The Arc of Motherhood
The earliest trace of me, in the form of tiny precursor cells, existed in my mother’s body before she was born. I was with her in the primal darkness. By the time my mother was pregnant with me, the earliest trace of my son was also present inside my body before I was born. We were smaller than breadcrumbs. We shared the same darkness inside my mother. The precursor cells carried the words of a story that had been written in my mother’s body.

The story was told in a dark cave where spells and mirth were made, where curses were cast. A drop of blue ink fell into a mire; the ruinous curse was carried in the water.
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My mother did not want to have me. After all, I was the product of a rape. She told the story while she was drunk. The rapist was my father. My father wasn’t a stranger. In fact, my parents had been married for over fifteen years when it happened. My father would have counted on that, as men did back then. Since his actions could be hidden inside the shadow of a marriage, in the thin blurred line between a truth and a lie, my mother’s story was hard to believe, necessitating alcohol to give her the courage to tell it. Each time my mother told the story, while intoxicated, she discredited herself a little more, despite the fact that it was a deeply ingrained and terribly painful memory for her. She found herself slowly disappearing inside herself, opting for a safe haven of silence. Although the story was submerged in years of silence, it did not diminish or vanish. The pain did not dissolve with time.

Against her will, I attached myself to the soft wall of her. My mother knew I was there. She felt the quickening like first love.

The pregnancy was further complicated by the fact that my mother and father had different blood types. My mother’s Rh-negative factor had already become highly sensitized to Rh-positive blood through her earlier pregnancies, which is why a priest had presided over my older sister’s birth. The blood types did not match. To prevent the potential harm caused by the incompatibility, my mother’s immune system produced antibodies to attack my red blood cells. The red blood cells were killed quickly, faster than my body could replace them with new ones. This would result in fatal neonatal hemolytic anemia and heart failure. Fetal or newborn heart failure would be followed by death.

Given how unstable things were, the doctors and my father advised my mother to terminate the pregnancy. But my mother insisted on keeping me. Part of me knows the choice was made for one reason: she wanted to destroy me herself. To be precise, if she destroyed me, she could undo the event that had predicated my existence, she could unravel the storyline. The pregnancy was considered high-risk, carrying a significant threat to her life as well as mine.  Before I had even been born, I had been given the capacity to kill my mother.

Inside my mother’s dark body, I developed lanugo and little limbs, my own fingerprints and bones. Her body recognized that my blood was not her own. Every part of her identified me as a pathogen and endeavored to destroy me. Instead of carrying vital oxygen and other essential nutrients, my bloodstream was contaminated with my mother’s antigens, triggering an immune response that identified me as an invader and urgently signaled for my removal and destruction. Inside the walled city of my mother’s body, I was trapped. It was an invasion launched from inside a citadel.

Against my mother’s wishes, the doctor kept announcing that mother and baby are fine. Her plan for the pregnancy to take both our lives had gone awry. She eventually took matters into her own hands and feigned an accidental fall down some steps. Perhaps she slipped in the early morning mist and drizzle or there was a light covering of frost over the cold granite. We both knew that was a lie. The narrative was flawed. I left her body for a moment and watched her throw herself down a flight of steps.

She was rushed to a hospital where the doctors immediately administered a combination of drugs to induce a twilight sleep. Morphine took away the pain; Deadly Nightshade took away consciousness. My mother would not remember the pain or the restraints. After the delivery, the doctors swiftly administered a full blood transfusion as all of my blood was contaminated. Then they took my mother’s ovaries and her womb. They took the space to grow a child from her. My father signed the papers.

She would have woken to her ravaged and childless body. A body disfigured. I am sorry for that. I hope the surgeons treated her unconscious body with respect, that they were skillful with their incisions and careful with their stitches. When they first placed me into my mother’s arms, she would not recognize me as her own, or even remember that she had delivered me. The amnesia would remain. She would not take to me or be able to love me. It went against my mother’s plan that we had both survived. I had prevented her from rewriting the story.

