Yer Maws Yer Maw

The darker side to Mothers Day….

“Yer Maws yer Maw!”; there’s no greater meaning behind any other bond - no matter how bloody hard that is to bear.

Mothers Day brings so many ambiguous feelings to the surface for so many.  The imperfection, loss or waste of maternal connection can be hard to explain to those who could never understand. 

I struggle with Mother’s Day, I always have.  I have a ‘Difficult’ relationship with my Mum which runs so deep I don’t know if I’ll ever find the bottom.  This word ‘Difficult’ encompasses more than I care to explain right here, right now, yet it doesn’t do any justice what-so-ever to the scale and scars of it. 

Mother’s Day morning still jolts me like a series of powerful wee electric shocks; “You should be doing….”.  “Why should I?”. “What will people think?” and “Just don’t mention it, it’ll all be gone tomorrow”.  A historical negative shameful shouldistic self-narration laced with comparison and commercial imperative to be all ‘hearts and flowers’, that still muddles my brain a wee bit….

When I was little, and we made cards at school I went along with it of course, but the words, ‘Love’, ’Mummy’, ‘Best Mum’, felt grandiose and untrue, and, I just so wanted them to be true so I pretended and gushed along. In my teens and early 20’s I pretended rather grandly, literally faking it, lying, hoping positivity would change how I felt, transform it into the TV version of reality and the dark corners would light up.  In my 30’s I avoided it completely, totally ignored it, as all that incongruence was too much.

In my 40’s I’m dealing with it.  I got some help and went into the dark labyrinth of my childhood.  It was time; for me, there was no other place to go.  It was dark, brutal, sometimes a wee bit too much to bear and it’s taken several trips back in there to get ‘here’. 

I think a bit of naivety is required when entering the labyrinth; if I knew what it was going to be like, I simply wouldn’t have done it. I didn’t expect to find the ‘Wee me’ who my Mum and I had behind.  That wee girl abandoned in there, way back.  I had to sit with her, listen to her, comfort her, and help her.  I didn’t expect her to come with me, to take her wee hand in mine and bring her with me out of that dark cold labyrinth.  

Being ‘here’, where I am today a few months from walking into my 50th year on this planet and her days away from her 80th, is a ‘me’ more able to understand this tricky relationship with my Mum and how it’s intertwined and tangled in the craziest and darkest childhood. I’m able to accept it for what it is rather than continually judge it, her and me for what it’s not.  For it to be anything different she would have to be someone other than herself, which is impossible, and so would I, equally impossible.  Things would have to have played out differently, meaning everyone involved would have had to have been different people, from different backgrounds, living different lives; again, entirely impossible. 

Did she choose for it to play out the way it did?  How much could she have chosen anything? How much was just timing, placement, ‘broughtupness’ and her other important characters stamping their biography all over her, metaphorically and literally?  How could it have been any different? 

And, that still jars a wee bit with my belief in personal responsibility.  I MUST believe in personal responsibility, to be able to keep moving forward, learning, and growing and reflecting on how far I’ve come; from that neglected wee girl who was never ever good enough to being this woman who is entirely good enough and always has been. Free will versus personal responsibility is a seesaw in my head - a ‘tricky’ juxtaposition of destiny, hard determinism, and personal accountability. 

Experiencing this apposition, being with it, and ‘seeing it’ with some help of course, has helped me get out the other side of that dark labyrinth with Wee Gill’s wee hand in mine.  It’s afforded me the capacity to look back in with curiosity and compassion for my Mum, her Mum, her Mum and all the Mum’s, even though I’m not a Mum.  It’s allowed me to experience self-compassion, self-kindness, self-appreciation, and self-love.  This has naturally developed into compassion, appreciation, and kindness for others. Connection  - which I was absolutely not expecting and a part of me that I now love to bits and feel very, very proud of.  I was a steely cold independent woman with very limited trust or compassion available for anyone - understandably.  Sitting in the middle of that messy juxtaposition has helped me see that, we are all just doing the best with what we have at the time.  That’s fuel in my fire to keep on keeping on….

