mother

Mother, wife, teacher, friend, mom is gone.

It has been several months and still I have no words to describe the gaping black hole in my life that has been created by her absence.

No words but there are questions. So many questions. Who will answer the questions I never got to ask her;
When you were my age, did you feel this lost?
This silenced?
At gatherings did the men talk over your head while a thousand unspoken comebacks raced through it?

The questions I have yet to even think of. Who is going to teach me how to mother my own babies?

What do I do mama now that my foundation has been ripped from beneath me? Where do I find the confidence to build a life?

My Mother

I have a mother, and our relationship is difficult.

On the one hand, she's my mum, she raised me, gave birth to me, and because of this technically, I love her. I try to make time to chat to her and I help her when she needs me.

But that's it. This may sound harsh of me and possibly even ungrateful, but she wasn't a very good mother. A good provider, yes, but never a mother. I wanted to post this, as my relationship with her has been such a big part of my life, but so difficult.

My mother, Susan, married aged 17 to a man called Tony, aged 21. It was the late 60s. Aged 18, exactly 11 months later she gave birth to my sister. She considered herself a bit of a hippy. She says she never smoked and didn't know what drugs were until several years later and thought being a hippy was just about wearing flowers in your hair (I don't know how big the press was on drugs in 68-69 so I don't know if she lies and did do drugs or if this is plausible). In hippy style, she made up my sister's name - Sepy. They moved to a new house and looked after their newborn baby. When she was 20, my mother decided to go to a local college to continue her education. Her O Levels had not been the best so she re-sat English and started Maths at A Level. She passed English and only completed the first year of Maths then left, but in her Maths class she met a man called David.

Sexism is a tricky thing. Sure, it's your brother getting a new car for his sixteenth birthday when all you got was a hug, but sexism creeps into your life in more subtle ways than that.

For example, my mom came to visit me mid-semester of sophomore year. I'd been writing papers and studying for exams, so I barely had time to clean my room before she arrived. In the thirty minutes that her cab made its slow, steady way towards my house, I desperately tried to trash liquor bottles that had piled up in the downstairs common areas. To give you a little background, I was living in a literary society house—kind of like a fraternity—where a bunch of old, curmudgeonly men had spent the best years of their old and curmudgeonly lives. The society became co-ed after a century or so, followed by the University.

A few of my feminist idols that you may (or may not) have heard of…

Ama Ata Aidoo; Ghanaian author; always mindful of what it means to be both African and female; true inspiration for those of us who carry both of those labels proudly.

Alice Walker; feminist, environmentalist, civil rights and gay activist… enough said.

Ruth Hughes; one of many inspiring English teachers that I have had, the first one to tell me that even today, women are paid more than 30% less than men in the same workplace.

Ulle Lewes; One of my college professors, always something original and inspiring to say, always sharp, always funny, always so knowledgeable.