“‘That was the night I decided to kill my mother’ – If I was ever to write a novel, that would be the opening line,” my mother announces quite out of the blue one day.
“Is it definitely a work of fiction?” I asked. Her mother hadn’t died by this point, though it wasn’t far off. I resolved then and there to steal the line from her as it is a very good one, but I’ve yet to employ it, opting instead for slightly less histrionic openers. I think I’m saving it for my foray into horror.
I was in the room with her when she got the call that her mother had died (of natural causes: I can categorically assure you, my mother had no hand in it). I was surprised by my mother’s reaction. She cried which I’ve never seen her do very much. And she visibly sagged. “I’m an orphan now,” she whimpered like a child as I put my arms around her.
We went together to see my grandmother in repose in the nursing home where she had died. It wasn’t my first dead body, but it was the first I’d been so closely bonded to; this was about 10 years before my dad died. I went in alone and was startled at the sight in the bed, for a few disorientating moments I thought it was my own mother lying there. I had never thought they looked alike. My granny was large and solid and old all my life, while my mother is very small and slightly hyper and girlish in her demeanour.
She is very pretty. I’m sorry to say I didn’t find my granny pretty: I loved her and I thought she was impressive, but not pretty as such. But the face of her corpse was astoundingly youthful, all her wrinkles, it seemed, had been only kept in place by the tension of living, and now they’d fallen away allowing me quite suddenly to see the incredible resemblance between mother and daughter.
Momentarily seeing my mother in that deathbed gave me a fresh understanding of what it means to come from somebody. What that connection really does to us. I come from a body that once came from this body, and so on, like Russian dolls for as far back as your mind can conceive. The men barely seem to come into it. Sure they come from these motherships too, but then they scatter.
They seem to be able to cut the cord in ways women don’t.
The baby feasts on the mother continuously and, equally, the mother at times wants to devour the baby
Maybe it’s because women understand their mothers in ways that men don’t or can’t? The mother-daughter line is something sturdier, more complex, more loving, more hateful than any other connection. I think of the umbilical cord, hitched to mother and child looking distinctly like something a Xenomorph might grow. What a crazy thing that women can produce to nourish their young. What an alien-like initial connection to have with our mothers. And then it’s severed. (I cut one of my own. It was difficult; it took a few goes like hacking through an extra-terrestrial pork loin.)
However, the connection remains, knitting mother and child together in an initial fierce co-dependence: the baby, after all, feasts on the mother continuously and, equally, the mother at times wants to devour the baby. This enmeshed state can resolve itself into a bond involving healthy distance or mutate into a dysfunctional ballet of lifelong co-dependence. Or a little from column a) and a little from column b).
I would say I have caused my mother some of the greatest pain, irritation and worry of her life, and she has inflicted similar on me. I would say it’s practically unavoidable to be a daughter of any mother and not feel this to some degree, unless you have one of those cosy sorts of mothers who is always proffering lovely homemade scones without a generous side-helping of passive-aggression or impressively cutting remarks regarding face, clothes, life decisions or hair choices.
My mother has an almost mystical, telepathic personal connection with my hair. My hair could, if I were the malicious type, act as a voodoo doll for my mother. Any cut or tweak I might make to the hair wounds her as deeply as a thrust of a shiv in her side. “Why do you insist on messing with your hair?” she cries, as though I’ve tattooed my face instead of gotten a trim and blow-dry.
How can I even begin to answer this question? Because I’m 34 years old? It was getting long? It’s my hair? How, I often wonder, does she even have the capacity to care this much about anything, never mind hair? I realise that’s just the kind of boundless, obsessive love we have for our children. It’s not rational.
It reminds me of my own slightly raving love for my boys. It’s a strange brand of superstitious mothering that I think I inherited from my mother, and she inherited from her mother before her. I picture it coursing down through the shimmering pork loin, a kind of pre-emptive catastrophising that we cling to in the hopes that it will ward off unthinkable terrors and protect our children from calamity.
“If I worry enough about this one thing, then it definitely won’t happen,” I try to explain to Seb, who doesn’t understand. “Say I’m worried that Rufus will grow up to be a psychopath, well, if I worry about it enough then it definitely won’t happen. It’s never the things we’re thinking about that blindside us and ruin our lives. It’s always the one possibility that’s never occurred to us, see?” He leaves me to it.
If you're reading this now, then I didn't make it
All my life, whenever my mother travelled she would send me letters explaining what to do when she inevitably died en route to wherever she was going.
I vividly remember receiving the first one aged 16. It began with the words: “If you’re reading this now, then I didn’t make it.” I glanced over to where she was, perfectly well and unscathed, making tea and continued reading with interest. The rest of the letter was hilariously practical, listing various financial information and insurance details with little by way of grand declarations of love or life advice. “I see you didn’t make it,” I waved the letter at her, she snatched it and tore it up.
"Aww but your bank account details …" I feigned disappointment. I heard from my dad later that most of the trip had been blighted by anxiety about her imminent death and hijacked by bureaucratic details about how to time the posting of the letter so that it would not be stowed in the hold of their own doomed plane back to Ireland.
“She eventually posted it from the airport right before we boarded the return flight,” he explained. “Why didn’t she just leave it on the dining room table?” I wondered. “She didn’t want you getting hold of any of the information.”
Ha. So essentially she loves me so much that she ruined a lovely holiday in Sicily fretting over my wellbeing after her untimely hypothetical death, but doesn't trust me enough with sensitive financial information.
“What does she think, that I’d kill her for the insurance money?”
My dad shrugged. “If I was going to, I’d do it with trace amounts of arsenic, it builds up very slowly in the system. Very hard to detect,” he advised.
