Day 14 - Holding

A month-long writing challenge exploring the theme of "Being Myself"

This is the day 13 instalment of the 21 day writing challenge I did with Megan Macedo in March, where I wrote a piece in response to a prompt (unseen by the reader) every day. I’ve scheduled one of these posts to come out every few days this summer so I finally get all these up and out into the world! I hope it’s not overwhelming and that you get something from them. Thank you for being here.

I took a picture of my mum recently, hugging my kids in her arms outside our family home. I didn’t show it to her because I knew she’d say, oh god I look old! She looks beautiful to me, just as she is.

She’s holding her grandchildren and gazing at them so tenderly, she is holding on. My parents are getting older, and the luck we’ve had so far feels shakier. How much longer can we make it? Each extra day together feels like something to be celebrated.

The night after I took the photo I couldn’t sleep, I lay awake and at one moment in the night, half waking half sleeping, I had a stronger sense than before of what it might be like for the people that made me and raised me to not be here physically, with me in the world anymore. I felt a tightening of my throat and a squeezing sensation in my chest and the sentence that floated in was, I cannot do it, and the imagined feeling was that of a key part of my body being removed and me having to completely orient myself to living in the wake of this.

A new navigation. It wasn’t the feeling of losing a limb, that felt too remote. A central part, something bigger.

My daughter recently found a sheet she’d filled in as a littler girl at school where they had to write what people made them feel better and what places made them feel better. She had written “frenz” for people and “mum” for place. I like the idea of being a place someone can come for comfort. This is right at the very heart of the idea of a mother for me.

Mothers are our first homes (and homes vary greatly in the sense of safety, happiness and freedom they provide). To lose a home is to be uprooted. Do we lose the home entirely or does our memory of it mean it still creates some safety for us? Without the original place to take ourselves towards, I imagine we have to learn how to be in the world again, to build new foundations, to start to feel our way around again.