Mothering Without a Mother. Conflicting thoughts about what it's like.

This newsletter is about motherhood because it was Mother’s Day last week and I’m trying to keep my content vaguely relevant but also because I’ve had this one semi-drafted for a long time but writing about motherhood is a risky thing to do because you cannot complain about it or seem ungrateful but also need to talk about it to avoid feeling isolated. 

I will start by telling you that a few weeks ago, as I was reading a chapter of an Enid Blyton book to my five year old, my three year old snuck off with her scissors (yes they were children’s scissors) and chopped her hair off. She now has a really bad mullet and I am mortified. It totally ruined my day, I was devastated by this act. She wanted to look like her brother (on International Women’s Day no less) and my shock / horror / disbelief ended up with some tears followed by a huge sulk. Not my finest hour. I haven’t mentioned it again to her.  In fact I have told her she looks fantastic. Mullets are on trend (in case you hadn’t noticed) and I don’t go for trends but especially not that one!! 

It’s one of those things you think won’t happen to you. When you hear someone’s baby fell of the bed you think “gosh how could you have let that happen”. Then yours falls off the bed. How could you just let a three year old wander off with a pair of scissors?? 

Anyway, this email is about my mother. And being a mother without a mother.

My mum died when I was 28, 12 years ago. It was quite sudden and when she died the family we thought we had fell apart quite literally overnight. My father was ready to run (he’d been having an affair and had someone waiting on the sidelines - we had no idea). So, as one work colleague suggested to me at the time - you’re basically an orphan! I didn’t realise it at the time but looking back, the change was so sudden, I now wonder if this notion of a “family” was ever real or not? Maybe it’s quite common - for the mother to die and it all just sort of fall apart? 

Poor me right? No really, it’s OK. Time is a healer. And all life experiences, good and bad, is living. I was lucky to have some very good friends - no one had children so they had capacity to be there when I needed them -  and their parents were extremely kind to me. I was so angry with my father and also with my mother - her death felt like abandonment - and had years of therapy every Wednesday with a rather formidable but kind lady in Shepherd’s Bush, in a warm cosy shed at the end of her garden. I feel enormously grateful to have had her in my life. I focussed on work and did really well. 

Thinking about my mother / not having one became less painful, less sharp, and having my own family has also helped soften the ‘blow’ of that loss. But it’s not just grief you have to work through. I had to work on untangling from her too. 

She disapproved of hoop earrings. She thought talking about your feelings or reading any sort of self-help was deeply self indulgent. She was comforting if you were physically unwell but any sort of emotional turmoil was met with confusion. When she was about to die she just said “this happens to people all over the world every day. You’ve just got to keep the show on the road”. NO SELF PITY allowed! I spent a year deliberately wearing hoop earrings on repeat and reading every self help book I could find. She wasn’t here to disapprove. I needed to get her voice out of my head. 

The thing is, since becoming a mother myself, not having my own mother has become louder again. It is sort of following me around. I can’t call her to ask if I also did these certain things my children do. What sort of birth(s) did she have with me and my sister?  What should I do about schools? Primary school seems to require so much input from parents (reading / spelling / handwriting) - who did this with us, was it the nannies or did we just go to good schools? I don’t have any useful information about my early years. 

I live in a rural place and I am surrounded by people who have a lot of help from their mothers. These women frequently tell me that they don’t know how I do it. But I don’t know any different. I’ve never had any help (I would pay for it if I could find it but that too seems difficult around here). Some of these women complain a lot about how overbearing, interfering and divisive their mothers are. They feel like telling them “these are MY children, butt out”. Someone I know has said she is envious that my mum is dead because it must be so freeing not having the judgement and opinions breathing down your neck. 

I do not begrudge the women who have a lot of help with their children. I don’t know what it’s like, so I don’t know what I’m missing. Sometimes I wonder how they might cope without the help. Or more specifically, when they complain about how gruelling motherhood can be, I compare myself and think “I must be doing an OK job here, working and mothering with no help”. 

The one thing I wish I could do is get my kids in the car. Drive to my family home. Go and have a bath and leave someone else in charge. But I can’t. And to be honest my mum would probably light a cigarette and say “oh lighten up, it never harmed you”. Or something similarly reckless. Or she would have been up in Shetland doing her Own Thing. That is what I miss the most I think, being able to totally relinquish all responsibility just for a day and hand the baton to someone else. 

Somehow you need more mothering yourself whilst in the trenches of motherhood. No one seems to talk about this.

The Flip Side

The flip side of having a dead mum is probably rather controversial but I think about it a lot. I think the mother-child relationship is probably the most important / defining relationship in your life. That voice in your head. Good and bad. It never really goes away. 

There are things I have done or been able to do since my mum died that I don’t think I would have done if she was alive. My choice of jobs (there was a silent disapproval of anything sales / marketingy), the hoop earrings, writing about my life, pride in my achievements (my mother expected results but praise was thin on the ground). Most of all I can tell you with some certainty that I don’t think I would be making and selling knitwear if she was still alive. Any idea of the sort would have been met with “oh yes but lots of other people are already doing that”. 

So, there is a sort of freedom in the loss. Which no one ever talks about but must be true for others too. I watch other mother-child (grown up) dynamics with interest now. The agony of not getting the mother you want. The emotional unavailability. The not saying sorry, admitting fault, the not making amends. The silent judgement.  And I feel free from all of that too now, because my mum is off the hook. She’s dead. 

