Reflections on grief, healing and transformation
#18 The lioness
It is easier to write about my father who has been physically absent from my life since I was 8. There is enough distance there. He has always been a distant, abstract entity, a half-man, half phantom, far away, not here in the messiness of now.
At therapy, I rattle off my prepared script about my father. My therapist asks about my mother, and I surprise myself by breaking down. Let me tell you about my mother. When I was 11, a man we’ll call X organised a summer vacation “Personality Development Camp” for the kids in the parish. Every morning, a bunch of kids would pour into the church auditorium to learn the grip of a good handshake, how to introduce yourself and the importance of body language. One day, X assigned homework. We were to write a poem. In those days, my sister and I wrote rhymes like they were nothing. Our homemade birthday cards to each other all had little, goofy Roald Dahlesque poems. For the assignment, I composed a little something called “The Sounds of the Night”. The next day, X asked the kids to read their compositions out. Each poem would be received with applause and then X would take it upon himself to critique the work in a condescending, gentle, low voice. My sister, who had written a cheeky poem about the camp itself went up before I did. I saw X frown under his shaggy fringe when she was done. He offered no feedback. I read mine. When I was done, everyone clapped. Then X held up his hand for silence and asked in a threatening tone where I’d copied my poem from. I stared at him confused. He proceeded to tell me that plagiarism was a low, cheap trick done by the very dregs of humanity. He said there was no way someone my age could come up with a poem like mine overnight. “I wrote this poem, sir.” I choke-whispered. He called me a liar. I crept back to my seat, feeling like I’d been attacked by a cloud of bees. When we got home my siblings reported what had happened. It took a while for the story to reveal itself because they were so enraged that they kept talking over each other. I watched my mothers eyes go obsidian-black. She went straight to the phone and called X. She was so furious that each word flew out of her like a knife, razor-sharp, wounding. In her anger, she was both terrifying and beautiful. She made sure I got a public apology. She met with X face to face again and gave him a piece of her mind. For all his Personality Development schtick, X was a coward and no match for her. He never conducted another camp again. After the brouhaha died down, my mother looked me in the eye. “Never listen to people like him. People like him stay small and mean forever.” She told me I was gifted and brave. She picked me up from the murky, hot pool of shame and she brushed the hair out of my eyes. She told me to keep going and not to let anyone stop me. She raised hell because someone hurt her baby. That’s who my mother is. She’s a lioness who will stamp the earth into dust for the people she loves. She thinks with her heart, trusts that her heart will never fail her and never looks back. There’s only space for one shining reality and that is her reality. She’s playful, funny, affectionate. With adults, she is brisk and demanding but with small children and the elderly, she has endless reserves of patience, and she never gets tired of loving people the way I do. She used to glare at the world, daring it to stand in her way. It rarely did. Impulsive, bright, passionate, determined, beautiful, always firmly stuck in some or the other extreme.
In 2020, I go through my I-hate-everything-and-everyone phase. I am a prickly pear. I snap and I bite. My mother and I spend months together in a careful, tense dance, neither wanting the other to erupt like lava. There are tears, fights, stony silences. I go back to the old place of wanting her approval and being miserable when I don’t get it. I ask her about some of her choices when her marriage was breaking down, trying to find answers about my childhood. “You could have..” I say, cruelly. “You should have…” I feel guilty with each word as if by erasing the old narrative, I’m erasing her. I feel responsible for the emotions that my inquiries bring. She’s defensive, stubborn and also guilty. We go back and forth, both of us smarting. We don’t know how to get out of the spaces we’ve carved for each other and the roles we’ve played all our lives. We’re stuck, and I’m both defiant and terrified. I don’t want to lose her, but I can’t keep living like this.
My mother and I are a work in progress, as every relationship that means anything is. I realise I have outgrown our old dynamic. I stretch a little, testing what it feels like to feel like both a part of her and a part of him too but also, wholly, infinitely my own person. And my mother surprises me. She stops and listens, she adapts. She learns new ways to love by asking questions, having the stomach for difficult, painful conversations, for giving me the space to heal and grow. She makes room for more than one reality. We talk of the old days. She recalls the first couple of months after the big move, her fears, her freedoms, what she wanted from life when she was younger. I glimpse her own grief-map colouring and shaping the choices she made. I learn from her and make my heart grow large, like that of a lioness. I make room for more than one reality.
I closed the door between my father and me and from the deep heart of that great pain, I grew a new understanding of love. I carry it like buried treasure. The truth is, from among my many blessings, my mother is the constellation that shines the brightest and is fixed the firmest in my sky. Every day we step into these new love-waters, uncertain, unsure but brave because we are together.
