"And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight
A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear"
Oh my head is stuffed with so much these days, it's hard to stay focused. I am up and I am down and I pace and try to do something useful every day but simply doing what one must to stay alive most often overwhelms me. I want all to be beautiful but it is impossible... but then again, I believe that I was able to give something perhaps not beautiful but heart-warming to each of my children and Rob for Christmas. I asked each one what they wanted from me and Gill's request was the most daunting. She wanted an essay on what it was like to be her mother. I poured over old journals, blogs, her letters and such and wrote and rewrote, edited and then edited again, adding and subtracting, and it turned out to be as much of a gift to me as it was for her. I asked her permission to post it here and she agreed.
So, although I have not posted anything the past month, you'll understand that I have been writing - not my novel which is giving me a lot of grief but writing - and all feeds into the story of my life and how I read it.
"Bringing up Baby"
“What has it been like being my mama and watching me go from a baby to a woman?" Gill asks.
That's a big question, little one. I've been your mama for over 34 years and you sugar and spice with your great big heart through thick and thin have always been my dream daughter.
***
When you are five months old, I write in your baby journal: “You have a wonderfully happy, tranquil disposition and are easy to care for…." At six months, I note that “you are coming along beautifully… a perfect cherub… [with] wonderful smiles.” A week after your first birthday, you take your first step and a month later, you conquer walking: “You are still very easy going… I love having you my little one, my daughter! When you raise your little arms to be picked up - which you do often - I can’t resist you.”
You are now almost two. You are sitting in the bath, your hair tied back in a braid: "I still can’t believe I have a daughter and she is so sweet," I write. You are now talking, forming simple sentences and love saying "no, mom". You are quieter, less physical than your brothers and mimic me more than they did. You love washing walls and countertops. Jokingly your father says you'll probably be an airhead. I say you're going to be a doctor or lawyer, whatever - you will always be special.
When you are almost four years, we move to France for the year and, unlike your brothers, you do not speak French or complain about missing your friends and home comforts. The only time I am aware that you are aware of language difference is when you ask, “how do I say ‘give me back my toy’ in French?” By the end of the year, you speak French as well as the village children. One of my sweetest memories from this year is watching you with Susan. (How happy I am that she can teach you about the natural world - a subject I know little about.) In my mind’s eye, I see you plodding after her in fields of wild flowers and when she points out a particularly unique orchid, you exclaim, “how clever you are Susan to find such a beautiful flower.” Once, when the two of you are sitting on a grassy hill in the hot sun drawing, Susan removes her blouse, and you tell her: “my mother has nicer breasts, Susan.”
You are my sunshine.
We return to Canada and you begin French Immersion kindergarten. We walk to school each day because I read that children who walk to school rather than be driven are better grounded. Often, we sing and step to the rhyme “left, left, I had a good job and I left. I left my wife and 48 children just because I thought I was right, right” our left and right feet touching ground on the appropriate word. I believe you love school, make good friends, have play dates, are happy. A few years later you join an early morning walking group and the leader tells me that you are noncompetitive, are never shoving to be first, you take your own sweet time, you chat to whoever, you are a delight.
You teach me how to be a better mother. I am angry at you because you won’t do your school work. I yell and you cry. I say “Gilly you have to allow me to yell sometimes.” You say “you have to allow me to cry.” We shower together and you look up at me and say, "aren't vaginas beautiful?" You are already leaps and bounds ahead of me.
Before you are ten, we become travel companions. I see you still, trudging behind me pulling your small green suitcase. In those days, we go cheap and don’t make reservations. We stop at small inns and examine the room and decide if it is good enough, clean enough. Once we are invited to Italy to stay with a family who has a daughter your age. We go but that year it snows, the house is cold and the mother has a hissy fit and books her family into a Hyatt in Rome. We decide that we will go to smaller, more affordable cities. I am befuddled and you suggest Pisa and Verona. We visit the two, wander, share meals and beds. From that time to this, I love travelling with you.
(Years later, you want to see the Mediterranean. I drive for several hours and park by the sea. We walk and talk, sinking into sand and soaking in the water, and forget to search for a hotel until it is too late. No vacancies. We drive out of this town to the next. No inn. Finally, when I can drive no longer, we spend the night in the car, in a hotel parking lot off the autoroute. I am miserable but you, daughter of my heart, tell me "it's an adventure” and make me laugh. Forever after this, when we find ourselves in trouble, you remind me that life is an adventure.)
You are a pre-teen and your brothers are well into their difficult teens and test me often. I worry that you are too sweet, too kind, too ready to please, and worse, too like me. (Throughout my early life and well into my teens, my friends’ mothers called me “Little Mary Sunshine”: I was so smiley, so polite, so “tamed”.) Around this time, we have our first real confrontation. You buy a very skinny stretchy black skirt for a choir recital. You try it on to show me and for the first time, I see that your body is changing. You are still very young, you barely have breasts but you are sexy. This sexiness worries me. I seek a friend for advice and she tells me that I am right to be worried. There are men who prey on little girls. I tell you to buy a larger size and you cry and ask if I think you a slut. (As some one glibly told me “with boys you only have one penis to worry about”.)
