(C) 2013 Paul Clarke – All Rights Reserved
March has two events of note, firstly, in the UK (and I know it’s different in the USA) there’s Mothering Sunday, and secondly, the Ides of March … and it struck me that ultimately both are about trust. One, the greatest kind of trust – that of a child of its mother, and the other – the betrayal of trust.
Reflecting on my own situation, I was an elderly primagravida and now I’m a geriatric first- time mother! I am sitting here having tucked my 14-month-old daughter into bed after bidding good night to my own mother, now eighty something and it sort of struck me that I am not just a midlife mother, but I really am a mother in the middle ( and generally a mother in a muddle too!). Trusting and trusted.
There’s a poem, by the eminent British poet Philip Larkin (who held the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry) which always scandalised me when I was younger. Then as a belligerent teenager, I thought how true it was (oh, how horrid was I?) and now I’m a mother, it terrifies me … This Be The Verse is the poem:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
What hope is there then for Hope?
Is it right that we trust our parents? In my own personal experience I have always totally trusted mine even though I may not have always shown them the respect I should have done. They were the parents they were, the only parents I’ll ever know. My father was away alot with his work, I think he always regretted that but in the last years before he died we spent a good deal of time together, and reminisced about times gone by. We perhaps never knew each other that well but the love was very deep and the absolute trust was there too … in the end he knew I was always there for him as I helped my mother nurse him through his final days.
My mother and I have had a volatile relationship at times (more of the volatility on my side obviously), I remember locking myself into my bedroom and playing Billy Joel’s ‘My Life’ very loudly and over and over again, “I don’t care what you say this is my life, Leave me alone”, and generally being an obnoxious pain … We’re over that now and she’s my dearest friend, the person I trust the most and she has let me to believe that she feels the same, although she is quick to side with Hope in our nightly ‘just one more mouthful of vegetables’ situation! I think she’s getting her own back.
I now credit my parents with my strengths and been hard on myself about my failings so perhaps that’s a chink in Larkin’s argument. I hope not to be a clingy mother, I hope to let Hope fly freely through the world. But I know that it is my nature to want to be a part of everything (I know I got that from my mother), so I think it won’t so much be a case of not wanting her to have adventures, it will be the case of wanting to share them with her and finding it hard to let her have her own and head off without me.
Perhaps, being an older mother makes me more aware of my faults and more determined to allow her to have her own take on the world. I know that I am more prepared to make time for a small person now than I would have been in my 20s, so I think for me this is the best time for me to be a mother, which is just as well, really. Hope will suffer or indeed benefit from my life decisions, but as far as going down her own path she must make her own mistakes … As ever, Springsteen sums it up beautifully, in “Long Time Coming,” the song he wrote when his waife was pregnant with their third child:
“Well if I had one wish for you in this god forsaken world
kid It’d be that your mistakes will be your own
That your sins will be your own.”
I don’t want to make mistakes on her behalf, and I have endeavoured to ensure that I have enough advisors, helpers and supporters around me in the shape of her eight Godparents to say nothing of wider family and friends. I turn to them when I need support and encouragement with critical decisions.
What is important in all of this is trust. If Hope heads off into the wide blue yonder when she’s older, she will, I hope and pray, know and trust that I’m there for her in the background. If she does have any major hiccups, then she can trust me to be at her side as she works through them. Just as my mother was, and still is, with me. Mothering Sunday is an important day not just for mothers but for everyone. It celebrates trust and love and I believe it also celebrates the ‘mothering’ we receive from wider friends and family.
I spent Mothering Sunday with my mother and my daughter … a mother in the middle … and wondered as I do every day at the joy of my situation. I was very tired, I didn’t get a big bunch of flowers ‘from Hope’ not even a card. But that day, seeing my girl crawl around at the feet of my mother while we three enjoyed each other’s company, I knew how very blessed I was. Since then I’ve had a card (Hope drew it while her Granby held the paper) and a lovely little teddy bear ‘from Hope’ from one of the ladies who go to our playgroup… mothering in both senses of the word from mother and friend.
I am fortunate. I have a loving, stable family background, I know that it isn’t the case for so many people. I can’t imagine how it must be to grow up without the certainty of trust and love. Hopefully, Philip Larkin’s stark prediction won’t be the case for Hope and she’ll always be able to potter or leap through life and never turn to me and mutter, “Et tu Brute?” as poor old Caesar did at the point of his betrayal. I hope I can hand on some of the wonderful learning and joyful vision of the world that my mother gave me. And, come what may, Hope will know that however old, geriatric or tired her mother might be, how very loved she is. Right then … time for a walk with my girl, down the lane where my mother pushed us as children down to the swings, in a pram that my I sat in over 46 years ago. Somehow that sums up life for this mother in the middle.