anniversary

another first

When I get new subscribers I automatically think it might be a mistake. The way you can so easily sign up to a number of writers by accident when you subscribe to one you actually do want to follow. When someone subscribes and pays I am dumbfounded. Delighted, grateful and then doubtful - was it a mistake? I actually emailed someone who subscribed last year, from Australia, to ask if he had done it by mistake. I know he admired my mother, and my writing couldn’t be more different from hers, but I accepted his gift to support my stop-start patchy writing career with gratitude after he convinced me it wasn’t a mistake. As I accept with enormous gratitude the latest one, plus the odd ‘cup of coffee’ (which you can buy here if you like? insert bright smiley emoji) here and there.

Age is just a number. So they say. A number that we humans use to measure our time on this earth, to help us identify when we have more years behind us than ahead, or if we have to get up for work or if it’s hopefully the weekend again.

I have 63 years behind me, who knows how many ahead. The president of Mexico is a year younger than me - doesn’t she look amazing? And I don’t mean ‘for her age’. So strong and decisive looking. I think about what she must have to do in a day and I immediately need a lie down. I don’t know much about her politics, but she appears to be standing up to the orange one so that is definitely in her favour.

My point here is that we are all different, so saying age is just a number, implying that you simply need to do more exercise, or take the right supplement to bounce around like a 25 year old, is just bollocks. We are all different and as such we age differently.

Not much about getting older is dignified really. It’s not pretty either, apparently, as we are constantly told to apply anti-aging stuff to our faces and bodies to make them look 25 again. It ain’t going to happen but we can die trying. Or, radical thought, we can stop caring. I sit somewhere in between. I spent vast sums of money on a Trinny product called the ‘elevator’ (ffs - insert eye rolling emoji) in an attempt to return my neck to some sort of youthful, ageless lie. Big surprise, it didn’t work. I could have carried on with it, and maybe seen a teeny difference, but then the sane part of my brain resurfaced after its battle with my vanity and told me to get a grip and spend the money on plants.

I imagine you are wondering what this has to do with the title of this piece. Nothing is answer. It’s just how it began.

This next bit has something to do with the title because it is the anniversary of my mother’s death today. It’s the first one, and also one of many firsts (Christmas, birthday, Easter…) over the last year.

It’s huge and insignificant all at once.

Everything about today in the world is a contradiction playing out. The planet is burning, it’s a beautiful day; the planet is drowning, spring is here; we are ruled by monsters, I will pick some flowers and put them in a vase; my mother is dead, I am not. Nothing makes sense. I am sitting a room in a house that has my name on the deeds (not that I know where the deeds are - does anyone know where these things are kept?) but it means nothing, except that I am, in this moment, safe. But owning a house? What does that mean? I didn’t see the money that bought it although my bank account had some large numbers in it briefly. What even is money? It’s all very confusing is what I am saying.

This time last year I was writing this.

Rosemary Eleanor Konradin Luling Haughton

13th April 1927 - 9th May 202

All those conversations I never had. All the time playing the daughter who was ‘fine’ and didn’t want to worry anyone, but wanted her to know, instinctively, that I wasn't fine, and I think she did, but we never found the words. All the time asking in my head why did she leave us, why did I move away after the family moved to Scotland when my brother didn’t, why could she and I never talk on the same level? Why didn’t she barge in and take my hand when I was giving birth? Was it too late then for her to be in that role? Had I pushed her away? Why did she wait to be asked to come to me when my partner at the time was dying? Was she scared to step in, did I do that?

I once spent 9 months living with her in the US to try and reconnect. I was 26. The last time I’d spent that long with her was when I was 12 and I had spent the previous 12 years with her. I know she liked roses, Victoriana, old fashioned art, Georgette Heyer novels, gardening, making scones and bread. But she was also a person of huge intellect and an important feminist theologian. That bit left me standing at the gate.

She never really knew me. She knew I like roses, Victoriana not so much but old things definitely, old fashioned (and modern) art, Georgette Heyer novels, gardening (in pots), making bread. She didn’t know I had 2 abortions. She never saw me drunk. She never knew my darker, meaner thoughts.

When I was a child and upset she would stroke my head. When I was older and no longer with her she would sometimes do it verbally, on the phone, although that was hard as neither of us were very comfortable with the phone. You are wonderful, she would say. I’m so sorry about… whatever crisis I was going through, which I always played down because there’s one thing I can’t stand and that’s pity. Poor Lizzie. I just wanted her to fix it, but she never did, she wasn’t able. No parent can, especially if they don’t know what they are being asked to fix, and I couldn’t find the words to describe the problem, and if somehow I did manage to she didn’t understand, couldn’t see through my lens. This is parenting, hers of me, mine of mine. She did buy me a frying pan that pretty much saved me from starvation for my first term in college.

It’s taken a year for me to allow the anger and hurt to surface; to understand the mystery of her, in that she will always be a mystery to me - and really feel her absence, like the shape of something I could hold in my hands. Then to forgive her, and myself, and love her again. Not necessarily in that on order, nor, I am fairly sure, is the process finished.

We had two weeks together, here in my home in Wales, in May 2023. We had not spent time alone together in any significant way since 1986. The same flowers I see in the hedgerows now are the flowers she saw and loved so much, gorse and hawthorn especially. It was a precious time, parts of which were shared with other family members, but mostly it was just her and me, hanging out, going for drives, eating lunch in sunny cafes. It was a healing time, we spoke to each other without speaking the words. They were no longer necessary. She spent some time sitting on our sunny deck under a raffia umbrella, mending an old tapestry cushion with a patch of Welsh blanket fabric, sewed on using large blanket stitches. It’s a very obvious patch, very on trend with the visible darning that is so popular now. But she would not have considered that even had she known, she just did it, enjoying the sewing and the colours and beauty of a useful thing rescued. I like to think of it as a metaphor for the the time we had together in those two weeks, a visible and enduring mend, sewing us back together again. I say I like to think of it that way. I have, really, only just thought of it that way. But I like it and shall keep it.

No recipe this time. If you have got this far and think you’ve been swizzed let me know about something you’d like to cook but haven’t yet. We can make it together.