Lessons I learned later ...

“In years to come when I’m dead and gone, you might think ‘Gosh, I wish I could tell Mom that she was right’, but you don’t need to worry darling, because I’ll already know”.

In yoga we teach this; let nothing and nobody steal your peace. If someone infuriates you or a situation triggers you, it is just a giant mirror illuminating your darkest shadows. To judge another is to admit a fear of being judged, and to feel repelled by loudness and aggression might suggest you simmer down. Self-awareness can be a slow burning practice, our egos sometimes only allowing us this epiphany years after a fact; you are everything that annoys you.

Nobody annoyed me more than my mother. But it was only as I lay in my hospital bed cradling my newborn daughter in my arms that I knew with absolute certainty the depth of her love for me. She was all that I wanted in that moment, not the scores of visitors disrupting our slumber, nor the phone call from my dad and stepmom who had timed their African safari with the birth of their first grandchild, and not my husband, who my soul suspected already would let us down spectacularly. I craved my mother’s touch, and to tell her she was right, that the letter she had left with the lawyer for me to read upon her death rang true. “Have children”, it said; “It has been the greatest joy of my life”. The woman across the ward with her own newborn was ordering her mother around and not being very nice to her. I wanted to slap her and tell her she was lucky to have a mom. I blamed it on the hormones.

Many of the lessons I learned from my Mom occurred after her death, a reminder that bonds are boundless, love is limitless, and relationships do not necessarily end when a life does. I learned how Mom’s grief for her own parent must have felt; my Grandad who died when I was 6. I remember that evening vividly, my cousins and I being told to wait in the car in the driveway while she administered CPR for longer than she wanted to, knowing already he was gone. We were asked if we wanted to see him, tucked up in his bed. My cousins declined, but I was expected. “It just looks like he’s asleep” Mom said as she ushered me in. I know now she was mentally preparing me. She had already had a mastectomy, and was bringing me up to be fiercely independent, just in case she wasn’t here next year.

Mom once told me that when someone you love dies it hurts like hell but that sometimes the true impact hits harder later. As the years pass their absence can amplify, and the well of longing gets deeper. I recalled these words when I was hiding behind the valiant in my boyfriend’s father’s garage, tears streaming down my face, trying not to make a scene at a family function where the musicians were playing the entire repertoire of Mom’s life. I still remembered her cell phone number and had the ludicrous notion to text her and tell her all about it.

Eventually I learned how Mom must have felt as a newly divorced solo parent of a little girl, packing up her life to move back to the city she was born in, tail between her legs like the family fuck-up. But from despondence she taught me resilience, and this the most powerful of lessons: how endings are also beginnings. Mom retrained as a teacher so that she could work school hours to be there for me, she got married to my stepdad and they bought a house and filled it with music and laughter. Mom’s love of gardening and the back doorstep counselling of a friend-in-need are all traits I have inherited from her.

The greyer my hair gets the more I see her in my reflection, in literal mirrors as well as metaphorical. I hated her grey hair back then and the mean kids at school mocking my “old Mom” who must have been all of 34. She dyed her hair jet black on a whim, and I came home to a stranger - we didn’t know then that she was ahead of her time, that a whole generation of millennials would carry pictures of Daenerys Targaryen’s silver tresses to the salon for a colour match. I’d give anything to have an old Mom now ….

Mom would do this weird sigh sometimes, a little sound like a “himph” would erupt from her spontaneously, when we were walking in the park or driving in the car, and she was lost somewhere deep in her thoughts. “Why do you do that?” I asked her one day. “Oh” she replied. “I don’t really know”. She came back to me weeks later with this answer, having realised: “I think when I sigh that way, I am remembering something that happened in the past that I am embarrassed of or I wish I’d done differently”. “Okay” I replied, not really understanding at all, until I caught myself doing the same thing 20 years later.

“Who’s the boss?” Mom would ask me repeatedly, while I squirmed and avoided the answer she demanded. “I am”, I would tentatively challenge, until eventually conceding “You’re the Boss Momma”, waving my white flag. I learnt to back down and avoid confrontation in life, because I could never win. Perhaps this is why I married a controlling man. I didn’t have brothers and sisters to get in the ring and practice sparring with. Firm but mostly fair, it was Mom’s way or the highway. The original helicopter parent, she loved me with well-meaning advice and too much information. She built me up but wouldn’t hesitate to strip me down in front of anyone if I stepped out of line - Mom was the boss of me. Mom would have loved to have had more children, but cancer robbed her of that. Her students rave about her all these years later when I see them in the street. My Mom touched the lives of everyone she met; “she was such a special person” they say, and she was - a special person to all, but most of all to me. For those years after my dad left, after cancer and poverty, before my stepdad came along and she had her second chance at a happy family, it felt like just me and Mom against the world. “Mom and Minxy” she’d call us. She was naughty though when she told me that she was the only person I could ever truly trust in this world, because then she left me here in it, alone.

Mom would have been an incredible Grandma to my babies. I see her face in theirs sometimes, little smiles and quirks, fire in their eyes, mannerisms of the gene pool. Red petals are our gifts from her, we pick them up on our walks. Geraniums were her favourite, so I had one tattooed on. Something permanent to keep close, a little piece of her that nobody can take away from me.

I remember Mum practicing Standing Bow Pose in her bedroom, sandalwood burning. A stripy bath towel rolled out on the emerald-green carpet, wearing her blue 70s leotard. “Yoga calms me down” she explained. I taught my first yoga class on the tenth anniversary of her death, and I knew she’d be proud of me for following my dreams, but she’d also remind me I come from a family of teachers, so it was only a matter of time.

Ten thousand times you were right Mom, as you downloaded and installed 80 years of parenting into 28. When you told me that I’d look different but feel the same at 20 and 40. When you told me the cream always rises to the top. Mom you were so strong - I wish I could tell you how you made me proud. I see you now, doing your best for us, staying alive when you wanted to die. I wish I could tell you I know how that feels. I wish I could tell you I saw you sobbing in the bathroom that night when I was five, but I didn’t let you see me seeing and slunk away. I wish I’d put my arms around you and told you everything was going to be okay, even though it wasn’t.

Now you are dead and gone I wish I could tell you that you were right.

But you already know.