Every day is mother's day

Right back in the early days, when Blaise was newly flown, I started writing about loving her and losing her. It was therapy, really, a way to let the huge feelings inside me escape before they split my skin to rags and ribbons. Writing is like hanging onto the tail of a raging dragon and hoping I can land the thing before it bucks me off its horny back to tumble, pinwheeling, into the abyss.

In the early days, people didn’t know what to say to me, so they said the usual things. ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ peppered my posts, the fallback we turn to in our helplessness after a death.

Very quickly though, my friends learned I didn’t want platitudes or phrases of rescue. It’s impossible to save a grieving mother or father, son or daughter or partner. Nothing can bring our loved one back, and the way through grief, like any birth, is to go through it all the way, dying to ourselves as we do. We have to save ourselves.

Some people in their sorrow need those pithy phrases of comfort, but to be honest, those well-meaning words just cause me to retract. To me they are a barrier to connection, a film to lay over the terrifying chaos of my grief, an unconscious attempt to bundle it into a box where it won't rampage through the village, trampling all the gardens and scaring the kids.

I have never squished my feelings into a box. I don’t think I know how. They don’t fit, none of ours do, not really, though culturally, we are taught to tame them so.

We live in a society without many healthy rituals of grief. Descended from colonial Britain (here, in Australia at least), our white western culture still staggers through a centuries-long hangover of stiff-upper-lip, lie-back-and-think-of-england fear of deep emotion. Feelings are akin to weeds, to be stamped out and eradicated lest they take over the lawn and, god forbid, flourish.

‘Please show me your real!’ my posts have always screamed, and bless you all, you do; have kept replying in kind for almost ten years. I am so grateful for you, this unlikely community of heartful humans connected through the digital oceans on social media, of all things.

I throw my messages in bottles into the currents and they wash out to who knows where. Strange tides toss back the wonderful gifts of the sea; words from friends and strangers. Clunky, kind, brusque, brilliant. Perfectly smooth and heart shaped, like rubbed seaglass. Oddly bobbing driftwood, covered in tiny barnacles. Clumps of weed rotting under my feet. Carcasses of fish, bony stories of what lies beneath. Observations, haikus of the spirit, the tiny blessings of petals torn from the rosy hearts of strangers and offered with generosity and vulnerability. Messages that don’t try to fix me, and thank you for that, because I’m not broken, far from it. Dancing with grief has been a decade long practice of kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with pure gold. I am more for the losing of her, not less.

Instead of advice or platitudes, you bring that which connects us, an exploration of grief and loss and life and love and death and all the meaty, mighty messiness of beings, humaning. Thank you, from my heart, thank you.

I don’t usually write anything about her on mother’s day, because to me, every day is mother’s day. I don’t need a hallmark card to remind me I was her mama, or that she was here and now is not.

But maybe I do, because this one has been full of her laughing ghost. A beautiful weekend with my own mother, and Douggie, my dad, and my sisters who are mothers in their own right, along with Blaise’s cousin, Mum’s only surviving grandchild, now a sometime-bratty-but-generally-adorable teenager.

Blaise and Amy were as inseparable as sisters. Blaise looked up at her cousin in pure adoration, taking cues from her, absorbing this living breathing apparition, someone her size who knew ALL THE GAMES and could help paint nail-polish on the claws of Jilly the dog and climb the three storey treehouse and run around in a matching tutu (also ending up on Jilly the dog).

Today I find myself wandering through the house, gently touching photos now faded, curling at their edges on the pantry, blue-tack lifted from years of service. Another forest of them on the fridge, here she is wrapped in a woven skirt and crown of green vines, her crooked smile straight from my genes, long legs also, Lee’s eyes. Here she is again, asleep in my arms. Here she is. Here she is.

Here she isn’t.

Every day is Mother’s Day. My bones ache a little on this one with the missing of her. She’s about to turn thirteen, in my heart at least, about to become her own version of sometimes-bratty-but-generally-adorable teenager. I can’t know what she would be like, it’s too long now, too many possibilities have spun their own webs of chance. The infinite river of choice and consequence splits and forks; she sailed down a million rivulets and I can’t track them all. I remember her small starfish hands in mine. Her cascading delight in every living thing, spiders, snakes, birds, fish; all of them equal in her eyes. When we found a dead kangaroo joey she insisted we bury it so it could give its body back to Earth Mama. As she did, not that much later. As we all will.

It’s so many years since she flew away I never know when she’ll circle back to perch on my shoulder for a while, surprising me with the flickering beauty of her presence. But here she is now, blessings be, with her wild titian curls and that laugh that was bigger than her body, her head bobbing in time to her glee, whu-whu-whu. Visiting me for mother’s day, hallmark be damned. Thank you, little chicken.

Everything I am now is because of having her and losing her. That bends my head a little. Every step I take is her gift.

I had better use it well.