Motherlode

It's Mother's Day. And my mother, who is in good physical health at 76, is slipping away from us with dementia.  I went home last weekend to work on a memory-book with her, to try and capture some of the history before it's too late - and it will soon be too late. I've been horrified at the speed of her deterioration, and we will have to start working on some concrete plans for the next stage (whatever the next stage is). 

My dad, who is not a patient man at the best of times, drinks heavily every evening now, which must affect his mornings too. I imagine a person more confused than my mum might need a lot of help going to bed and getting up.  Neither of them really ought to be driving anywhere, but both of them still are. There's a high chance they will hurt or kill themselves - or god forbid, someone else, in an accident so that needs to be addressed too. 

I don't know quite how this help and sorting is going to work out - other than that it will fall to me.  My brother is busy with his terminally-ill child and my sister lives in Australia.  And I'm the oldest, so I am kind of in charge I suppose. 

I've had a difficult relationship with my mum from my early teens through to my thirties, but it's much better now. Becoming a mum and finally growing up myself has helped me to forgive and even understand some of the things she said and did so they don't matter so much now.  She has been a lovely granny to the girls and I know that she loves us all, in her own strange only-child way.  She will be gone while she's still here, like her father before her, so I kind of know what to expect.  It won't be fun, but we will still find the fun in the days that we have, just as we have learned to do with my nephew.  Where there is love there are always smiles. 

I don't usually post poetry on here, but as it's Mother's Day, here's one from a couple of years ago that I'm editing at the moment.  It's not quite ready for submission, in my view, but it's getting there.  I was thinking about it when we were doing the memory book, and she was talking about all women in her family who were named after flowers. Her parents were not in favour of showing emotion, and it must have been a funny old life, just the three of them. As my granny often used to point out, my mum stuck out like a sore thumb - an exotic looking child with her striking red hair in a family of mouse-brown. 

Marion: I

Born in the summer of the gathering storm,

Soothed each night by the rhythmic thud

Of bombs falling on the Glaxo plant
She Listened With Mother
All dozy and cosy in the Andersen shelter
Watched over by the eyes in the potatoes
Studding their soil sky like stars;
Spiders were her night time friends.

Endlessly re-knitting jumper into scarf
They also served who sat and waited
Picking balsa-wood pips from their teeth
In the pretend-jam sandwiches of birthday teas
Barrage balloons hung cheerily along the Thames
Just for her – bomb-site fire-flower

In the family bouquet of Rose, Daisy, Violet & May.

  

Marion: II

Ernest as his name, father was away
Beating the Nazis with the neatness of his inventories
Seasick, then homesick, then sick of it all
Counting the cost of the ruins of Germany
Lodged with a family just like his
Where another girl with plaits and a too-small dress
Knits the same scarf, thumps the same piano scales
Laughs at spiders and the same stained moon.

Then victory was ours, and he came back
A stranger to his daughter
"When's that man going home?" she hissed.
He was not a one to pull her to his knee
Throw her in the sky and catch her in his arms
With a joyous shout; she held the basket
As he pruned and told the names of all his roses,
Secateurs held gently as a child’s hand.