My mother was released from the hospital in a few days, home to the place that was not home. She returned to the house at the top of the hill, where the tall elm trees grew, casting long ominous shadows over the washing that she pegged out every day. My mother carried the fear that the hills would fall in on us. She waited for the glow in the eastern sky.

I was transferred from the neonatal unit to a Victorian hospital in a quiet part on the edge of town close to the sea. Inside the safety of an incubator, I was kept comfortable and warm.
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My mother’s own childhood was ruined by war. As a young girl, she would open the window to the night sky. I can almost picture her standing on tiptoes, although I have never seen a picture of her when she was a child. The drone of airplanes in the distance would have grown louder. The approaching enemy aircraft could be heard from miles away, growing louder as they neared their target. When the bombs began to fall, the sound was deafening and terrifying, with explosions, windows blown out, and buildings collapsing. She would have heard the anti-aircraft fire from the defensive forces. The air-raid sirens would have sounded for her to take shelter. Over and over, the distinctive wailing sound could be heard throughout the city. For years, the echo of the sirens and the bombs falling would have been a constant reminder of war and danger, the immediate and imminent threat to life, the transience of human life.

The enemy sometimes deployed parachute bombs, a type of aerial incendiary that was dropped from an airplane with the aid of a parachute. This slowed its descent and allowed the bomb to be dropped from a higher altitude. The parachute subverted its original function, to slow down the descent of a person falling through the air and thus protect life. Instead, drifting and floating in the wind, they induced terror, exploding on impact or later without warning.

The bombings left buildings across the cityscape in ruins, destroying factories and homes, churches and halls in the city. The destruction was kept secret from the enemy. The next morning, after picking glass out of her hair, my mother searched for shrapnel and fragments of shell-casing amidst the rubble. I believe she was drawn to the ruins because they made her feel alive, giving her a chance to experience a reiteration of the past in the present. In this way, the ruins found a space in her. All forms of hardening vigilance toward her soften and fall away when I imagine my mother as a young girl, treasuring a part of a broken teacup, running her finger across its edge, drawing a rush of bright blood. When I imagine her trying to protect herself, I in turn only want to protect her.

Living through wartime established and sustained a baseline of fear and anxiety that would never fully go away. My mother carried the sound of the sirens inside her. It was passed on to me. It’s the only way I can explain how I startle at everything, as well as the sleepwalking and the night terrors. The trauma and the terror were passed forward in epigenetic modifications, changes that had occurred at genome level, genetic shifts that were written in the body.
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My mother ruined my childhood. She stood on the ramparts and recited the incantation that she wished I had never been born.

“I wish you had never been born!”

I remember the ways in which the words hung in the air. I remember not really knowing how to respond, how to atone for my ill-fated existence, for not being wanted. Sometimes she changed the inflection or the intonation of the words, placing the emphasis differently.

“I wish you had never been born!”

The words were delivered with varying cadence, sometimes slow, sometimes fast. On occasion the incantation was screamed in my direction before I ran to hide in a safe place under the stairs where I worked on trying to disappear altogether. My mother was always careful to make the point of letting me know she could not love me. There would be no misunderstanding. She cultivated the disconnection she felt towards me and rehearsed her inability to love me in her daily actions. My mother’s conduct conveyed a coldness, an emotional distance, which resulted in me feeling unworthy of love and acceptance. A deep and life-long sense of my own unlovability was thereby established within me.

