Women Who Inspire

To the mother I don’t remember.

Hi mum.

Well, here we are. If ever there was going to be an opportunity to write you a letter, this is it.

I saw this challenge on a writing platform I recently discovered called Vocal. Nothing like that would have existed when you were alive. Back then landline phones were the main form of communication or telegrams for urgent contact with loved ones abroad.

Today, we can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. You would have loved this. You would have used social media or What’s APP and Messenger to connect with your parents and siblings while you traveled around the world with my dad. I know you sent them telegrams though. Your mum -grandma Audrey- showed me some when I was growing up.

She also showed me the one she received while she was in Malaysia with granddad Paul. The one that told her you had taken your life. She had a breakdown straight after.

I know you wrote her letters. She showed me those too. You wrote long, detailed explanations of all that you were seeing, experiencing in different countries in the world. Being the wife of a sea faring captain was fun and you enjoyed sea -salt seasoned adventures. You met some amazing people, rescued parrots, mynah birds and monkeys from markets in Beirut and Morocco. But you couldn’t rescue me.

It feels fitting to write you a letter. You wrote many and they were beautiful. Little did you know that your daughter would be so like you. A writer, an animal lover, a rescuer, a wandering soul.

When I saw this challenge to write about a woman who inspires me, many women came to mind. Women who have been mother figures when you were not there throughout my life. Even the woman who grabbed me and placed me in her husband’s arms when I walked round to her house and said I couldn’t wake up mummy. She was a rock to our family. And she still cries for you even in her very old age. But I didn’t pick her.

I thought of aunt Zoe, your best friend. She was a mother figure for me while I lived on the farm those first years. She would take me to her home to play with her girls and wash me in the bath. Patiently and often with tears streaming down her face, she would scrub the filth from my body. Caked on dirt from the farm. Dirt my grandparents couldn’t see or wash from my body, they could barely take care of themselves.

Aunt Zoe would use rose scented soap, warm water, and soft towels to dry me. She told me that when you were alive, I smelled of flowers. No one knew what you used on me but anywhere I went, I smelled clean and beautiful. She always made a point of drying between my toes so that I couldn’t get a fungal infection. I used to think it was weird. Now I know she was desperate to protect me in the only way she knew, by keeping me clean.

She still grieves for you. And now she grieves the loss of her own daughter too. Too soon, too young, your age when you left. Who would have thought? But I didn’t pick her.

I thought of Elli, the woman who fostered me when you died. At just 5 years old, she added me into her home with her daughters and made me feel like part of her family. I had my comfortable bed, my own set of drawers with neatly folded clean clothes. She cared about me and loved me like a mother, but she wasn’t my mother. She couldn’t connect the bond that was severed when you left me. Nothing could do that. No one could. But she did her very best, for two whole years she tried but in the end all I wanted was to be close to you by living on the farm with my grandparents, the last people who ever saw you alive, the ones who kept your handbag and nightdress in the wardrobe. Living on the farm meant I could hide in the wardrobe and hug your handbag tightly, smelling your scent, feeling you close. So, I didn’t pick Elli.

There have been other women who have inspired me over the years. Women I called when I gave birth so that I could announce the happy news to someone who resembled a mother figure in my life. There have been women who have loved, supported me, cheered me on but I didn’t pick them.

There are friends who are women of valor, an example of what is it to overcome trauma, adversity and live victoriously. I thought of them. Surviving domestic violence, sexual abuse, loss and severe trauma, being an example to their children, setting up charities, making a difference in the hurting world.

But I didn’t pick them.

Why did I pick you? I don’t even remember you, well, the two memories I have of you are not the stuff of inspirational stories. Your detention in the mental hospital and your death. that's it.

At five years old when you left, I should have more memories, but they were cleaned out with the same brutality strangers cleaned out our home when you died.

I picked you because you inspire me to be the woman I aspire to being. I picked you because you weren’t perfect and you did life raw, hard but real. I picked you because you loved me in the deepest and most profound way there could ever be. I know this because even though I have no good memories of you when I think of you, I sense the bond, severed but still there like two ends of one umbilical cord cut in half the two bodies floating away from each other and yet, somehow, supernaturally connected through a stronger invisible cord.

I don’t remember you, yet people say I am so like you. I write like you, we even have the same handwriting, how can that be? I love animals, nature, people. I laugh with my head thrown back, loud and full heartedly, just like you did apparently. I see the funny side of everything just like you did. Apparently.

According to all those who knew you as a daughter, sister and friend, you were sensitive, compassionate, loved deep and hard, stood up to fight for those with no voice. My arrival was your happiest moment and as I have been told so many times, I was always carried by you lest I fell, lest I scraped a knee, lest I felt sad.

I remember your mum, grandma Audrey telling me that when you all lived in Malaysia or some other exotic part of the world, while she dined and danced and played tennis with diplomats, you were tending to the lepers that no one wanted to touch. You had access to wealth and luxury, but you preferred the poor and destitute.

Your beauty won you many competitions and many rich and famous men asked for your hand in marriage. But you picked my dad. A Greek man from a poor family who sailed the seas to get away from his own pain and then found you, his kindred spirit, his soul mate. You were happiest feeding sheep on his parents’ farm, helping on the ship, bringing joy and rescuing people and animals wherever you travelled.

You loved fully, unconditionally; you were real. And your pain bore deep. My father’s death was the final straw for you. You couldn’t bear it any longer and so two failed attempts later, your struck ‘lucky’ the third time and left me forever wondering why. Why you left. Why I wasn’t worth living for.

I have been so utterly heartbroken that no one could help me. My body has taken all the pain of my soul and doctors could not help me as I screamed in physical and mental anguish. The trauma of your loss was too much, at times I have been tempted to end it all, to follow you but then there has always been a force within me pushing me on, lifting me up. Is it you?

I went through years of anger towards you. If you had stayed alive, I would have been safe, protected from the molesters, the neglect, the further loss when my grandparents died. I would have had someone to rejoice in my pregnancies, someone to call for that family recipe, someone to hold the baby while I took a nap. You would have been my light in the darkness. But maybe you have been all along.

But its all the stuff of dreams because we truly do not know what the future brings. I was angry for what I thought I was missing and yet so many mothers are alive but may as well be dead for the pain and sorrow they cause their children.

There came a time, I saw what I was doing and how you became a scapegoat. If you were still alive, I would be ... If you had not died, I would not have endured …

But its all just thoughts, no proof. It is all futile.

They say time is a healer. I am not healed. I have learned to live with your absence. I have forgiven you for leaving me and I have wished you alive more times than it is possible to count. But you are not, at least not in this same life I am living now.

And yet I am inspired by you. I am inspired to live my life fully even if I don’t know what may come. I am inspired to love like you did even though you knew it hurt. I am inspired to care for others selflessly even if they never acknowledge my kindness. I am inspired to do what thrills my heart even if it doesn’t meet with the expectations or approval of others. As a mother, I am inspired to hold on to my children longer, carry them lest they fall, hold them high above the danger, be real and raw and funny and sad and authentic lest they have some false aspirations of a perfect mother that does not exist.

Most of all mum, I am inspired by you to let go of all that I think I should be, to not conform to the standards of the world and instead be unashamedly and unapologetically myself. Because that is the example by which I want to inspire my own children to live. Holding nothing back, fitting in no one’s box but living fully themselves, making mistakes without shame, discovering without judgement, living according to their benchmark and embracing all there is with no regrets.

And for that I am truly grateful and inspired.

I love you

Until we meet again

Your daughter

Michelle