For a long time, I felt as if my mother and I were on opposite peaks of a mountain looking at each other but unable to see how the other was thinking and feeling. We loved each other, always, but that period when I was a teenager - and, looking back, she was probably in peri-menopause - was a perfect storm. The pair of us were likely two wrecking balls of shifting hormones at exactly the same time.
As I got older, our relationship got better - maturity and having to pay your own bills will do that, as it dawns on you how hard your parents worked. Then, in 2015, my husband Rob passed away and I gained a whole new, painfully sharp appreciation of time passing and not wanting to have regrets when it came to the most important relationships in my life.
I saw, with a sudden clarity, how friends and acquaintances discovered details about their parents too late, once they had passed. I didn’t want that to happen to my mother and I. So I started being more intentional about how we spent time together. I took her away for overnight stays and made sure we met up, just the two of us. In my grief, I was also forced to communicate clearly with her, possibly for the first time, about what I needed, and why I might not be able to do certain things – attending big social gatherings, for instance, felt overwhelming for the first few years.
Our relationship shifted, subtly but profoundly, into something more equal, where we could talk to each other, rather than talking at each other. And suddenly, a window opened into her life. Through it, I saw a whole new side of her. For the first time, I learned properly about her unusual upbringing, growing up first in Ethiopia, then moving to Ghana as an older child. She talked about the hole in the heart, about being a sickly child unable to play too boisterously with her brothers and sisters, until she had a life-changing surgery to fix it at the age of 19 a few years after she and my grandparents had moved to the UK.
Growing up, I had always been hyper-aware of my mother’s big, bubbly personality. As far back as I can remember, she has been outspoken and fierce. Now, I realised it was all the more remarkable given how fraught her health was as a child. I could suddenly see both that she is the kind of person you want on your side in a fight, and also the degree to which I had been shaped by her world-view. I remember very clearly her being outraged if there were ever any spaces where women were not allowed to go or be seen, and that sense that she had the right to be anywhere she wanted, was something pressed into me from a very young age.
I saw too that she is the source of my forthrightness. Now, whenever I have a wobble about my abilities, I think about what my mother would say. She’d tell me to hold my head high, and "not take s**t from anyone". As North Stars go, she is a powerful one.
There was one conversation, though, that changed what I thought I knew about her. On a summer’s day, we sat in her living room while my father was dispatched to mow the lawn. I wanted to ask her how she became the kind of woman she is today and what her own expectations of her life were, back when she was a girl. 'We weren’t taught to think,' she said. Her parents, as all parents of girls her age, did the thinking for her, whether that was around education or who she married. She spoke about her ability at maths (something I’ve not inherited). As a teenager, her potential was enormous and her ambition healthy. She was destined for university until her father decided he didn’t like the people she would have had to board with in order to attend, and that was that. Dream over.
Instead, she went to work for the tax office in the UK. Once again, her promise shone through. Her boss told her she should study for the auditor’s exams. But she was told by her parents that they’d all be moving back to India soon, and that she’d be getting married. Although she continued to bring it up a number of times, it simply wasn’t going to be possible.
Eventually, after getting married and raising my sister and I, she got a job at the Heritage Lottery Fund. 'I knew I had the ability to do the job,' she said, 'but there was a part of me that initially felt like an outsider because I was one of the very few who hadn’t been to university.' Despite that, she went on to become a project manager, holding her own against other people who had degrees and all the while encouraging other women in the organisation to better themselves and get ahead too.
Listening to her talk that afternoon, I felt a wave of emotion rise up in me. I knew that her parents loved her but I also knew that by dint of being born in a different time, she wasn't given the kind of support she’d given me. Had she had the same, she probably would have been a CEO of a company - that’s how brightly her ambition still shone to those of us that knew her much later in her life. I felt regret and guilt – at how much I took for granted in my own education and career, and how much I wished she’d had someone to give her the same -and a new awe that she’d managed to achieve what she had, given the start she'd had.
Most of us are aware that our parents strive to give us the things they didn’t have in their own childhoods but I don’t think I truly understood the scope of it until she and I had that conversation. It triggered a tidal wave of compassion – not just for my mother as she sat before me, but for the girl she once was.
It also made me grateful that this new-found understanding could be used to better our relationship while she's still here, and not mired in regret and longing. Understanding her younger years has made me be more forgiving, and in some instances, a bit more patient.
Although I have long-channelled my mother's ability to speak up when something isn't right, our conversation gifted me with a final vital power - to keep going. If you find yourself in spaces you think you don't belong in, change the architecture so that you do. You never know what a conversation with your mother might unlock, if it can be had with openness and softness. It might be something that doesn't just change your life but that you can pass on too.
She Wanted More: Reimagine Your Future And Live By Your Rules by Poorna Bell (Leap) is out now
She Wanted More: Reimagine your future and live by your rules by Poorna Bell
