To my mum

My mum died five years ago today.  I've written her this letter. 

So much has happened since you crept gracefully out of life.   I know you’ll be ecstatic that I finally mustered up the courage to walk away from that relationship that was so damaging to me, that you knew has become a mirror image of your marriage.  After you died I tried many things to fix it but in the end I knew that to stay with him would be like a betrayal of you.  So I left and it was the best decision of my life.  You’ll be proud of me, I think, for doing the thing you were never quite able to do.

I’ve started singing.  I know!  I wish you’d lived long enough, and been well enough, to come and see my choir.  It’s been a lifeline for me and I now understand how singing was such an emotional outlet for you, a release of all the feelings you took care to hide from everyone.  When illness took away your singing voice I saw how painful it was for you; now I understand something of how soul-destroying that must have been.   I would love, so much, to be able to sing with you.   Oh, that we could have the chance to do it. 

I cook like you.  Throw it all in, one pot dinners.  My spaghetti bolognese and moussaka taste like yours but I’ve never managed to match your roast potatoes – although let’s be honest, no one could ever match your roast potatoes.   I can never eat cheese on toast (with seasoning salt, of course) without thinking about you, with a smile.  The same goes for chicken noodle soup, our comfort illness food.

I’ve had a horrible year, mum.  I’ve wanted more than anything to curl up on your lap at your end of the sofa and have you make it all better; there were times when I thought about coming to find you in the sweet hereafter or wherever you may be.   I know you’ll understand that, I think you felt that way more often than you ever said. You knew there was a dark shade to me and without you to talk to about it I’ve felt lost.  I’m coming through the other side of it now. Being a strong woman is as much my strength and yet my weakness as it was for you and I’m learning when to ask for help, and accept it.  I’ve learnt so much from what you did and couldn’t do. 

I wish you could have known B.  You’d like him ever such a lot.  He’s even got me interested in gardening, so maybe I have got your green fingers after all.  He makes up silly songs and I can just picture the two of you together in your garden, pottering about among the hardy perennials swapping ever-more ludicrous rhymes!  Yesterday he said “even if you don’t believe in god, you can still believe in magic.”  I think you’d love that as much as I do. 

When you died I was terrified I’d never be able to remember you as you were before illness, but I do, and I feel happy at these memories more than I feel sad.  I have this picture up in my bedroom, you and your funny, shy little shadow.  We had such good times you and I. 

I guess I’m not in Singledom anymore.

I have a boyfriend. 

This is weird. Good weird, but weird nonetheless.

I haven’t had a boyfriend for three years; I liked being single and being in control of my own destiny, with only myself to please, and it was definitely by choice. Oh, alright, and also partly because my man radar was way off kilter and anyone I’ve got involved with has turned out to be highly unsuitable for one reason or another (or, just not that into me. We’ll ignore that).

Anyway, Mr Bearface as he is now known – I am nothing if not original – has odd interests. Odd to me as they are entirely outside my experience, that is. He does skateboarding and snowboarding and is as passionate about them as I am about singing and cheese, which is to say, very.   Given my complete lack of co-ordination and ingrained fear of anything approaching extreme sports it is unlikely I will ever be tempted to join him in either of these things.  I love that he has passions in life and feels like he’s come home when he does them, however, I must confess that on going to a skate park with him recently I did feel rather like his mum. Do I clap? Do I kiss it better if he grazes his knee? Do I sew up the patches in the jeans he only bought recently (fancy skating in them, young Bearface Esq) that have ripped from doing some kind of ‘move’?  I am really interested in the world surrounding his interests and the philosophies that accompany it, but I do feel slightly at a loss as I can’t contribute. I remember a girl I knew getting hold of a book like Rugby for Dummies or something and genning up on the rules, manoeuvres and positions of the game – it served her well, she made it with most of the rugby team as I recall. I, however, can’t quite bring myself to ferret out a similar book because I’d sound like a prick, suddenly spouting stuff about how to ‘ollie’ (I’m cringing right now)  so it’s a good thing I like listening to Mr Bearface enthusing; perhaps I’ll pick stuff up along the way.  It’ll be RAD.

Another weird thing is he’s a vegetarian.  And eats fake meat.  I’ll say it again. FAKE MEAT. I’ll be honest, I don’t see the point. Some of it does actually taste alright but I reckon that even as a carnivorous meat hound, I eat more vegetables than he does. I like meat.  I love meat. MEAT. That is all.

So from meat to flesh. Say hello to personal hygiene and grooming, everyone. Given that in the last year my ability to shower on a daily basis has been severely compromised by that fucker called Depression – seriously, getting out of bed to go to the toilet can be a seven hour process sometimes never mind actually washing – it is nothing less than extraordinary to find myself showering AND moisturising every single day. No one likes a smelly bear, after all.  Also (men, look away now lest you have all your illusions shattered) remembering to pluck those random granny hairs from your chin so that he doesn’t get stubble rash from kissing you; that’s a right old pain and yet I do it because I want to look good for him and for me and it’s been a while since I wanted to look good for anyone, least of all myself.

