How might your life be different if you knew more about your mother?
Knew her fears and worries, not just about you, her daughter, or your siblings, and your father or other family members.
What would it mean to you to know and understand your mother as an individual with her own hopes, dreams and wishes, regrets, ambitions, etc?
How might you be different, your life changed if you could see the entire person that comprises your mother, the little girl who lives inside her?
A pang of fear grips me as I write this for I never got to know my mother in this way.
And yet I did.
No, she was never able to articulate her story, the memoir of her life in a moving fashion that led to some cathartic discovery on my part.
And yet her fear, her inability to list the events in her life, and prioritize how they left her feeling, made her into the person that she was, told a story unto itself.
I draw much from what my mother could and did not say, perhaps more than from what she said, or I wish she would have said.
Perhaps in our silence, we speak more, that the lack of words echoes louder than utterances and syllables of what could have been.
As a mother of three daughters, ages 26 yrs., 21 yrs. and 14 yrs., I now fear that perhaps I say, have said too much–that
my attempts at explaining the person that I am has perhaps failed.
It is the best I can do, my response in the wake of a mother who said so little to me, I wishing for more, wanting to merge and understand.
Do we ever find balance, get it right?
Perhaps that is not the goal, rather our aim must be to remain present, in whatever way we can.
To give our personal best in the most honest and sincere way.
That, I know my mother did.
I am able to see this now as I a mother struggle to make sense of my own patterns of mothering, parenting, coming and remaining present with both my children–and myself.
I’ve thought about those questions many times. What if I could travel back in time to the 1930s and 40s and get to know my mother as a child, teenager and young adult. But as you so eloquently put it I have. Age brings perspective. As I approach age 55 I see my mother in a gentler light. Like I inherited the family stigmata of mental illness, my depression and panic attacks as opposed to my mother schizophrenia I also have my mother’s feisty attitude. I think that’s what keeps me going. I still hear her voice and I still cry for her comfort when the chips are down and life is kicking my ass. Even though I’m a grown woman I still need my mother because she knows and understands what I go through daily.
I realize I can never blame her for not being in touch with her feelings because in those days Black people and women were taught not to put their business in the street. Over the last six years I’ve discovered many family secrets. I’ve seen the effect keeping secrets has had on my family.
Since I have no children I’m exploring how the lives of my mother and my grandmother affect me as an adult. Memories of the past are now held in a different context. As a writer it’s up to me to make sense of those memories so my life will hopefully be better.
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