What my mother gave me

I want to write to you about my mother, but I can’t get to her.

This is often the way with these newsletters, I have this idea which is just out of reach and I can’t quite find the strands to say what I want to say.

I will press on.

It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday, a complicated celebration I mostly try and ignore. It used to be fraught when my children were small. My mother died too young, my husband, the children’s father, died even younger. Grief makes the memory of those years thick, as if time had a treacle-like quality, gluggy and slow. Mother’s Day was a burden. Eg¹. Now I don’t sweat it, I’m happy for a phone call. But Mother’s Day is not why I’m trying to write about my mother.

I’ll start again.

I am just home from three days in Adelaide where I was an enthusiastic spectator at the 25th Adelaide International Three Day Event. Read this footnote² for an explanation, but basically it’s three days of deep horse immersion. I am part of a little group who are all as passionate about horses as me. Though we have aspirations to travel to the UK to attend Badminton and Burghley, Adelaide is much closer. We had three days of horsey bliss. We held our collective breath, we cheered, we cried, we clapped. And see I’ve wandered off again. The question hovers, why would this wonderful weekend make me want to write to you about my mother?

This jump is so big we are standing on our tiptoes to see over the top.

Longtime Sit Spotters will know my older brother is autistic. It was a label my mother resisted for many reasons, but indeed it was autism which dominated our childhood. Our brother, who is non verbal and loves to flap and make deep hoots and hollers, took up a lot of space. My mother knew this, and one of her ways of trying to rectify the disparity of her attention was to regularly take my younger brother and I out of school to spend a day exclusively with her doing something we loved³.

My younger brother usually chose a music event, a shared passion, for our mother loved music. Obviously I chose horses. Our mother hated horses. She was a country girl and grew up with horses. She’d even ridden to school. This sounded like heaven to me, but not for her. She rode with the neighbouring boys, who bullied her, slapped her pony on the rump and made it gallop home. It was hardly surprising, once she had a choice, that she steered well clear of horses. Well until she had a prickly, horse obsessed child.

For my special day we went to horse events. Each year she’d find another one. We went to World Cup showjumping and I hung on the edge of the fence and watched my idols. We went to the cross country day of a three day event and walked around while I whispered information about every horse and rider who galloped past. We went to the Sydney Royal and sat in the empty grandstand for hours while polished ponies trotted in circles. It must have been like watching paint dry for my mother⁴.

*

Last week, or was it the week before, no matter, my writing group used the poem Speak to Me of My Mother by Jasmine Mans to do a seven minute prompt. Here it is:

Tell me about the girl my mother was, before she traded in all her girl to be my mother. What did she smell like? How many friends did she have, before she had no room? Before I took up so much space in her prayers, Who did she pray for?

I used the prompt to write into a character in my novel whose mother has recently died. But here we are a week or so later and I am still thinking about this poem. Perhaps this is because I cannot ask my mother who she was, but there’s also something else. There’s a question to myself. Who I was before I became mother? The answer is in the joy I felt all weekend.

Now, with my own children grown up, I am returning to those things which delighted me as a child. And perhaps this fizzes with something even more precious. Our mother took my interest in horses seriously and for all the chaos of our childhood, she gave us the superpower of her attention; she gifted us to ourselves.

mm

A few other things:

I watched the trailer for the NZ film Tina and it made me cry. Here’s a review with trailer embedded. This wonderful essay by Lucie Elven on Janet Frame in the LRB will send you rushing back to Frame if you’re already a fan, or will have you seeking out her books if you haven’t read her. In completely the opposite direction, Isaac Fitzgerald goes hat hunting in London. It’s a romp.

Have a great week Sitters. Thank you as ever for your support.

mmx

1. one memorable mother’s day my 8 year-old daughter, eager to spoil me with breakfast in bed, insisted I stay there while she and her 3 year-old brother made pancakes. All went reasonably well until the packet of sugar was fought over and, well it was a big mess. Cue tears for us all.

2. Three-day eventing, also known as eventing or horse trials, is an equestrian sport that combines three disciplines: dressage, cross-country, and show jumping. It tests the overall abilities of the horse and rider. The event horse and rider is a true all rounder, elegant, bold, fit, careful. The dressage phase tests the horse's obedience, suppleness, and trainability through a series of precise movements performed on a dressage arena. Cross-country is a test of speed, endurance, and jumping ability, involving a course with a variety of obstacles such as fences, water, and ditches. Show Jumping requires horse and rider to navigate a course of show jumps in a stadium setting. It tests whether a horse is fit and well to be careful of light rails after the boldness of galloping across country the day before.

3. She did this for us from a very young age through to about the age of fourteen, when we became independent enough to take ourselves.

4. Though it must have been a welcome respite from my older brother, whose obsessions were (to name a few) watching the local bridge open to let boats into the harbour, doing the washing (water/machine…perfect combo for him), catching any form of public transport.