Narrowing it all down into words now, like a weed emerging from a tiny crack between the flagstones, so warm beneath my bare feet these summer evenings. Words feel very tiny for this sense of changing light, changing appetite, changing tempo. Six weeks of summer holidays from school may have something to do with it. My mother slowing down. I've more or less given up she tells me, slumped on her bed in summer shirt and trousers I seem to have known forever. Sweet-natured physios encourage her to stand and turn and sit, stand and turn and sit, bed to chair, chair to bed. She is by turns funny, and savage in her response to their gentleness. She pulls faces, she complains it's all such a fuss. Don't touch me she snarls. The young Asian physio, pulls her helping hand away, smiles quietly. Why are they so beautiful to me these young women, their enormous patience and kindness, their simple desire to help? My mother on the road to nowhere, puts herself in our hands entirely, and we must decide what is best now to do. Next weekend we three siblings will come together here to have this archetypal conversation, over wine and good food, strawberries, gooseberries, bilberries, all the plenty of West Yorkshire. Try to decide if our mother can go home, or where home is going to be now - a home?
And I am well, and I am intact, and I am, somehow, ready for this. Sad, oh yes. Sorry. Yes. But I confess (must it be a confession?) I am feeling an unexpected sense of liberation. The clinging, needy, demanding mother has gone. I no longer have to phone her twice a week, to hear the same refrain of how much it means to her to hear my voice, what a difference it makes. I no longer have to go and sit beside her watching tennis, drinking wine, dredging for conversation. Taking her white lilies. The sharp mixture of sadness and freedom is not what I would have guessed.
Now I take her hand, lean my head into hers, try to imagine what it feels like to begin the sentence I really feel I ought to be going... then taper off, unable to finish the thought, much less the sentence.
5 comments:
This is so beautiful in its tender honesty. Thank you for sharing it, and warmest wishes (or cool ones if these are more welcome in the hot weather).
This was like a sock in the gut. Must have been even harder to write. Hugs.
You will be ok - you already know that. There is only so much you can and must do. This is your mother's life journey, all you can do is be there when you can. And not let the mother-daughter guilt trip mess it up.
Good to know you're all there, thanks.
Late with this, been occupied elsewhere. I think I understand.
Take care.
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