Her Hands

“I told my friend I was hitting an emotional wall. She said, sometimes walls are there to lean on and rest. I cannot even begin to express how much I needed to hear that.” Unknown

Still now I see her hands, soft, veined and holding the book. She reads my favourite tale, The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde. I am twelve pleading with her to read it to me. She chides, “you’re getting too old to be read to”, and gives in like she always does.  

Soaking up her words, the way she reads the tale, always lying next to her so my body touches her somehow. Softly drifting into the story. This is how it always was.

Her hands, her voice, her warmth, my mother.

One of my richest memories of childhood. She reads out loud to me all my young life. The Happy Prince and The Nightingale and The Rose, so many other stories and tales. I read avidly to my own children for years, a gift from her. The inexplicable joy of someone giving you their time with stories.

Fiercely intelligent and strongly feminist, she could speak to many topics and hang the show ponies out to dry, especially men. Stunningly attractive, she made rooms stand still upon entrance, constantly harassed as she walked down the street, she loathed the attention. Equally, an extraordinarily difficult life we know very little of, both traumatic and hard.

Still, she listened and attended and cared for us. She turned up for everything in our lives. Every week we had butterfly cakes, cookies, scones and pancakes. Her pavlova for Christmas. Her stories at night. She was our world.

Until one day she wasn’t, without warning, after the birth of our first child, her first grandchild, she began withdrawing.

Years of grieving. Sending photos of her grandkids, inviting her to stay and money to live. Offering her secure housing and a family who wanted her around. Booking flights which she almost always cancelled last minute. The more we reached for her, the more she retreated.

One of our daughters called her every week, hoping she’d come to celebrate her birthday, promising she would. Three days before she phoned, “I’m not coming and could you tell her for me.”

Something in me let go. Not this, not my daughter, hurt me but not her. Finally, years of trying to reach and include her, I simply stopped.

Rarely talking about her, not knowing how to explain her disappearance, her disinterest. You can’t. People judged and shamed, it’s your mother, like some how I, we, held the magic and responsibility to fix it all.

Mostly it has been a quiet and enduring heartache.

This March she calls. I don’t answer. I can’t bear the yearly shallowness in her words, the voice I no longer know. She leaves a message, “calling to wish you a happy birthday and to say I’m sorry I haven’t been the mother you have needed in this lifetime.”  

Sucking in air quite sternly, I recoil, not my birthday, no way.

At the same time, I would give anything for her hands, her voice, her warmth, my mother.

Seventy-nine now, admitted into emergency, calling her for the first time, she sounds frail, telling me she got her wish, to talk to me. She asks about the grandkids and is unable to say much beyond that, she adds reflectively, “you were a soft and beautiful little girl, and, for a lot of years I forgot I had a daughter.” 

And it comes flooding back, what I gruellingly set out to numb, how much I’ve wanted her through these years.

The psychiatrist delivers a diagnosis of a complex mental illness. This makes sense. The earliest and most common symptom, isolation from others. Pieces fit together, explaining the why, her absence. Never her fault, or ours.

In my van on a road trip to meet my daughter, the wall crumbling, persistent tears fall I swore I’d cried a million times over. I speak only with my brother and two friends for a time. Clearing my work calendar for some days, practising what I teach, self-compassion and kindness.

Happily, solo and independently operated, I surprisingly tell my friend I wish I had a partner, to help hold this load and offer tenderness. For twenty-five years she’s witnessed the impacts of my mother’s illness and her decline of any type of help. She messages me back, “I am your partner today and I’m telling you’ve done all there is to do, and I love you.”

So, I did what the moment called me to do tucked up in my van, I google The Selfish Giant. Closing my eyes for a moment to imagine her hands, her voice, her warmth. I then read my favourite story the way she used to. For a tiny moment I forget the years of absence and longing as I speak the words out loud to a place only the two of us knew.