I am thinking about my mother a lot. I have had some tearful moments, moments where I feel full of regret, saddened by the circumstances we both dealt with, hurt by the state of our relationship. As my own child grows within me, I guess it is natural to examine your own mother-child relationship.
My mother died 16 January 2012, a mere 10 months ago. It was just the two of us growing up, I never met my dad, my mother was my world and I was hers; that was the beginning of the problem. Our lives were so intertwined it was unhealthy. My mother never had a serious relationship besides from her almost marriage when I was a young toddler. After that I was her world.
But I grew up and was no longer mommy's little girl. I wanted so much to see the world, experience it, soak it all up. We spent my entire childhood in a small holiday town, Margate (a place I have come to loath for its small mindedness, its idle gossip and lack of originality). By the time I finished school I had bought a bus ticket and was on my way to the big city, Cape Town. I was free, there was so much to learn, to experience, new people, new places, mew ways of being. I was alive. I think it was two months before my mom followed and I was back in the house, back in the routine, back in Margate. I was frustrated, I wanted to break free. The more I tried to be my own person, experience my own things, the more I felt I was leaving her behind, and she knew it. She held on tighter and tighter.
Comments about my life and my experiences became negative; they became about how she never had the chance to do those things, how could I do them without her? would she ever be able to live like that? be happy like I was? be free like I was? I stopped wanting to share. Guilt & avoidance became our way of communicating, it was the undercurrent in every conversation, every visit. I begrudged it, she begrudged me for begrudging her. It was a cycle that neither of us could out of.
Then the lump was found. The fact is that the lump had been there for years, the first few times they said it was "nothing to worry about" - they were wrong. By the time they realised their error it was too late. Our visits moved to hospital waiting rooms, waiting in gloomy government hospitals to see some ineffectual doctor that would not help at all. You would think that something like this would bring us closer but it just made the guilt bigger. That secluded life she had built for herself became a place of desolation and isolation, but also the place she refused to leave, it had become her life, her comfort zone. This was not a place I wanted to be in. She lashed out at me - a lot.
During and since this period of our lives I have tried to avoid hearing of the stories she told of me, or seeing the pictures she painted of me - the reaction from our family was enough to tell me it was bad. I tried to ignore it, I swallowed the pain, the hurt, I dealt with the rejection from my family and I continued to be the person to be there for her, sit with her, speak about the good old days as if I knew nothing, I defended myself to no one.
We were fighting the cancer, with a mastectomy and chemotherapy and all seemed to be going as well as it could be. Until one day I arrived at her house to find a small, frail, bald woman screaming in pain then passing out, then vomiting, then starting again. Was this what chemo did to people? I did not know. I had no one to call. No family nearby, no family to even call due to the stale mate that had occurred over the past months. After an hour or so of this, we bundled this frail little woman, who no longer resembled my mother, into the car and off to emergency we went. A coma ensued. Emergency brain surgery was undertaken at 3am. I sat in a stark hospital room howling in pain, she was going to die and things were still like this...it couldn't be happening. I watched as the brain surgeon walked down the brightly lit corridor, with his white coat flapping, holding his clip board. What would he say to me? This man had the ability to my change my world forever and I had never met him before. She survived the surgery. I saw her wheeled to her room with huge staples running across her skull and a ventilator in her mouth. Now we would wait and see if she woke up and if she did, what state she would be in.
It was Christmas. I lay on the couch like a vegetable, watching Friends - the entire series. I had never watched it before, sure an episode here and there but never got to know these people. They became my lifeline, my world. My mother woke up, we took presents to ICU - she would never remember this. She had to relearn talking, walking, who she was, who I was, writing, expressing herself. My mother had been reduced to a child, she was scared, she cried a lot, she giggled like a little girl and she couldn't remember my name. I was physically and emotionally done. I cried in bathrooms, I cried everyday on the way to work. She needed and wanted me close by all the time, I felt like I couldn't breath, like the oxygen was being drained from the atmosphere.
It would take an exhausting year and a half of rehabilitation to get her back on her feet where she could live on her own again. We went through all of this, she came back from the brink of death, we struggled through the rehab, through everything just for things to go south. I think she was on her own for a year when the blurring of her vision started. One trip to the neurosurgeon and everything changed again. She was booked in for an emergency scan, after which they sent us to wait on the radiology floor for admission. We sat there for hours, no one said a word to us. We did not know why we were there but we knew it was not good. By the time a doctor came he was babbling about lesions and radiation - we looked at him blankly. It was then that he realised that in the four hours we had sat there waiting no one had come to break the news to us. My mother had multiple brain tumours and her life expectancy was extremely low - like 3 months low. He was sorry that no one had told us properly. I was sorry too. Its not the kind of news you just babble about.
In the end she decided not to fight. She was exhausted, the past 2 years had been hard, too hard. In her last few months I saw and experienced incredible things. I saw how her 2 best friends, who did not live in Cape Town, came down to spend a month with her - they loved her, they made her laugh, they took her out for anything she wanted, they wheeled her in a wheelchair when walking became difficult and had giggling fits about it. They bathed her, they laughed so much they cried. It was a beautiful thing to behold. She was probably the happiest I had seen her since she left Margate, which was 12 years ago.
I held my mothers hand when she took her last breaths. As it was in the beginning, so it was at end - just the two of us. Somehow we never really healed the fissures that had grown between us. But we did speak; I told her to go, I told her that I didn't blame her for anything; that her life was hard and it was time to let go and start again, somewhere new, a little wiser.
I miss her, not the woman she became but the woman she was when I was younger. I want to remember her that way, vibrant, young, beautiful, full of life and sass. I am hoping that my experience with my child will help me get closer to that person I so badly want to hold in my memories.
