angharad

among my mum's papers is a book of poems she wrote with her twin sister. this one makes me cry:

angharad

sometimes

i sit and

stare

across the

room to

where the

sunlight

slanting

on a chair

would

mingle

with your

hair

if you were

sitting

there.

a eulogy (part 1)

this is what i would have said at my mum's funeral, if i could:

Val came into life in a traumatic way: the people attending to Mary, her mother, did not realise that Mary was carrying twins. So Astrid had been in the world about half an hour before Val was born.

Val and Astrid were identical - so much so that it was hard to tell them apart even as adults. Val told me of people coming up and touching them for luck when they were children. They must have been beautiful children with their pale skin and red hair; they certainly grew up to be beautiful women. Astrid is still beautiful now in her seventies.

It seems as though for a lot of her life Val was trying to escape being a twin. Her quest to be an individual consumed her and influenced most of the decisions she made. Astrid has told me how hurtful Val could be as they were growing up. But as Val grew old she became more comfortable with the idea that in the world was someone she had shared an egg with. Astrid gave me some of her letters which she wrote as she became ill with Alzheimers. They show a woman who was almost childlike, with an awareness of how she had failed the sister who had wanted to be close to her.

Certainly Val’s valuing of individuality was something that determined how she raised me for the 8 years I lived with her. She felt children should be allowed to develop with the minimum of boundaries so they could express themselves. This manifested itself in child-rearing that could have seemed neglectful; but I don’t think this was the case. There are snippets of memory that I have of her kindness and tenderness. I have smothered these because they nearly always make me cry. She would treat herself to a Boots Lemon Grass bath cube sometimes and she always gave me half of it for my bath. She baked cakes for my birthdays, and cooked lovely meals even after a long day at work. She made me clothes by hand, including circular skirts that needed bias binding sewing by hand all the way round which must have taken hours. In one photo of me in a lovely satin dress with pictures of chinese ladies on it I am wearing a vest. This says more that many of the other things - she worried about me getting cold.

A time came when she decided that she would let me go to live with my dad and his wife Maria. I will never know why or how this decision was arrived at. She asked me if I would like to live with Dad and Maria and her daughters and I said yes. For years this made me think I had chosen to go. But she chose to ask me the question in the first place; it is not a question I would ever ask my own child.

I have puzzled as to how she was able to let me go. None of the practical reasons make sense to me - that she was a working woman, it was hard to be a single parent in those days and so on. Now I have a child these are just so much rubbish. You could cut both my legs off and I would not let you take my child from me. I think the reason may be to do with being a twin.
My friend Merry says that your children’s skin feels like touching your own and this is true. They are made of the same stuff that you are, they have been nurtured inside you. This is why the bond with mothers is so strong. But maybe for Val this was her downfall. She already had been part of someone else. She and Astrid shared the same DNA. No doubt Astrid’s skin felt like Val’s own. So having a child must have set up a whole lot of conflicts within her that she had thought she was free of. The older I got the more she seemed to pull away from me. I in turn was hostile to her, in a way that she is unlikely to have experienced from Astrid who is a much milder character. The way she had brought me up had made me very difficult to handle. It must have seemed to her that I was acting out what she had been like to Astrid, pushing her away and at the same time needing her.

We will never know is any of this is true. The only person who might have known is dead. Even if she was alive she might not have had the self-knowledge to see into herself and explain.

What I can say is that the way Val gave me up has made me the person I am. Growing up knowing that your mother, for whatever reasons, has deemed you should grow up away from her leaves an indelible scar on a person. For many years I saw this as a weakness. But scars are tough, broken bones heal harder than they were before, and the early part of my life fitted me well for what was to come, with Dad’s suicide attempts and other difficult times.

It has also made me just the right mother for Owen. Bernie says, very wisely, that I could not have designed a better child for someone like me that Owen. He never wants to go off on adventures, which suits me fine as I have really extreme separation anxiety.

But the reverse is also true - you could not design a better mother for someone like Owen than me. He will need unconditional love and acceptance to help him build on his strengths and deal with his challenges. He will never be rejected by me. I know how bad that feels. I also remember a lot of feelings from being a child that might have faded into the mists if they weren’t so strong. So I can relate to a lot of what he feels. I hope he will be able to grow up into a strong a confident man who can do the things he wants to with his life.

So out of quite a lot of sadness and pain comes good in the end.

Go peacefully Val.

in reality i had to say much blander things. i was officiating. she was an atheist so there could not be a vicar and i did not know there was the humanist society then. so i had to say stuff that was true but also that would not be to raw for the rest of the people there.

two comments

here are two comments i posted on another person's blog. when reading them together it gives a different picture to reading them separately. especially the food thing...

i am odd about my mum's death. she died in 2000 from alzheimers. when i was 8 i left her to live with my dad and my stepmum. i felt physical pain and would not eat any food my stepmum made. she left out catering packs of instant mashed potato that i went down and made after everyone else was in bed. i would not wear any clothes except those my mum had bought me. eventually it got impossible as i grew out of them and they were taken away and replaced with new ones. when my mum died i expected to be hit with a hammer of grief but i wasn't. i think it had already happened both to the 8 year old me and more mildly to the adult who watched the vibrant, beautiful mother she had once been degenerate into dementia.

and the second one:

my stepmum is polish and grew up during the war. she came from what is now lithuania. she saw things as a child that we could not begin to imagine. they were placed in camps and then came here as refugees. the legacy of being starved has made her hoard food, like a lot of poles. when they came to the uk her mother developed throat cancer and died a very painful death. my stepmum nursed her and looked after the family's lodgers, as well as studying to be a doctor. then she had my two sisters. she took me on when i was 8 and very wild and challenging. she worked as a child psychiatrist specialising in children who were victims of abuse. she is still a remarkably positive person in spite of all this. i would never have become a lawyer if it hadn't been for her influence and encouragement. it makes me furious when the right-wing press rant on about asylum seekers being spongers. my stepmum has changed many lives for the better through her work and her life. the country was lucky she came here.

my stepmum made me lunch last week. we talked about life and the past. she told me of how, when she and my dad were splitting up, when i was 16, and he was refusing to deal with selling the house, she had decided she was not paying any more of his bills. she said "i was just going to take the three of you up to newcastle [where her dad lived] and stop paying the mortgage." it is hard to explain the effect of this. i was utterly hellish at this time. i was totally out of control in a whole load of ways and very hostile towards her. yet she would still have taken me rather than left me. that means a lot.