Mother
I am as old now as my mother was when she fell, when she disappeared. Yet I’m still here, and so is she.
I am. I am an individual. I am self-contained. I am whole.
I’m five. My mother is carrying me, I love her so much, I’m kissing her neck all the way up the hill. Do you want your dad to carry you? My father is much taller, much stronger, but I want my mom to carry me, because I love her so much.
I’m in my teens, I fight with my sister, I love my sister. There’s us teenagers, and there’s them, the parents, and the main frontline goes by that line, as it should. But there’s also another division, there’s them, the Ilić, my sister and my father, strict, tidy, organized, technical-minded, and then there’s the Kojadinović, my mother and me — that’s her maiden name — we look alike, and we differ from them in every way possible. There’s us, the clumsy, the dreaming, the unadjusted, my mother and me, and there’s them. But we have each other.
I’m in my early twenties, my father dies. He dies a slow, horrible cancer death. My mother loses the ground under her feet, she falls, she disappears. I’m confused, I’m lost, I’m furious. In the fury, in the betrayal, I decide to learn to live without her. I’m not anything like her, I will never be like her. I’m not her.
Still in my early twenties, I move abroad, I keep the distance.
I’m in my early thirties, I’m grown up, I’m married, I’m leaving my mother’s apartment on a hot summer day. At the door, she checks my hair at the nape of my neck, I have had a shower earlier that day, my hair is still a bit wet, it’s very thick, just like hers. Your hair is wet, you can’t go out with wet hair. For Christ sake, mom, its 28C inside (thank god for the air condition) and 37C outside, please! A skeptical look, a moment of hesitation, then a sheepish smile, alright, then. A glimpse of my mother as she used to be, the first little victory in a dozen years.
In my mid-thirties, I get my second daughter. My mother comes over to help me out. She’s an old woman, she behaves like an old woman, the day her husband died, she became an old woman of forty-nine, and fourteen years later, she’s an old woman of sixty-three. My old fury of her betrayal, of her deserting me reawakens. I want my mom back. I yell at her. I’m ashamed.
I’m in my late thirties, I’m making coffee, I listen to my mother teaching my daughters how to make their beds. If you don’t put your pajamas under the pillow, a tom-cat will sneak in and steal it! Years later, my daughters still put their pajamas under their pillows.
In my early forties, I watch them in the kitchen of my childhood home, my mother and my eldest daughter, they are emptying the dishwasher, my mother is hard of hearing, my daughter speaks clearly, distinctly, in what is her second language, my mother hears every word she says. My mother answers back, shows her where to put the cups, how to stack them. I recognise that voice, that’s not an old womans voice, that’s my mother’s voice.
I’m in my late forties, my daughter breaks a glass in a room that is still called the nursery, although no children have lived there for a quarter of a century. My mother has always been very strict around broken glass, it has to be cleaned up to her high standards. My children are teenagers, I have successfully cleaned a number of broken glasses, but this day, as I kneel on the floor with a half a glass full of shards, I wonder if I’m doing it right, I feel small, I feel insecure, I feel incompetent. And it’s a soothing feeling, allowing myself to feel clumsy, to feel incompetent, for a little while, in her home, in her life. To take a little respite of having to be strong, of having to be determined, of having to be competent, in my own home, in my own life.
I gather the tiny glass shards, and I hum to myself.
I am as old now as my mother was when she fell, when she disappeared. Yet I’m still here, and so is she.
I read in a book, I think it was Frances Fukuyama’s, about an old Chinese view of a person, not as a distinct individual, but as a part of a string, stretching from his ancestors to his descendants. I feel the string to my mother, I’m not bound tightly by it as I was when I was a child, it’s not holding me back, neither is it severed and dangling sadly as it was for years after my father’s death. It has gotten repaired, slowly and inexplicably as organic things do. It is there, reassuring me, anchoring me. I throw a line ahead, towards my daughters, to use as a support, as an anchoring line, when they might need it.
I am. I am an individual. I belong, I am a part of a whole. I am whole.
