Today I read my mother’s poems

It occurred to me today that I should not take certain things for granted.

The way I should not take for granted that my mother was finally able to share her collection of poems with me yesterday. She had always been hesitant and decidedly insecure about showing them to anyone, let alone her daughter.

I suppose she thought that some part of our relationship as it stands currently, would prepare me for what I was about to read. She did remark later on that she felt we had become more like ‘friends’ to her rather than a mother speaking to her daughter.

The poems were earmarked into sections: ‘Mother’ ‘Wife’, ‘Friend’ and ‘Lover’.

I was unprepared for what I found in the ‘Lover’ section, I can tell you that. Words so full of lust and passion, longing and relief found in bodily union.

But then again, why not? It makes sense! My mother has always been a passionate woman, why should her words not bear testimony to this? And why should she not express this through her body? Through whatever it is we mean when we say, ‘sex’?

She is a woman and so am I. Perhaps the ‘Lover’ poems were only jarring because I did not expect to see a reflection of the waves of lust that I go through, the carnal experience of relationships that I have had and am currently having, the longing that is only sated through inexplicably… satisfying… sex…!

What a selfish assumption to make on my part!

There were poems in the ‘Wife’ collection that felt too close to the bone for me.

Leading up to my parents’ divorce, I remember being a persistently Angry (yes, the capital ‘A’ is deliberate) child/young woman.

At the age of sixteen, I knew that their marriage was doomed. In hindsight, I think this was perhaps unsettling and disorientating for me at the time. It did not help that I had moved from Indonesia to Australia only a few years previously, at thirteen years of age, and was finding it difficult to ‘find my own place’ again.

So, ‘Wife’, left me feeling quite raw.

It is difficult to have to face my own mother’s accounts of how lonely she was with my father. Moreover, there was a clear sense of how she is now able to enjoy ‘being alone without feeling lonely’ in her current marriage. I am glad for her, but this is painful for me to accept, as it is a blessing only made possible by her leaving my father.

But let’s be clear, I do not hold her decision against her.

In fact, it was I who told her, again at the age of sixteen, to not stay together ‘just for your kids’. Why did I say this? Because it was clear that they were not happy together and that this was not doing us (their children) any good either!

After reading her last piece, I told my mother that I was proud of her… and then I started to cry.

I was crying because she had shown how honest one could be: about our feelings, about the ambivalence one feels about the life-changing decisions, about what our body really needs, about how difficult but also how irreplaceable our relationships with our friends, colleagues, partners, ex-partners and finally, our children, can be.

To think that I find it so difficult to leave myself feeling vulnerable, and yet here is my mother doing exactly that, time and time again, poem after poem.

After a few deep breaths, my mother and I shared a hug. Then, she thanked me for being her friend and I thanked her for being my mother.

I hope to never take this for granted.