mothers
“Dear Mum, dear Clarice
I don’t think I ever addressed you by your given name – few did, since for years your shame about your poor northern background extended to your name; Clarice Cliff, Clarice Lispector were unknowns to you. I remember that one or two more pretentious acquaintances softened it to ‘Clarisse’ and there was a phase in my teens when I decided I would call you ‘Clare’. It didn’t last! But often, when I’m speaking or writing about you, I think of you as Clarice. And these days I regularly find myself doing both.”
“I don’t remember how we changed from calling you ‘Mummy’ to ‘Ma’. I often wonder if you minded that – Peter and I decided to call you Ma and from ‘Daddy’ to ‘Pa’. I think it must have been our feelings leaving from child to adult. You always called your own mother 'mother', I wonder if you ever called her ‘Mummy’?”
* * *
“If you were here. I think you would like it - the place the house and the fact it's in France. I'd love to show you the pictures of Mary's children rejoicing in Mother’s Day for her too! mother to daughter to mother - will her daughter be a mother?”
“Would you like it here? I think the open-plan arrangement wouldn’t appeal to you and you might feel exposed, I imagine, with all the glass. But I think you would approve of the way even a part-ownership conveys a sort of success or status; as if somehow I have at last abandoned my naive idealistic notions and have ‘made it’ in the real world. Or am I putting words in your mouth here? Maybe you were waiting patiently all along and I simply took my time to fall into line?”
* * *
“I wasn’t sympathetic, not at first. All too easy to grumble to friends about the crazy parameters of ‘Nanaland’, your disappearances, your intractable habits, your routine dishonesties, your ‘accidents’, your denials. I recall so many instances when I was quick to criticise – an outburst of furious exasperation about the bits of toilet paper you stuffed inside your knickers instead of liners designed for the purpose (‘This is not the War..!’) or to correct – your insistence (obviously nonsense) that you had a ‘stand-up wash’ every morning, that you still did all your own housework. I wonder now why the truth mattered to me so much, when I was always ready to cover my tracks with a lie to avoid your censure.”
“It's just to say I'm sorry for all the pain I must have caused you as a teenager - all those hurtful things I must have said that must have been hurtful - you know what I'm talking about - I don't need to spell it out, this is simply to say today - I'm sorry - please forgive me. Much too late to be saying I love you.”