My mum was not overtly opinionated about what we chose to do - but there was an unspoken, silent expectation that hovered around us. Sometimes I wanted her to tell me what to do. She wouldn’t or couldn’t and I used to feel short-changed. But now I watch people I know who can’t decide which  coat to buy without consulting their mother and I realise this ‘you’re on your own’ parenting style had its benefits. We were capable. We did know how to keep the show on the road. 

Then there are things that drive my choices around motherhood - a reaction to my own mothering. My mum was mostly at work and when she wasn’t she was not terribly engaged in what we were doing. I think it was quite typical of the time. 80s / 90s latchkey kids. She got home from work at 8:30pm most nights. I always wanted a mum who picked me up from school and asked how my day was 😂.

If my children could tell me to F off for asking this question, they would (I’m sure they will in a few years). So, I insist on being around, consistent. But I sometimes wonder if I would be a better mother if they spent longer at nursery / school / I got some sort of wraparound care - so that I had more hours in the day for my work and myself and am less frazzled, less impatient, less overstimulated by the non-stop noise and motion of small children. 

My friend’s mother was a city lawyer with four children and told me with total conviction “listen, it was MUCH easier to go to work than it was to look after four children”. I now see that my mother’s long hours was probably a choice not a requirement. She would have said that she felt she was doing a mediocre job at both work and home. And of course - she had grown up with an incredibly overbearing stay-at-home-mum and so her one mission in life was to be a career woman who would not be pinned down by any domestic drudge. To quote the Tractor Ted theme tune, these things just go around and around and around don’t they.

On Writing About Motherhood. 

I know this is a triggering subject to write about. And one of the worst things to say to someone is “I understand'“ when actually you cannot possibly understand someone else’s experience. I can’t begin to understand how it feels to dream of being a mother and not having that chance. I don’t want to upset anyone by writing about motherhood. I have avoided doing so since I got an email from a 67 year old lady called Bridget who told me my emails are too motherhood related (she’d only received 3 of my emails) and suggested that mothers shouldn’t feel sorry for themselves / complain about motherhood. 

Well, Bridget (I have unsubscribed her), sorry but I’m not stopping. I spend the vast majority of my time thinking about whether I’m being a good mother, how to be a better mother,  whether I need to buy some earplugs to stop me wanting to scream above the surround sound of whining and demands, how to help with number bonds to 20, what am I going to COOK tonight, have I taken enough photos, I ought to get those photos printed out one day, they need to see a dentist, Key Stage 1 - they are learning about the rainforest, let’s go to The Eden Project and walk around a sauna for a day in our winter coats. How am I going to pay for this? And on and on. I have a feeling that my mother’s generation did not think like this. 

I know that my generation DO, on the whole think like this because these are the conversations I am having with other mothers. Because that is why there are podcasts about motherhood, books about motherhood, all this talk about ‘the village’ that doesn’t exist. I don’t think mothers should feel sorry for themselves. I think it’s a privilege to be someone’s mum. Not to be taken for granted for one minute. But I don’t think mothers should be silenced and shamed the way they are. Shamed for working, shamed for not working, shamed for losing patience in supermarkets, shamed for not being able to cope, for complaining about it. Shamed for being anxious about the state of schools these days etc. And when I get parenting advice from people who have not been through the wringer of raising young children - I ignore it. 

When I walk in to Sainsbury’s and see other women with multiple young children in tow I always wonder what they’ve already been through that day. How many meltdowns before they got in the car? I think about how driving a car with screaming or fighting children in the back is probably as dangerous as drink driving. How mothering tests your resilience and patience like nothing else.

And, I know my children will probably resent me and blame me for destroying their lives in some way. For me not allowing them to have a mullet (ha) for being so uptight about sitting at the table to eat. For taking the batteries out of my son’s electric keyboard after one too many 6am ‘STORM MUSIC’ sessions whilst his sister was asleep (and having been asked nicely 25 times to turn it down). 

As I have said, it is the greatest privilege of my life and I do not find it easy in many ways but I also can’t remember or imagine my life before children. I feel lucky. 

I will also admit that I used to roll my eyes when I met women who said “I am a mum” when I asked what they ‘did’.  I have no desire not to work, or for motherhood to be my ‘identity’ but this job of motherhood fills 90% of my thoughts and time. Sometimes I wonder what I will fill my thoughts and time with when they are big and don’t need me. I know you never stop worrying about them but will I want to keep on thinking and writing about motherhood when they are older?  I doubt it. 

Should I include it in my ‘work’? (this newsletter for example). Well yes, I think I should. I think motherhood and working motherhood should be talked about MORE. We now know that we can’t have it all but many people are not able to simply pick one or the other. I don’t have that luxury but even if I did, I wouldn’t choose - I love work. 

I don’t have a properly written conclusion to this newsletter.  It was finalised yesterday in a service station on the M5 having been away on a 24 hour work trip about wool. The children told me they had flapjacks(!!) for breakfast and that the cows got out. So I raced home to cook them green beans and make sure they brush their teeth.

I’ve got a sustainable fashion newsletter lined up for the next one. No motherhood content, don’t worry.