The "Other" Mummy

The “Other” Mummy

Hey mum, I have never told you this before but.

I was scared of you growing up,

I loved you, and I still do, but I was also fearful.

I never truly realised until I talked with one of my sisters (the one you never hit).

It's so strange how things become more apparent as you grow up, and the thing that I understand now with complete clarity of my thoughts was... you are not supposed to be scared of your own mother.

You weren't a drunk, you weren't a druggy, you weren't abusive in the way that you would think, the way that would leave trauma or marks.

But you were loud.

And you were very quick to anger, and I don't have an awful lot of early memories of not getting smacked for mistakes, which were never actually explained to me.

What did I do wrong?

I wet myself, I was less than 3 years old, and I wet myself.

So I was smacked and cleaned up in that order.

I wish I had the words back then to explain how I felt. Everything was so much bigger than me; you were bigger than me. You were my protection and comfort, my safe place, and you hit me.

My sisters and I have described how we sometimes felt like we had “Two mummy's”, the one who would bake brownies with us and let us lick the spoon clean on Saturday mornings.

If she heard someone was picking on us at school, the mummy would listen and sort it out, standing up to the bullies' parents and the teaching staff who couldn't protect us like you could.

Then there was the other mummy, the mummy we would all tiptoe around to avoid, the one we dreaded coming home from work.

I accidentally broke one of your small Buddha statues in the living room as you thought they were “trendy” when I was 8. I simply knocked a child's red plastic chair over and smashed the head off.

Dad said it would be okay, but I remember it being the most prolonged five hours of wait, wondering how you would react when you came home from work and saw what I had done.

You shrugged it off; after all, you had 17 just like it.

Luckily, It was the first mummy who had come home that day and not the other mummy.

One day I asked where we were travelling to, and you snapped at me in the car, saying I didn't need to know everything.

That is true, but I did need to know which mummy I was talking to on any given day.

I don't know why you never hit my sisters.

Were they cuter?

More innocent?

They indeed were no better behaved than I was.

I think you were just worn down by that point, too tired to raise a hand on the three girls you inflicted upon yourself.

You always wondered why we got on so well with dad. When we cried, you would tell us to pull our socks up, take it on the chin and get over ourselves, as crying wouldn't help with anything.

When we cried, Dad would joke that our eyes were like a lousy sink facet and try to “turn them off” for us. He would listen to why we were crying (no matter how pointless), and then you would rub the backs of our hands with one of his big hardened, often oil-covered thumbs and tell us it would be okay.

You still resent him for being the “Good guy” yes, he's soft, sometimes too soft when it comes to the youngest, but sometimes you need to soften the blow and not just the physical ones.

I tried to make you like me for years; I wore what you put out, played with the children you chose and did the clubs you thought were best. I even took the constant comparisons to other people's children that you made without complaining.

“Charlotte never has a messy room, if there's anything on the floor her mum throws it away in the bin!”.

“Charlotte has a paper route, earns her own money”.

“Charlotte has chores that she completes with no fuss”.

“Charlotte spends every weekend at her grandparents so her parents get nights off”.

“Charlotte goes to the park with her friends”.

“Charlotte doesn't fight with her sisters”.

“Charlotte this”.

“Charlotte that”.

Charlotte became a teen mum. A teen mum who basically abandoned her son to her own mother to raise so she could travel around the world as an air stewardess now.

I don't get compared to Charlotte anymore.

Now Charlotte's just a “stupid girl”.

We get on better now; now, I'm not under your feet all the time like we were when growing up. You bring KitKats to my house every fortnight and send me Facebook messages to see if I'm eating enough every few days.

You stopped hitting me when I was seven when I attempted to hit you back. That was, after all, how I'd been shown how to deal with mild inconveniences and mistakes. When I was 12, you figured out I wasn't neurotypical, and our relationship improved again. When I did odd things, it wasn't too on purposely aggravate you. It came from an instinct place deep down that might not always be logical but feels very real to me. You said that you think you would be a much better mum now as you have mellowed out and are more patient with your older age, or perhaps you are more patient now on the other side of raising three daughters.

I enjoyed our dog walks together, our trips to the cinema to see Harry Potter and later Twilight movies. You didn't judge me when I said I wanted to go on the pill at 18, and you took me to every appointment for the next 7 years. I'm graduating soon, and you will be there (mainly because we think you like to brag about our successes on Facebook, but the thought counts).

The other mummy is gone, she was slain by modern science and medication, but her memory still lives on in the memories of your daughter's minds. I had to explain to my Boyfriend why I flinched when he raised his hand suddenly. I had to explain why I was so competitive, so eager to please and why I burst into tears if anyone raised their voice too loud.

I remember the last time I said out loud, “I love you” to you.

You were putting washing on the line at the bottom of the hill in our old home. I hadn't told you in a while, so I wanted to remind you.

“Mum?” I nervously asked (after all, I wasn't sure which mummy I was talking to that day).

“What?” you asked exasperated, never looking away from the clothing pegs.

At that moment, I understood that I was bothering you, taking up your finite time for something potentially irrelevant or unimportant.

And there it was, the last time I said it to you out loud in almost twenty years.

“I love you”, I said quietly, turning back to our house at the top of the hill.

“I love you too”.