Motherless Mother
Urinating on my bedroom carpet as a child some thirty years ago had been intentional, though not malicious. I’d been going through a curious phase and discovered rather quickly that the bodily process responsible for urination was indeed voluntary. When I told my mother about it she barely stole her weary gaze away from the television, her cheeks creasing in amusement. ‘That’s okay, darling,’ she told me. ‘Just clean it up with a flannel.’ For a moment longer, I lingered on the threshold of the family room with a towel around my stick legs and torso, dripping the last of the shower onto the carpet, mirroring the unending rain raging outside. Even now I wonder whether she knew I was watching her, for suddenly she laughed, wiped tears from her eye, and said, ‘Oh gosh, that is funny.’ To the casual observer, there was no way of knowing this was her way of celebrating the heart of me; the curiosity that brought on my compulsion to explore newfangled territory, my handmade foot massage vouchers gifted every year on her birthday, even the rain coming through the opened window and the grey outside and us being together. More than anything, she was looking past my behaviour, not taking it on as a reflection of her own character, which is to say, she was less broken in motherhood than I am now.
I am staying at my family’s holiday house in the Coromandel for the long weekend. When I say ‘my family’s holiday house’ I do not mean mine, or our late mother’s, but the place owned by my sister and her husband, and my brother and his wife. My husband looks forward to these visits in many ways, but one. He must prepare himself for the spontaneous probing of the walls he spent his childhood and adolescence erecting. We are a candid lot. Here, in the presence of my family, our ordinary fears of vulnerability and judgement are no longer useful, instead they are left to the roadside for other people and other families.
My siblings and I grew up in a mansion that underwent no maintenance for the twenty-one years we lived there. The quarter-acre property situated in the heart of Auckland’s suburbs was bought months before my birth, and soon after went through an extensive renovation to accommodate my siblings and me, our parents, a couple ionic columns and multiple living spaces. The financial investment to buy my brother, my sister and me the security of a family home became the hill my parents were willing to die on. Little did they know that the paint would dry and peel off, and there would be enough time for the wood to rot.
My family has been patient and gentle with my husband who joined us last, soon after our mother’s death. They do not understand why when we are throwing our thoughts and opinions around without fearing criticism, my husband becomes silent, turning toward the glass doors displaying jet-black ocean. My husband in turn does not understand why we enjoy being so unguarded, or why we don’t seek a more nuanced way to share our opinions and talk about the past. Nor does he understand that by being so exposed during these discussions we are risking our hope to know each other and to be known. My brother-in-law once likened the relationship between my mother, my sister and myself to a lioness and her cubs, each little lion lunging at their mother scowling with high-pitched growls, only to be batted by the occasional paw before embraced under her chin. That isn’t to say our mother hit us, she did not, rather that her most ordinary phrase was: ‘Of course you feel that way, it makes complete sense, now come here for a cuddle.’ My husband doesn’t see the many hours of repair that took place with our mother after every rupture. It’s mighty fine to apologise and say ‘sorry,’ but it’s meaningless if neither person has been seen nor accepted; what is civility amongst family without connection?
Often I wonder if I am the only one to have experienced such a childhood. My mother was loving and present, but who in our thirties does not come from a broken home? I mean broken in every sense of the word—disengaged, separated, hurt or addicted parents are not the anomaly. I am in my late-thirties now and I remember being the second girl at primary school with divorced parents. The first was my friend who had never met her father, and, strangely enough, she was the most judgemental when my parents split up. My family took my father’s departure seriously; I can see the flushed, thin-skinned hands of my mother wiping tears from my eyes with a resolution that makes my insides ache. The smell of her, an earthly thing laced with perspiration, and of course, the signature Chanel No. 5. It’s not a small thing to remind oneself that all 90s mothers can be described in exactly this way. We never questioned our mother’s or father’s love for us, yet some mysterious sensitivity charged every dyadic exchange for decades. In other words, it took many years for conversation in our house not to end in tears.
My childhood home is now owned by strangers, of course. Yet in my imagination I take my husband on a tour of the place one day. I can almost see his face turning from sweet anticipation to plain disgust at the browning polyester floral curtains and soiled carpet emitting mildew and mites (my husband owns a flooring business and is professionally critical of other people’s carpet). What could he know of the hours spent talking and weeping in the arms of our mother inside those many rooms? Where to understand your pain was to understand the world.
I am packing my sons’ bags for our stay at my family’s holiday house. I watch my three boys create an obstacle course around our living room using a couple of bean bags, an upturned occasional chair, four dining chairs, my mother’s old chest and our wooden table. This is one moment of many across a single weekday before my husband arrives home from work, but it is never more apparent to me than in these times, that unlike my mother, I am not removing trauma from my children’s eyes; their lives are largely trauma free. The pointlessness of comparing my boys’ childhoods to my own is not lost on me, nor is it more obvious than when we are staying at my family’s holiday house. When we arrive, I look for evidence of my mother in every room, though she has never been here, of course—perhaps forensic traces of her made the journey. Things like the cheese grater which was carried all the way from her Ōrākei house to this kitchen. Its black handle has cracked down the middle—we don’t allow the little children to use it for fear the flesh of their palms will become stuck. Above the pantry, in a small Snap Lock bag are her ashes that we still plan to bury here one day. The sheets in the linen closet were hers as well. I look forward to sleep when I can draw the cotton to my face and inhale the dusty potpourri and ancient salt of her cliffside home from a decade gone by. In the moments before sleep I am back in her house, but I am not.
During a midnight jaunt to the fridge, I pause and check on my children who are asleep in beds with their cousins. A foot under an arm, a woollen blanket between two. I find my oldest at age seven, naked, on the floor and asleep inside a pillowcase. To fit in there, he has had to rip the navy seams at the opening. Tiny blue threads scatter across the carpet surrounding his golden mane. I am ripe with anger; the pillowcases are brand new. My husband told me not to take them away with us, his much more reasonable solution than anger to circumstances like this. My husband has kept his own boyhood misdemeanours inside of him as a kind of roadmap, indicating the turns and roundabouts one must take to acquire acceptance. Though, somewhere along the way he was offered a way out, a gift that he accepted out of sheer necessity. This is to say, his grace for our children now abounds where mine lives off scarcity—that pesky effect of loss. Still, I want to give my children a taste of what evolved in that decrepit mansion between myself, my siblings and our mother years earlier, so they too will share their thoughts and ideas without fearing rebuke. So their walls will not grow too high that they can no longer bear being seen. Standing over the ruined pillowcase, my rage fades as I channel the benevolent tenderness of their grandmother, the woman they’ll never meet, and I cradle his small sturdy body up and into bed. ‘It’s okay, darling,’ I whisper in his ear. ‘We’ll sew it up in the morning.’ He can’t hear me, of course, but he smiles.
Danielle Heyhoe is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction from New Zealand. Her work has been short-listed for the Sargeson Prize 2020, and her first manuscript was shortlisted for the Michael Gifkins Text Prize 2023. Danielle’s fiction and nonfiction appears in Landfall, Headland, takahē, Newsroom, Ensemble, Something Other Press, Paris, as well as various magazines.