Doing her best with what she has; this is a line I have read in more books than you could shake a stick at.  It’s a line I have rolled my eyes so hard at, they’ve fallen out the back of my head.  It’s a concept that alluded me for the longest time, no matter how hard I tried and even pretended to ‘get it’. It never stuck and always became twisted into, “Well her best isn’t good enough”.

In my younger years my dislike, admittedly often disgust and hatred (there’s a powerful shame inducing word, right?) for my Mum and my childhood clouded everything - I was a victim of their violence, abuse, and neglect, so, it was literally impossible for me to see ‘it’ for what it was and see ‘me’ for who I really am.  I imagine I had to ‘be’ and ‘feel’ the extent of that victim space to be able to go into the labyrinth, it gave me the guts to step inside for the vindication and to discharge culpability, which I did (a continuous practice actually) and feel lighter for it.

With Wee Gill’s hand in mine, I’m now exploring what has become the most important questions; What happened to her; what happened to my Mum?  What happened in her life and her Mum’s life that brought about all that disaster and darkness?  What are the generational stories they never told?  What secrets are swept under the carpets and kept in cupboards to wither, yet never actually die (the fact that we will them to wither means they will never die). What does she wish were different for her?  Where does she go when she’s alone in her head? What can’t she bring herself to say to me; her only wee girl? 

She’s still hard as nails, still pushes me away; that’s so deeply ingrained in the rings in her trunk. Those questions make me incredibly sad, for her and for me.  We’ve never been to her place of honesty and sadly we may now never be able to make that trip.

Yesterday I went to visit her in hospital in Scotland, she is withered with Parkinsons, her mind over ridden with dementia, her body wrecked with years of alcoholism - she’s a tiny wee sparrow of a woman. Her stories are muddles of yesterday, twenty, forty years ago and her imagination, which sometimes beautifully delights her and sometimes utterly terrifies her. She is a tiny wee old lady who just needs care, comfort, compassion, and kindness in the final parts of her life. She needs recognition; she had a hard life too. I know this much is true!

I used to think I needed the anger, the confrontation, the how-dare-you, the apology and the make-up and the whole drama - yet was too terrified to be an actor in that play. I don’t need any of that anymore. I’ve managed to somehow fulfil that need from within myself. I sat with her as she slept yesterday, her skin porcelain perfect, tiny in a tiny bed, thinking how our roles have reversed. She’s now that innocent scared wee girl that needs love and care; love and care she’s never had or been able to accept. The realisation that I want to, and I can, to the best of my ability, give that to her - is frankly stunning. I can give her what I never got from her and I find myself needing to do it, for me - and her. This is new, scary and welcome.

This Mother’s Day for me isn’t a celebration of my Mum and our joyous connection – I admire that so much in others I experience with though; it’s taught me a lot.  This Mother’s Day, for me is a deeply sad reflection on our lives. Time lost, words unspoken and with tears I notice that forgiveness isn’t the dramatic event we see in the movies. It’s a dawning, a whisper, a scent in the breeze; it’s something that I’ve just began to see, hear and feel in myself. It’s an experience; a knowing that emerges in the clearing.

All these years have passed between us; they had to.  To be any different, we would have had to have been different people, living different lives and therefore not be who we are today. Life and relationships are not a Hallmark card for most of us and yet we look outside of ourselves and allow ourselves to feel bad, incompetent, and inadequate about what are our lives and our journey. Our story is our story. My story is my story.  I feel incredibly lucky to be where I am right now in this moment writing this. How much of where I am have I designed? it honestly feels like so very little sometimes, “There for the grace of god go I”, and still I know I have done, and I am, “Doing the Work’ every single day.

Today I’m thinking particularly of all those of us who have dark, ambiguous feelings about parental relationships, especially our Mum’s. The Mother daughter relationship is a powerfully deep and emotive concept and when it’s fraught with difficult emotions, I KNOW how hard it is to think about never mind reconcile.

In Scotland we say, “Yer Maws yer Maw!”; there’s no greater meaning behind any other bond - no matter how bloody hard that is to bear.

To everyone who can resonate with any of this; I SEE YOU ALL and my heart reaches to yours.

She did the best she could with what she had; she still is.

I did the best I could with what I had; I still am .

That is enough.  I accept that is enough. 

She is enough.

I am enough.

We are enough.