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quordleona03 · 11 months ago

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Not quite a Christmas story

My mother was born in 1935. In 1940, she and her mother went as refugees from WWII to Canada, where my mother spent the next five years in a Catholic boarding school and my grandmother worked in a munitions factory and they saw each other on Sundays. My grandfather was in the navy. After the war, my grandparents had two more children, hated each other, and divorced in 1969 when their youngest child turned 18.

My mother came to Scotland in 1959, taught school for a year, met my father, went back to Canada to get married, and came back to Scotland in 1964. She had three children, and when we were young, she gave us a wonderful childhood with - moments.

At Christmas she would devise each of us a stocking with small presents she had bought through the year, just right as stocking-stuffers, and also always fruit and nuts tucked into the toe. She taught each of us to cook - I have been baking expertly since I was eight years old. She taught each of us to read, and never banned us from reading any of the books that crowded our family home. She gave fantastic birthday parties, and because my birthday falls inside the Christmas holiday season when everybody is partied out, she also used to organise a second party for me elsewhen in the year - at Hallowe'en, or in the summer holidays. She liked to give thoughtful perfect presents but when I made clear my favourite present was a book token and an afternoon in the biggest children's bookshop, that's what she gave me, plus oddments to unwrap so it wasn't just booktoken envelopes to open on the day. She took us to a cottage in the Borders every summer, a 4-room cottage with no electricity, water heated by the fire in the living-room, and we spent golden weeks there.

She got me my first set of adult library cards, two years early, when she realised I had literally run out of books to read in the children's library. She gave me blank lined notebooks for journals, and my first two manual typewriters, and bought me paper and pens. She read aloud to me: The Once And Future King, and Ivanhoe, and The Lord of the Rings.

And then there was a birthday party that was cancelled at the last minute because my mother realised she had left too much undone and couldn't do it: the teacher told the class and told me separately and sent me home early and must have told the children not to tease me about it. There was any number of times I got screamed at for offences I didn't understand at the time (and only sometimes understand now). There was the strange distancing that happened between ten and seventeen, as I became less and less able to fit the mold of the daughter she wanted. I came out to her at seventeen - she was almost the first person I told: and she was horrified, and I lived for the next two years in an atmosphere of unremitting disapproval. The disapproval didn't end when I was 19: I left home.

My mother was homophobic til the day she lost consciousness: she just got better at hiding it over the years. The measure of her love for me is that despite wishing all of her life that I would stop being a lesbian, she never could bring herself to disown me.

My mother dealt with my neurodivergence - I am dysphraxic - by deciding it wasn't real: I spent decades of my life not sure why I was always so clumsy and so kackhanded with anything requiring delicate coordination. She didn't want me dysphraxic any more than she wanted me lesbian.

I found a page in one of her journals, a Christmas fantasy of her family in ten years time: of her oldest child married and with kids, her youngest child married with another kid. I was not in this fantasy: the unsatisfactory daughter.

My mother was a hoarder: it took me months to clear her last home of stuff. I found the teddy bear she'd had since she was five, tucked away in the clutter, and gave it to the undertaker to include in her coffin at the funeral. It seemed to me she should go with one of the things she'd loved and kept in life. My mother hoarded things. She and my father, who died ten months before her, lived in a large flat that was cluttered wall to wall with things - with books, of course, and with food, with clothes she no longer wore, gifts she had never given, inheritances and things picked up in charity shops, the once-useful and the might-be-useful and the someday-useful. And papers. And journals. And spent lottery tickets. She hadn't held down a job since the 1980s, and she had - from her journals - sometimes elaborate fantasies about what she'd do when she won.

We were waiting for the paramedics to take my mother to the hospital after the last bad fall she had, and because it wasn't an emergency they were very late. I made us cocoa and toasted cheese sandwiches in my mother's kitchen, while we were waiting. The last meal I made for her. I can't remember what the first one was, when she first showed me how to cook.

A couple of months later, I invited a couple of volunteers from a soup kitchen/food bank to come over and take what they wanted from the kitchen. I had meant to have it better organised but when they came, they looked at me, and at my mother's kitchen, and one said "You haven't been able to get started on this, have you?" and I said no, and they said "we'll do it". They boxed up everything they could take with them, and sorted the rest into cardboard boxes of what a charity shop would likely take and what should just go to the dump, and somewhere, I hope, some of that hoard of mugs are still in use, being drunk from with hot tea by someone who could really use a cuppa.

My mother died on this day, on 23rd December 2015, and over the years I have dealt with the anniversary of her death in different ways: I've gone on holiday, I've gone swimming, I've gone for a walk, I've gone to see Cats the Movie, I even one year worked a full day at work because Christmas fell on a Sunday and they were offering full hours to anyone who wanted to work the last Friday.

This year, I'm tired and in recovery from COVID. I've made bread, done laundry, done the dishes, had two naps, tried to read a Mira Grant novel, changed the cat litter trays, taken the rubbish out, gone for as long a walk as I could manage, and I'm still sitting here, contemplating my mother's life and death and legacy and wishing for, I don't know what.

My father's life is so much easier: he had a happy childhood, work he loved, a retirement spent writing and walking and caring for his wife. My father's life makes a satisfying story: he wrote some of it down in a memoir for his children.

My mother's life was strange and muddled and broken and full of cluttered things and unfocussed anger and a lot of misery. And yet: I still miss how she would say my name, sudden and joyous, "Oh, it's you!"

#my mother's life #my mother's death #unsatisfactory daughter #loved daughter

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