Over the years, she's switched to email and evidently become more trusting of both me and the ever-watchful Google. The subject line usually reads "If I die" and the message is as practical and to the point as ever. But I can see her love in the sheer labour of all this worry and anxiety.
Marguerite Duras wrote that "Almost always, in all childhoods and in all lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest craziest people we have ever met."
I’m sure in a book of stories confessing my own various strains of mental illness, she’ll be very irritated that I’ve appointed her the mad one. And I do feel guilty about that, as the mother of a writer, she’s been unfairly maligned in everything I’ve ever written. And being the wonderful mother that she is, she has largely put up with it, though when she read my last book, a novel, she did beg me to write a more sympathetic mother character next time.
“But my next work is a collection of non-fiction essays,” I told her. She just nodded sadly looking resigned and defeated. “Of course it is,” she muttered ruefully and I felt a stab of guilt, albeit brief, as I flashed on the title of this very story.
I want to support my children in whatever they pursue but I’d probably prefer they become anything – property developers, clampers, Catholic priests – rather than writers. It’s just dangerous having a writer in the family.
It is, it has to be said, the ultimate self-sacrifice on her part to allow me to write about her at all. While evidently at one point she seemed to have very real concerns that I might murder her Menéndez brothers-style, I know that she loves me even more than my dad did. Perhaps “more” is the wrong word but she certainly was more disposed to self-sacrifice than he ever was. We were once all on a long walk discussing whether or not we would give alibis on the other’s behalf should we ever be in need of such a thing.
My dad was willing but there was a “but”: "I’m not offering up a blanket alibi, it’d have to be on a case-by-case basis. It would depend on the crime,” he concluded firmly.
My mother, on the other hand, looked me squarely in the eyes, training the full force of her special brand of fiercely loyal, slightly suffocating, smothering love on me and said: “There’s no caveats from me, I wouldn’t prevaricate. You have an alibi from me any time you need it. No. Matter. What.”
In those years when I was gone and Dad was going, my mother coped heroically
Unnerving, but lovely all the same. And while I haven’t put this promise to the ultimate test quite yet, she is always very sweet about lying to Seb for me. She’s a very traditional feminist in that she believes women should have secret “running away” money and lots and lots of time to themselves. If I involve her in any of my machinations (often involving secret trips to hotels to be by myself) she is always forthcoming with my alibis and is, I have to say, a frighteningly good liar.
When my father first became forgetful and eventually utterly dependent on her, she protected me fiercely from the full scale of the devastation at hand. She bore the first half of his decline alone while I roamed, lost and happy, first in New Zealand, then in France. She never, ever asked me to come home. Quite the opposite, she encouraged the roaming, despite the solitude that surely had crept in around her in those years as her husband became childlike before her eyes.
I was relieved I had her permission to stay gone. I didn’t look forward to speaking to my dad on the phone, I resented his illness powerfully and any hint of it slipping into the long gaps as he searched for words or mangled facts like where I was living and who I was with would plunge me into a spoiled and selfish funk for days.
In those years when I was gone and he was going, my mother coped heroically. She’d have been more than entitled to partake in a little martyrdom – a right of all mothers I firmly believe – but she didn’t. She stayed afloat, working and socialising with the same incredible stamina for which she is known and admired.
When I returned to Dublin in 2012, we resumed our hourly calls, texts and emails updating one and other on scraps of newly acquired gossip, who was being an asshole to us on any given day and what nice dress we’d just seen and wanted to buy. In short, we reverted to our smothering brand of co-dependency and remained largely entwined for the next few years, hammering at the coalface of my father’s illness, comrades in the exhausting work of grief and denial.
At the end of 2013, when my first son was born, she called me every morning to see how the night before had gone. She gamely took my side against the baby whenever I said he was being a prick that day or some variation of such.
“You’re absolutely right, they are the worst,” she said loyally of the baby she was and still is obsessed with.
We passed hours visiting my father together. I would tell her when I was visiting (never enough) so that she could take a break, but she would still always go too. We visited him in the psychiatric ward, the dementia ward, the nursing home and then the room in the nursing home where they keep the industrial air-freshener and the reclining chairs and you know you are on the homestretch of the suffering by then.
In 2017, we came together at my father’s deathbed for a 30-hour marathon goodbye. By this point we’d spent what felt like a lifetime watching his decline, while bemoaning the terrible coffee available in the nursing home. At some point, we’d become virtually impervious to the suffering we were witnessing and indifferent to each other’s grief. You have to.
Practically every time we sat with my dad together, at some point she would turn to me mid-conversation apropos of nothing and say: “If I ever get like this,” we’d both look at my dad, vacant in his chair or bed, “promise me, you’ll smother me with a pillow.” The first time she made this request, I think I laughed and said it would be my pleasure. By the hundredth time she said it I was a person who’d given long consideration to euthanasia and, while I agreed with it in theory, I couldn’t risk jail-time with two small children to care for.
“Promise me you’ll smother me, if I ever get like this.”
“No! If we’re not smothering him,” I’d indicate my dad suspended in his vegetative state, “and he really deserves it, why should you get the easy exit? And I’d be the one risking everything by pillowing you. Absolutely not.”
But something tells me she’d probably manage to guilt me into it. Maybe she’s storing up that martyrdom she didn’t deploy when I was travelling and left her alone with my dad’s illness. She’s banked it for when she’s trapped in an adult nappy and wants out.
And maybe I can picture it. Smothering her, I mean.
In the most loving way imaginable of course. The way she has smothered me.
“That was the night I decided to kill my mother…” Of course, my alibi dies with her.
This is an extract from Corpsing: My Body and Other Horror Shows, by Sophie White, published by Tramp Press
