Mothers and absence

I should be writing an essay today. I tried. But it wouldn’t work. It’s my mum’s birthday today. That fact seems to eclipse everything else I’m trying to do. It’s a thing I dragged with me on the school run and back again. The last birthday she celebrated was her 29th, I think; she’s 70 today. I can’t stop thinking of her sitting somewhere, resolutely not celebrating it, because I can’t stop thinking about it, I’m writing about it in an attempt to put it somewhere else. Lately, I’ve been captivated by Nick Laird’s Up Late. It’s a very good poem and one I think of a lot. I read it this morning, hoping it would help with work. It didn’t. It’s a poem about his dad dying, so in retrospect reading it on the birthday of my absent mother was probably a bad idea. It’s also a poem where lines resonate differently on different days. Today, this stood out an elegy, I think, is words to bind a grief in, a companionship of grief, a spell to keep it safe and sound, to stop it from escaping.

I think I had a sense of this when I wrote The Last Days. Although it was a difficult book to write, it was even harder to stop writing it. I wanted to keep writing it because for as long as I wrote, my mother was back with me and I was back with her. More than being a spell to keep grief safe and sound, it became a way of reuniting us; if in life it is impossible for us to be together, then we were at least there on the page at the same time, and I could control time for as long as I wrote. Some days, I was so deeply in the past that when I came out my study it wasn’t so much that I didn’t know where I was, but when I was. I want the poem to destroy time, Nick Laird writes; I wanted writing The Last Days to do the same thing, the obliterative power of writing seemed to offer some redemption, a temporary solution to our separation. And for a while, it did.

But all elegies have to end. I had to finish the book, I had to stop compulsively rewriting it. I didn’t want to give it up. I thought it would be an end to my grief. I thought it would keep it safe and sound, bound between two covers. I thought containing it in that way would keep me safe and sound. The day I finished writing it, I went to the Tate Modern to see IKB ‘79. Maggie Nelson says it’s too blue, but she’s wrong. Visit it often enough and you’ll see it changes depending on the day, on the mood of the viewer. Some days, it’s too much blue if there is such a thing, other days, not enough blue. That day, so much blue I felt it pull me from the next room, I stood in front of it either wanting to disappear into it or be disappeared by it; but most of all, I wanted to be still writing the book I’d written to and for my mother that also very firmly, wrote me away from her. Finishing a book is a strange grief of its own.

It was only when I was on the third draft of Ava Anna Ada, that I realised I was writing around her absence again. Even when I’m not writing about her, she’s there; the grief, the way it haunts and lurks. I couldn’t and wouldn’t write what I do if she was still in my life. I don’t know if I’d write anything very good without what happened with us. I’m not sure I do write anything very good. I think, like Laird goes on to say in Up Late, I’ve been writing elegies to her for a long time. I think I probably always will be.

After I finished writing The Last Days, I felt like I’d broken something in my memory. I couldn’t visualise any of the events in the book, as if they existed almost in book form alone. I couldn’t see my mother’s face, or my grandmother’s, or anyone else in the book. It was horrifying in the truest sense. But I began to remember fragments of things I’d never remembered before. My mother was a seamstress, most of the memories that began to emerge were of her sewing, or me sitting with my hands apart as she wound wool into balls round my hands, sitting for hours on the floor of the fabric shop as she chose material, her hands later running it through the machine. In remembering the more difficult things and effectively creating a container for them, it seemed like I’d made way for the good things to come back. No one is ever one thing, this is why people are so hard to write about, they don’t conform neatly to character. My mother doesn’t conform to anything, even though she looks very conformist from the outside. I admire this about her. I like the new memories. I liked remembering that I was a child of God and cloth, both, not one or the other.

I don’t know if Nick Laird is right. The poem binds grief, but doesn’t contain it. Writing elegies to the living is complicated, grieving the living is too. Knowing I’ve missed a decade of my mother’s life, and her a decade of mine, is almost too much to know. Knowing there’s no solution is the same. And all I can do to mark the day is write this and think of her, surrounded by wool and thread and needles and Louise Bourgeois said a needle wasn’t a weapon, it’s not a pin, she said, but then she’d never met my mother with her foot pressed hard on the sewing machine’s pedal, the needle flying so quickly it was only a blur. When I close my eyes, I see this, and the tiny perfect puncture wounds it left in its wake.