Màámi

I love my mother! That thought keeps going through my head over and over, like a mantra. It won’t stop. I won’t let it. It’s all I’ve got now, all I can hold on to, so I clutch at it just the way my mother is grasping onto her life…

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The first vivid memories I have of my mother are of the year I was five. I don’t know why, but I can’t seem to dredge up any earlier ones. I have memories of my Dad as far back as maybe age three. I remember sitting in his lap, with my chubby arms wrapped around him, thinking I would protect him from the world! I remember my brothers as well and what my relationship with both of them was like at several stages in my life. But my mother, nada! Even now, I’m trying to dig up the memories, piece them together, but nothing comes. Did she sing me to sleep? Did she like to dress me up? Did she pamper me, being her only female child? Hard as I try, nothing comes. All I can bring up is her being short with me, how swiftly her hands could move, her constant reprimands and how deep down I figured I wasn’t good enough.

My mother was never one to be generous with words. I can’t recall having chats with her of any kind. My mother instructed, reprimanded, ordered, cursed sometimes, but she never chatted. Sometimes, I made up conversations in my head, wondering what a typical mother-daughter conversation would be like.

 I think the guy from Mrs Duncan’s class likes me…

Jude asked me to go to the movies with him on Saturday! How do I tell him no without sounding bad?!

Mum, I think I’m having my first period…

Sitting here in this hospital room, my mother’s silent form as my only companion, I can’t help but reminisce on the seasons that have marked our very rocky journey together.

 There was the time that it used to hurt so bad watching the other girls with their mums. I used to get this pang for something, I’m not sure what. It wasn’t really a sense of loss because I never had it to begin with. I can’t say I was missing something either because I’d never known what it felt like, so how would I know what I was missing?!  It always left me wanting so bad and it used to break me up in pieces. I knew deep down that my mother loved me, fiercely even. She was just not good at showing her emotions. There were so many times that I wanted to throw something and scream that love wasn’t always enough! I wanted a friend, an ally, a sister. I wanted a relationship with her in the sense of knowing someone, trusting them with your dreams, your fears, your secrets. It just never happened for us and I’m here, already a woman in my own rights, a mother to my own daughters, and yet, still struggling to get a grasp of my relationship with my mother, or a lack of one.

At some point, I stopped caring and couldn’t be bothered. I stopped trying so hard to make it work. I guess something within me died. Maybe my heart had simply taken all the battering it could and had curled up somewhere and had stopped being. I went my own merry way and left my mother in her sterile, sunless world. Mother never knew about my first boyfriend and how disastrously that ended. She has no clue that I still carry some of the scars. We never got to have those girly talks that should have been my rite of passage. I doubt she ever wondered about what was going on with me as a teenager, the things I might have done, the ones I actually did. She has no clue whatsoever about me, she has no idea what makes me tick or what goes on in my head. She doesn’t know how many times my heart has been broken, the mistakes I’ve made or how complicated my life is at the moment. I can’t talk to her about any of these things, not because I don’t want to or because I want to shut her out, but because I never knew how to. Because I wouldn’t even know how or where to begin. Because a part of me is still afraid she’ll judge me. Because she’s never been an emotional part of my life and it’s a little too late to start trying to build anything now when there was never a foundation to start with.

Sadly, the twilight has crept in upon us. The day has been spent and it is now too dark to do anything, too late to make amends. I came back home for the first time in almost eighteen years when Dad called and told me about the tumour. The journey halfway across the world is still fuzzy in my mind, wispy, like a dream. All I remember is the numbing fear and the panic that threatened to swallow me whole. Like the memories of my mother, my recollections are choppy and disjointed. I vaguely recall walking through the hospital corridors like the lost soul I was, choking on the tears I had been unable to shed since the day I’d left home. And before I was ready for it, I was confronted by the frail wraith that once had been my mother. I fell upon her, pouring out my heart to her and willing her to please, please hear me. I wept for us, for all the seasons we wasted, for the words that should have been said, for what could have been, for what will never be.

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And as the beeping machine finally flat-lines, all I can think is maybe love really is all that matters…