18 Sept 2026
You don’t know me
On the drive from the Magdalene cave I thought of my mum. Of course I did, she is everywhere here in France, as is my dad, but especially I thought of her because so many friends have lost their mum recently, and in our party was a young friend who lost hers seven years ago when she was starting university. And so I felt it, the loss of a mother, the fact of it happening and the waves that hit when it does but driving on the A8 towards Nice, I again thought how odd it was that I feel nothing.
I’ve felt nothing since the day she died, I’m not sure I felt much before hand. At her funeral I cried, I remember that, but only for short burst of reality. Since then I’ve been absent from the grief I see in others. I see it in my friends, I witness it, the missing. I hear about the love and yearning and anger and sadness. I watch as if it is some alien happening, a thing I recognise but cannot touch. I drove and I thought about this and the A8 became another road, narrow and winding. A sheer drop to my right as I climbed, the exact place where fifty years ago my mother fell asleep at the wheel and crashed head on into another car and I shot from the green suitcase in the boot (where I too was sleeping) all the way to the gear stick. I remembered how even in daylight she would swing these corners and point out pretty things in the view and we would say please look at the road, mummy and she seemed to not be aware at all of our fear. I remember how the night of the head on collision we all stood about on the narrow strip with cars queuing up on either side and the man we’d hit scratching his head, and wondered how we were going to make the rest of the journey with only one headlight working.
Last night, home safely having not swung about those narrow, precipice roads, having driven slowly and carefully and kept my eyes on the tarmac and not the breathtaking view and not crashed into anyone, I lay in bed exchanging photographs of our week. Do you obsessively zoom in on yourself in group photos? I do, and I did and guess who I saw smiling back at me. Not me. That middle aged slightly fatter woman with the hair identical can’t be. It must be her come to haunt my picture. Identical. The same place, the same face, the same everything.
This morning I spent an hour on the mat, Tara Brach my company; yoga practice and a discussion of fear. The question, what fear are you sidestepping? And I answered, I’ll tell you exactly what I’m sidestepping, Tara, it’s the fear of turning into my mother. I unpacked it while in Warrior II Worrier II and I and III. These are shallow thoughts of which I’m ashamed, so stand by: my mum was not beautiful. My dad made it clear it’s what he thought and so it’s what I thought, too. My mum was not attractive. She was workaday, practical, clever and articulate. She was not stylish. Beauty was my currency for a very long time. It ceased to be many years ago, but seeing myself, herself in me, the horror returned. And what else? What else was I rejecting about this woman who I felt rejected by? Her coldness. Her distance. Her nothing numb physical body taking up space she’d rather was filled simply with her head. She felt nothing and I felt nothing and there it was.
I sat on the mat and I thought these thoughts and my mother walked into the hall and turned to look at me and came and sat beside me. She put her hand on mine. I looked down and saw it; old, wrinkled, a large ring. She squeezed gently, she spoke more gently and more humanly than she’d ever spoken in life. She said, you don’t know me. And in the tone of her voice was written admonishment and an ask for forgiveness. You don’t know me.
Later I stood on the gravel and discussed it with the Cyprus who knows everything. What if she never wanted any of us, but for reasons known and unknown she had us. What if that’s true. It feels that way. She was very far from being a bad person, she was focused elsewhere and that focus elsewhere had devastating consequences. And I thought about the feeling of her sitting beside me, my mother in her freed form, all about her gentle, and I felt the tremors of love. The Cyprus, giant and ancient, agreed. I didn’t know her and we are not the same. Turning to face her allows for this burgeoning of feeling. There was a huge, pre my dad part of her she kept hidden, she locked down, she couldn’t breathe into for fear of the anguish. She loved a man before my dad who left her, who died, who she never got over. It’s enough to know this. One day I will publish a novel about it.
The ways we are the same: she was a political firebrand, left wing, work obsessed and vocal. She opened her home to artists and anyone in need of a bed. She rarely wore make up and didn’t dye her hair. I look like her, as one old family friend said recently, from the nose up. You smile more. She wasn’t afraid of an argument. She loved the south of France. She loved her horse.
The ways we are not the same: she was almost entirely divorced from her body; excepting riding and gardening she did no exercise and took no pleasure in anything physical. She was a terrible cook. She was an even worse dancer. She had no rhythm. She liked jazz and opera. She wasn’t interested in how she dressed. She never wore heels. She didn’t luxuriate in excess anything except martyrdom. She showed no emotion ever. She was the opposite of glutton. She was not funny. She was a rubbish mother but then again I’m not sure she ever set out to be a good one.
The second list is longer.
I’m glad you came to see me, mum. Now I feel something.
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