Freedom is Calling Your Mother When you Want to

Freedom is being able to call your mother whenever you want and know that she can do the same.

I built my relationship with my mother on a schedule, through booked appointments, locked doors, and the musty heat of a psychiatric ward. Through a haze of sedatives and through second-hand information. I built my relationship with my mother through a quagmire of guilt. There are only so many ways you can turn the truth; post-natal depression sent her into a downward spiral that exacerbated every problem she had ever had.

I put her in there, and she had to pull herself out inch by bloody inch.

She would come at the weekends in a big, round-cornered bus and try to push the jagged pieces of what should have been into place, cutting us both in the process. I am often ashamed to remember that I was afraid of her, because she never did anything to deserve it. Mental illness is rarely violent; like everyone else in that hospital, she was mostly sad or confused or afraid. Wavering between lucid distress and drugged serenity. She tried; she was, and is, a good woman who was dealt an unfair hand. But her panic was so palpable at times that it was almost infectious; when she tried to love, she tried too hard and it was bruising.

Time passed, however, and doctors can really do wonders. With time and love and understanding, and no small amount of medication, her hands became softer and her love became more gentle, and we saw more and more of her. She became herself again and that was the worst thing about her wellness.

That sounds horrible, right? But it's true. I didn't know my mother.

I knew the sick, frightened woman that circumstance, hormones, and my father created. I didn't know my mother when she became herself and that was more frightening than anything else.

Her moment of freedom came when she walked out of the ward and into a small home all of her own. She carved out a well-deserved place in the world and settled into it. And I walked into a cage of my own making. I had lived all my life, until then, with an absent mother and father, and now felt like I had no mother at all. I learned not to rely on good old Dad long before these.

She began the process of living in her way; Spanish classes, French classes, knitting, cross-stitch, and rebuilding the relationship she somehow understood had been smashed. I hope she never knows why. My mother is funny, bright, and endlessly caring; my mother is resilient. My mother is emotional and needy. My mother cannot be changed. I have always had her but never known her.

It took me 25 years to understand that our position is both unique and utterly unremarkable. Nobody knows their parents well - they know the Parent rather than the person. I know the person rather than the Parent, but that doesn't make her less than a mother.

I used to ask my grandmother to call her - keeping that barrier between us was safer in a way I couldn't ever explain. Recently I've started to call her myself, and nothing bad has happened. The world hasn't imploded, my mother hasn't changed and neither have I. There's the same strained bond, too eager on her side, a little frightened and wary on mine, but now something flows a little more freely. It's tiny and fragile but it flows and sometimes it does so without prompting.

My mother has always been able to call me, but she held back - probably because she felt the spikes around me. With them receding, I can finally call her when I want to, what comes next is nurturing that want. She deserves no less.