The love that she may have had for me was killed through neglect, through the way she ignored me in the morning and whenever I came home. The love was killed in the silence. Killed in the silent mincing and menacing chopping of the evening’s meal. But even the love that was blocked still bled, bleeding into a dark and silent space inside me governed by the tides.
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I wonder what happened to my mother to account for the person she became. There’s a treasured photo of her hanging in a hallway of my house. She’s the young and beautiful version of herself, with the soft wavy cropped blonde hair, holding my oldest sister when she was a baby. You can see how my mother has wrapped the baby gently and carefully in the soft white blanket. The eyes shine bright like a promise. The person who later became my mother seems like a stranger compared to the woman in the photograph. I wonder if the love that died inside the marriage accounted in part for the tidal shift in her being. I wonder whether it was the trust that my father kept borrowing from her, against the marriage, and never returned. Perhaps it was the nights he spent away in the tangled sheets and beds of other women. This was how he made her life a lie. All the broken promises. It’s as far as I can go in trying to understand how my mother had died inside even though she was still alive. After all, I am still learning how to account for my own being, how to balance my mother’s responses to my father’s behavior.
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My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was about ten or eleven. The cells inside her body had conspired against her, rapidly forming abnormal cells that did not die when they were supposed to. Instead, they continued to divide uncontrollably, accumulating to form a shadow, a mass in her breast. Instead of going to the doctor, she nurtured the lump, to spite my father for his ways, until the doctors finally cut it out. The surgeons performed a complete mastectomy, which followed the radical hysterectomy she had been given after I was born. The experience would have been traumatic; she felt that both her body and her femininity had been taken, ruined by the surgeries. All the same, it was too late. The cancer had spread. The tumor was malignant and had invaded nearby tissues and then other parts of her body through the bloodstream and into the lymphatic system.

When I was thirteen, my mother died. In many ways, she had already vanished into a faraway fugue long before that. Though her physical body remained, the spirit that had once animated her was long gone. Perhaps she had always been an expert at detachment, having learned at a young age how to distance herself from her immediate environment, from the terror therein. Life for my mother became a process of disengagement, a continuous journey of letting go, mostly with alcohol but later with the blue pills the doctor prescribed. Her body, which had once been a sanctuary, had become a prison of pain and suffering. The pain never left her, it was with her until the end.
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My mother’s pain is a suitcase, the one she never left the house with. As a grownup, I imagine calmly taking it from her, leaving it on an empty platform and boarding the train without it. Perhaps a strong gale comes through and takes it in the wind. At first, there is breakage and rupture, followed by the fluttering and scattering of everything inside: love letters and broken vows, papery certificates of life and death, a piece of parachute silk. The contents of the suitcase are annulled; its contents scattered into the wild beyond. As I release my mother’s suitcase, I both tell her story and release my own along with it.

I carry something unknown and unformed for my mother. It is invisible to others. They can’t see it because it is now hidden inside my body, within the darkness, within the quiet cells. The weight is not just an emotional burden, but also the result of intergenerational trauma – the trauma that is passed down from one generation to the next. Sometimes what I carry is dark and amorphous, a deep fear and shame in my own sexuality, an early fear of my own girlhood, a reticence towards my own womanhood. I carry the undulation of the waves, the endless dragging of the tides. I carry the blood, the viscera. I also carry my father’s guilt, the lies he told. I carry the emptiness of the love that she was unable to give; the emptiness of the love she did not receive. I carry the pain that disappeared into the emptiness, into the mire. I carry a vacancy.

I also carry things that are light and ephemeral: memories of her favorite songs, the aria of birdsong traveling through the trees. I carry the silvery thread that connects our shared past and present together, forever intertwined in my thoughts and heart, in the mysterious arc of our shared existence. I carry her womanhood, written through her motherhood, the softness of a blanket, the smell of perfume. I carry the stories, written through her pain.

The origins of our existence are deeply intertwined with the lives of those who came before us as well as those who come after us. The ties that bind run within us and through us, from the earliest traces of our being, that can be traced back to a time before we were even born.

On a train, I imagine my mother and I could sit across from each other; I want to be her contemporary. She is a young woman, wearing her navy blue rain coat cinched at the waist. Her blonde hair is tied up in a headscarf that smells of French perfume. She smiles at me. We have our first conversation.

I want to understand the ties that bind; I want to undo the curse, rewrite what began in the mire, what was written in dark blue ink. I no longer want to be mired down with the pain and trauma. I want to be light.

“I’m so happy you’re here,” my mother says. And so begins our conversation.