life, and I am left with what it produced in me: the sensibilities of a coming world that would have been freer and gentler for her.