And oh how we laugh!  At nothing.  At each other. Laughing without even having to explain what I’m laughing at because he just knows.  I haven’t done this much laughing in such a long time and whilst I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s the best medicine (I am all about the SSRI’s and therapy) it is certainly making my smile, a lot, which after the bastard that was 2011 is no mean feat.   Anyone who says when they see me in my shitty old-man style striped and faded pyjamas “I don’t know if they have a brand* but if they did it would be ‘Convalescence’…” is getting the funnies right in my book.

Probably the weirdest thing about it all is the fact that I’m used to being the strong one in a relationship. The one who picks up the pieces, gives the advice and encouragement, grits teeth when said advice is duly ignored.  I do the looking after and admitting I might need some looking after in return is difficult and frankly, makes me nervous.  I wasn’t sure I’d manage being the one who needed propping up but do you know what, I sort of don’t mind and I know I need it.  I like not having to be the only one navigating the good ship ’Us’ through the tumultuous waters of life; I like knowing that there’s another hand on the tiller, helping to guide us to calmer shores. 

2012 is going to be a difficult year for me, lots of challenges with health, work and finances are threatening to send me toppling over the edge, but knowing that I’ve started the year laughing so much with someone who isn’t freaked out by my mentalism and situation is definitely a properly good beginning.  Weird, but good.

*Primark, seeing as you asked.

Not to be morbid..

I never intended this blog to be morbid and depressive, I envisaged it being witty and insightful and laugh a bloody minute. But I have just found my way, by accident, into my sent mail from 2008/2009. I wrote this on 30th July 2008, when I was engaged to be married, but knew deep down it wasn't for me. It's a letter to I don't know who, about my mum who died 21st May 2007.

"My mother is dead. I don’t know who this is for. I like to think it’s for anyone suffering the loss of their beloved but probably it’s just for me. A self-indulgence.

We all knew it was coming; she’d been like a cat with nine lives. No one could be that ill, for that long and continue to fight and fight and fight. We’d been told she had months, not years. In the end it was days.

Within hours of her passing people were saying at least it was expected. Why do people think that makes all the difference? It wasn’t fucking expected. I hadn’t been expecting the phone call in the middle of the night, I hadn’t been expecting to see her dead in a side room of a hospital ward, I hadn’t been expecting it to be now.

I say now, but I started writing this just after she died; 14 months ago. I recently got a new laptop so I was copying across all the bits and bobs saved on the old one, when I saw this. I read it, and I cried. It’s still true. 14 bloody months have gone by and it’s all still true.

Even when I made myself face the harshest realities of her illness, I never imagined the actual moment of her passing. Yes, I’d been terribly practical, planning the funeral in my head, organising my father’s life and grief in advance. It didn’t matter in the end. The holes that have been made in my heart, my head, my gut are beyond imagining. You can’t prepare for that.

Funny, how you still function. I’d never understood how bereaved people were able to carry on being human. Truth be told, I’d always thought my grief, when it came, would be so overwhelming, people would see how it is to be truly lost in despair. I was at best naïve, at worst supremely arrogant. I know better now. God, she was fabulous and funny and beautiful. But as much as I miss her I wouldn’t wish her back to the life she had. The indignity of a once such vibrant woman being confined to a hospital bed, kept alive by machines while her mind wandered further and further from reality. It would have been an existence not a life.

I dial ‘mum mob’ on my way back from work, even now. I always called her on the walk between station and home. I wish there was a voicemail message so I could hear her, but she never quite got to grips with the whole voicemail thing in life, so I suppose I’m expecting too much to hope to hear it now, in death. I remember she had her own mother’s handbag in the back of our airing cupboard when I was small. I didn’t understand that then. She’s gone, why hold on to the tat? But I’ve got mums handbag, stuffed in the back of a wardrobe because I can’t face looking through it. I know there’s some change in her purse, but what do you do with a dead woman’s coins? Can’t give them away, can’t spend them.

14 months, and I still feel lost. I still feel anger and bitter and I’m raging; at the hospitals for not curing her, at myself for not doing more. And at her, for leaving me when I need her most.

It’s hard to remember the times before she got ill. Try as I might, the memories of sickness and distress will keep pushing out all the happy and fun times. I hope this will pass. It has to pass because I can’t spend the rest of my life with only the sad recollections of a too-short life for company. And I know the other stuff is there, waiting in the wings, anticipating a time when I will look back and laugh and remember and be thankful for the life she had.

I’m getting married. She won’t be there. I never really expected that she would be, but it still puts a pre-emptive downer on the day. She would have loved being the mother of me, the bride. I want to go shopping for her outfit. Actually I do go shopping for her outfit but then I remember she’s gone. Anyway, it would have been a hard task persuading her to splash out and not go for a Matalan two piece. Perhaps I’d have splashed out on her behalf, but then again, perhaps not. I was never quite the daughter I wanted to be. I took too much and gave too little. Maybe that’s just how it is with mothers and daughters.

People tell me I’ll feel her with me. I haven’t yet. But mum, if you’re out there, I miss you. And I could really do with a cuddle."