Mother Knows Best

You’re going to need to sit down Mum.

You’re not going to like what I’m going to say. But say it, I must.

Remember when I was 16 you bought me a suitcase for my birthday and told me “now you can really run away”? I’d been running away – down the road, to the neighbours, across the shopping mall – since I could walk. It wasn’t that our life was awful. It was middle class white bread nice. With socks and shoes and perpetually made beds. Closed doors were verboten in our house.

“I don’t believe in closed doors” you said.

But I do Mum. I believe in space to be myself. That’s why I was always running away. I needed to run to myself, to the life I thought I needed to be living. A dirtier, messier, chaotic life with frayed edges and crossed out paragraphs. I needed to experience a life populated by lively characters sporting the bumps and bruises of experience – characters who don’t necessarily wash behind their ears, and occasionally eat burgers for breakfast – those people you wouldn’t like.

It’s not that your values are not important to me. They are. It’s just I need to bungy from them to my own beliefs, my own ideals, my own life.

Over the years we’ve had some hard times together, and I’ve been the one left at home who massaged your feet at the end of the hard working day. I heard you sobbing in the yard when you couldn’t start the motor mower, in that dark time living on Buckland’s Beach when we left Dad. It was just us, and you needed me to make the meals, and tidy the house after school. I’d cook Spaghetti Bolognese (from scratch) light the candles and set the table with a bottle of red wine, for us to share when you got home from work. I mothered you then, aged fifteen.

You were the first person I thought of when I came to after the C-section. I needed your wisdom, your knowledge on how to be a good mum. I needed it communicated in your strong hug, as if it could seep into myself through touch alone. I missed you then, Mum. The circle had completed and I was absolutely separated from you and wandering down my own motherhood path.

Marriage and motherhood hasn’t been a straight road for me, as it wasn’t for you. I divorced as you did, when I needed to escape from a controlling man, just as you did. But it hasn’t been the same experience, it hasn’t been your experience rerun through the film reels of my life.

I know it’s difficult for you to accept, as you are entering the last scenes of your life’s play, that my expression of motherhood is different from yours. My children and I are very close. We share things. I sometimes swear in front of them (something you’d never do!) but I always apologise later. I let them shut their bedroom doors. I want them to share wine at the dinner table with us, so that they will learn to respect alcohol. I talk frankly with them about drugs, and how they shouldn’t..not even once.. I’m honest with them about my inherited depression and their predisposition. I tell them to quietly keep a watching brief, in case they should find themselves in the shadows one day. I wish you’d told me about your post natal depression after having me. It would have been so much easier to cope with if I’d expected it.

You find it difficult to accept that my life has been less ordered than yours. You say things like;

“Why don’t my daughters have any money at this stage of their lives? What have I done wrong in bringing them up? Why don’t they have their lives organised as other people’s daughters do?”

Frankly it stings. I need to say this now.

Mum, I’m 41 years old. It no longer matters to me that you can’t stand the way I wear my hair or that I fiddle with it whilst driving. (It’s curly and messy and unorthodox. But so am I) I don’t care that you can’t stand my favourite black leather jacket, the one with the studs that cost $800 and is a designer label. (because it makes you look like a biker). I don’t mind that you think I wasted 16 years married to a man who despised me (I have three fantastic children, without whom I wouldn’t be me). It doesn’t matter that you don’t always approve of your grandchildren, that you think the dog shouldn’t be allowed in the house (let alone on the bed!), and that you think the movies we watch are too violent and feature bad language. (Love Actually is not that bad. Well there is that porn film scene..) It doesn’t matter that you don’t approve of my career choices (why can’t you just get a nice little part time secretarial job. – cos that wouldn’t be a good use of a degree, and a brain!)

I am sorry you don’t approve of me, but you know what Mum? It doesn’t matter anymore, because I like me. I know that I’ve had an up and down time. (you don’t know the half of it!). I know that my kids and my pets all run rings around me but that’s ok. I love them. I love the fact that they make my life so full. I love this wonderful man for whom we crossed the world like a bunch of nomads. I have made some difficult decisions and I’m proud of who I’ve become. Of what this life, my life has become. I know you don’t understand my choice of career (you’ll never make money writing on the internet all day), and you think it’s a waste that I’m not amassing an incredible superannuation fund, and property in hot spots around the globe.

I’m crying now.

Mum, I’ve made a life for myself and I hope one day you’ll see that, whilst different from yours, my life has
always been bolstered by your love and support. I ran away but I always knew you were there in the background waiting for my call. No matter that you drive me nuts, that your disapproval stings, that I can’t spend more than four days in the same house with you in one stretch. You will always be the lynch pin in my life, and I cannot bear to think that one day you won’t be there to despair of my crazy life choices.

 I love you mum, and miss you. But I need you to know now, that this mother knows best, for this mother.

This post was part of the Sleep Is For the Weak Writing Workshop.

You’re going to need to sit down Mum. You’re not going to like what I’m going to say. But say it, I must. Remember when I was 16 you bought me a suitcase for my birthday and told me “now you can really run away”? I’d been running away – down the road, to ...

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