Chapter 9
Rachel
The thing I remember most starkly about my mother was the void of her gaze. How she would look almost through me, more Victorian portrait than person. So different from Dad, to whom emotion was like good music, to be enjoyed and responded to, impossible to switch off.
Back then, Mum was a roving reporter for a local paper, which meant she always had an excuse to escape me and Dad at a moment’s notice.
She and I had never bonded in the way society seemed to deem we should.
She appeared committed, in fact, to maintaining the distance that had existed between us for as long as I could remember.
So when that summer work trip she went on, the year I turned ten, transpired to be our permanent parting, I wasn’t surprised, or even particularly upset.
It felt less like a loss than a lifestyle change I could fairly easily adapt to.
But it wasn’t quite that straightforward, of course.
In the wake of Mum leaving, the difficulties came not so much from her absence as from what it implied.
I began feeling scrutinised, sensing that people were judging me harder than they were my mother.
Perhaps they were even thinking, How bad must you have been, for your own mother to walk out?
Sometimes it seemed that, when Mum left, a strange kind of social angst had replaced her.
On sports days or parents’ evenings, when Dad couldn’t make it and instead I was accompanied by Mum’s sister, who – much like Mum – always seemed slightly reluctant to touch me.
On Mother’s Day, when Dad and I failed to escape the greetings cards and bouquets, the saccharine assumption that all mothers were good.
I never knew what to say when people asked where she was, partly because I wasn’t actually sure.
Though he tried to hide it, I felt the steepness of Dad’s struggle to juggle the parenting and housekeeping and working overtime to make the rent.
And he couldn’t, not always. For a while we sofa-surfed around Bedford, and I can still recall that life-raft sensation of trying to sleep – or even just relax – in houses where we were always the guests.
‘This doesn’t define you, you know,’ Dad said to me once, as he gently brushed my hair in a bedroom that wasn’t my own. ‘You are more than what she did. Promise me you’ll remember that.’
And so I did. In fact, I resolved to take it with me, always: that I would never make myself accountable for another person’s choices.
Reluctantly, Mum did try – I suspect at Dad’s insistence, or maybe she felt guilty on some level – to stay in touch for a few years, afterwards.
I remember devoid-of-sentiment birthday and Christmas cards.
Awkward phone calls, the odd excruciating visit.
On one particularly torturous trip to a freezing and deserted café, where she bought me coffee – even though I’d never drunk the stuff in my life – I asked her why she wasn’t coming home.
Not to guilt-trip her, or elicit pity. I was just curious, mostly.
For the first time in what felt like years, she looked at me. Really looked at me. Her eyes were the tired, dull brown of weathered wood. ‘I don’t think you’d want that.’
And I thought, Maybe you’re right.
So perhaps she knew me better than I’d realised.
Once I hit my mid-teens she appeared to lose interest entirely, and essentially vanished for good. And really, I was relieved. Because, to me, forced contact had always felt uncomfortable in a way that no contact at all did not.
As the years passed, Josh and I pondered the possibilities. Depression? An affair? Addictions? Dad denied all these, but perhaps even he didn’t know.
Because I just can’t believe that feeling nothing for the child you birthed is no more complex than being a bit cold-hearted. I am sure that, even for my mother, it couldn’t have been that simple.