At fifteen, you tell me that you want to go to school in another country, to be the new girl in class, to wear a uniform, and to be intellectually challenged. You have searched the internet but it will cost too much. You sigh: “most of all I wanted to see if I could make a dream a reality.” I think of Langston Hughes: “Hold fast to dreams/ For if dreams die/ Life is a broken-winged bird/ That cannot fly.” This is too important to ignore, I think. Several months later, you are the new girl, wearing a school uniform and being challenged intellectually in Lisburn Northern Ireland. We celebrate your 16th birthday at an Italian restaurant. You walk home from school with a tall good-looking boyfriend. He disappears. It is a long grey wet winter and you are unhappy. You lose weight. You write me a note: "Sometimes a cold lonely apartment on Bachelor’s Walk seems like a lot compared to this non-stop chaos and drama. But even when I am not stressed, it’s almost like I need to create it… I respect you more that I knew I could respect. I respect very little in this twisted world.”
I am dumbfounded: I say “let’s go home”. You say, “no, I said that I was going to do this and I am.” We still watch movies and read poetry snuggled into each other in bed but you are pensive.
We return to Canada and you re-find friends and complete high school. You have grown intellectually and physically in Northern Ireland. You are writing poetry and prose. You challenge teachers at school. A steady stream of your friends come to our house and eat our leftovers. You appear happier. You are beautiful. You graduate. You will soon leave home for school in Toronto. I can no longer watch over you and keep you safe. One morning I find a package of black licorice, tied with a ribbon, and a note from you in my bathroom drawer, thanking me for rescuing you when your spirits were down. You include a poem that you wrote in Northern Ireland:
"I return home to my mother
who still hasn't eaten her scone
from the bakery that's shut down.
She's praising a poet
reminding me to dream big,
to earn my own living,
not to underestimate myself.
She sees some power in me
that I don't acknowledge
no matter how hard I squint to see.”
***
By this time, I have been a mother for nearly 30 years. I began when I was 29 years old. I feel as if I turned around three times and voila, I’m in my late 50s. Raising children is the hardest work I’ve done. Have I been good enough I ask myself? I often feel like a child myself and see, in truth, we have been growing up together. I cannot imagine myself in the world without you or your brothers. This reminds me of Sharon Olds’ poem “The Planned Child” as all three of my babies were planned:
“… when a friend was pouring wine
and said that I seem to have been a child who had been wanted,
I took the wine against my lips
as if my mouth were moving along
that valved wall in my mother's body, she was
bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then
bearing down, pressing me out into
the world that was not enough for her without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea--none of it
was enough, for her, without me.”
***
You attend university for one year and then spend one year in Paris as an au pair before returning to school. I visit you in Toronto (December 2006) and write in my blog: “Every time I see her walking toward me, beautifully groomed and dressed… I think Paris, my favourite city has changed her, left its mark. She is so much taller, thinner, more confidant than I was at her age… And though I worry about her restlessness, sleeplessness, I do not worry that she won't find her passion… We talk for hours. When we are sitting, she curls into me. When we are walking, she links arms with me.”
A year later, I write: “I want to plant a seed in her brain that may take years to sprout. Nothing she does or doesn't do will stop me from loving her… I don't expect perfection. I know she is human… She doesn't have to be better than she is. I don't want her to despair as I have. Yet, I know I am powerless in this realm. She will despair.”
Susan tells me not to worry about you, to let you be: "Gill's clever." (I thank the heavens for all my strong female friends.) I let you be. You write me: "I feel as if I am always searching for something I
can't find. Anything within reach will never do." One professor tells you that you must decide what you want as you excel at all aspects of the program. I cannot advise you. I do not want to risk suggesting something that will divert you from your true path (if there is such a thing). I worry. I commiserate. I support you as best as I can but know you must find your own way to be alive.
In your notes, letters, and tributes, you paint me, with words, to be some wonderful wise creature and I have tried to live up to the picture you have painted with your glowing reviews but in true, I struggle. I am indecisive. I don’t know what direction to take myself. Paula Meehan says it so well in her poem “I am not your muse”.
I’d like to leave you in love’s blindness,
cherish the comfort of your art, the way
it makes me whole and shining,
smooths the kinks of my habitual distress,
never mentions how I stumble into the day,
fucked up, penniless, on the verge of whining
at my lot…
***
After graduating, you work hard. You blog. You visit your grandparents. You fall in love with a man who owns a boa. You create an in-home dinner club. You sparkle and shine. You leave boa man and meet television producer. I feel powerless to stop what is supposed to be the most joyous ceremony in your life. (I see clearly that your husband-to-be is an unhappy man, a lost soul, a drunkard.) I question myself even now: Is there anything I could have done to stop it?
You learn quickly that if you do not leave him, he will crush you. You return to me. You become a gypsy. You find work here, there and everywhere. You re-educate yourself. You experiment. You find love again. You move to a new country, learn to drive, follow dreams, create your own business, and over this past difficult pandemic year, you have developed a social conscience, re-educating yourself yet again.
Still you have dark moments when you doubt yourself and all is gloomy. I want to reassure you, to tell you not to go there, that you are too warm, kind, intelligent, beautiful to indulge in self pity. Or if you must, know that it will pass, that it’s good to be human. I love how you aren’t afraid to expose your human side in your writing, how you pour it all out as if saying, take me as I am. I do.
You remain my dream daughter.
You are home for the holidays. You call out to me “there’s a monkey in your bed.” and you silly-Gilly are laughing under the duvet on my kingsize bed like the child you once were.
“More than gems in my comb box shaped by the God of the Sea,/ I prize you, my daughter” - Eighth-century Japanese poet Otomo no Sakanoue Iratsume