It will come as no surprise to many of my generation that I had an absent relationship with my mother. I wrote about in my memoir A Memoir In 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries. Those of us who grew up in the 70s invariably had parents of the Silent Generation, born just before or during the Second World War, whose "seen and not heard" mantra built childhoods that had no truck with tears and no time for such things as "feelings".
I’ve lately, as an adult and mother myself, come to understand this stiff upper lip with more compassion than I had for it as a child; the Silent Generation witnessed slaughter on a massive scale, and giving into grief or hope would have left no time for the business of living. It was less of a choice than a survival mechanism, and no one can deny them that effort to survive. We all do it.
Yet the net result for many of us kids of this generation was neglect on an equally massive scale. I could reframe that as "freedom", and it was in part, but it also left us vulnerable to harm and ill-equipped to emotionally explain ourselves or them.
My mother was a feminist icon in her public-facing persona, one of only four girls at Middlesex Poly studying to be an architect. She then set up her own practice and ran it until COVID forced her retirement, aged 90. But her private, home self was quite different. Absent was the passion which she applied to her work, gone was the focus of which we knew she was capable, missing was the attention, joy and obvious love she embodied in the office. I knew she loved me, in theory. Intellectually, I could square the circle of her emotional neglect by reasoning she was busy but try telling that to a ten-year-old being bullied at school.
I grew up and grew distant and wished she would change, that some break in the clouds would come when she would be the kind of mother described by finalists on reality television shows who declared, "My mum’s my best friend".
I couldn’t imagine such a relationship until my friend Vix introduced me to the teachings of Tara Brach and I started to practice the RAIN technique.
RAIN stands for Recognise, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. The idea is that when difficult emotions arise, instead of pushing them away, they are greeted with these four steps - to recognise that the emotion is difficult, to allow the feelings to be there, to investigate them with an open heart and curiosity and, finally, once this is in motion, to nurture the self with kindness.
I have to admit that there were times where Tara Brach’s well-meaning tone didn't work for me. But here’s what else happened: I began to practice accepting my mother, I began to say the way she was, and that her character and characteristics belonged as they were. In other words, I stopped trying to change her and instead accepted her exactly as she was.
The idea of everything and everyone belonging exactly as they are is a funny one, and not in ha-ha sense. How can I agree with my mother’s neglect? But that intimation was where I was going wrong; acceptance doesn’t mean agreement. Acceptance means only that you’ve got reality as a starting point for change.
During the last week of my mother’s life in May last year, I sat at her death bed and stared at the fading face, the disarmed body, that I’d spent five decades wishing would hold me. I felt removed, dispassionate, calm. I knew this was her, how she’d always been, and the futility of those decades wanting her to be different appeared as time wasted. I accepted that, too, the sadness of it. There was nothing I asked of her in those final days, no miracle I wished for and consequently that’s when it happened.
She’d been sleeping and woke up suddenly. She turned to me and her expression was one of shock and surprise as if she knew who I was but hadn’t seen me in a million years. As if to say, "You!"
She took my face in her hands, looked into my eyes, kissed me on the forehead, did it all again and just as suddenly fell back onto her pillow, eyes closed. In that one blessed, unexpected and undemanded moment, those years of wanting love from her were met, and the agony of neglect was healed.
The time I’d spent practicing seeing her without judgement, and seeing her for who she was, allowed her to see me. I shall be forever grateful for it. And for what it’s worth, her posthumous self and I have a much-improved relationship. There is acceptance, truth and witness, and at long last, there is love.
Fallout by Eleanor Anstruther (Empress Editions) is out now
