NANA'S ANGEL

My mother was dead to me. This realisation came to me in the early hours of the morning as I lay in her stuffy guest room listening to her rhythmic snores filter through the thin wall separating us. 

It wasn’t because she’d done anything super horrendous. There was no big climactic moment that caused my epiphany. It was more of a straw, fragile and brittle, placed gently on the camel’s back.

But she’d forgotten about the anniversary. 

She forgot a lot of things when I was a child. Almost all my birthdays for a start. The years she did remember, she usually gave me a twenty and told me to buy myself something. 

This may be a little unfair. I do in fact recall her buying me gifts twice. Once for my fifth birthday she gave me sea monkeys. And a cake. The sea monkeys, not surprisingly, never made it. The cake, being an icecream one, also did not survive being left on the counter for the day. But still, it was the thought right?

When I was eighteen, she gave me a bottle of peach schnapps. It was in a dusty cellophane bag tied with ribbon. The little card attached had a snowman on it. She hadn't written on it.

She never came to my school events. To parent teacher meetings. Or sports days. She didn’t read to me, or tell me funny stories about her childhood. I very much doubt she had any to be honest. 

My mother was a single one. She came from a poor, uninterested family, and she got pregnant young. My father took off three months after I was born. My fault, according to mum. I was a terrible baby, colicky and loud. 

She lived off the benefit for a long time. Until I started school and she found part time work at a dental clinic. The one thing my mother did do was enforce the importance of dental hygiene, despite only lasting at that job for six months. She was fanatical with brushing and flossing and even on bad days, she always insisted on mouthwash before bed.

My mother took her looks seriously too. She dieted and plucked and bleached and polished regularly. She put on ‘her face’ the minute she’d had her morning coffee, and took it off only after dinner and her nightly tv programmes.

She dated, a lot. The men seemed to get younger and younger, along with the age she gave them. Eventually, if they asked - which wasn’t often - I was her little sister.

But my mother wasn’t healthy. Mentally she was very ill. Voices spoke to her. She spent days in bed, lamenting her life, threatening to end it. Then she would be off, sometimes for days on end, on an adventure, or a wild goose chase of some sort, trying to ‘find herself’.

She tried various jobs. Bar work, retail, telemarketing, cleaning. But nothing lasted longer than a few months. Like the men.

I learnt to cook out of necessity. It was that or starve on those days where I woke to find her gone. I got myself to school, and I found myself jobs wherever I could. I learnt to drive a car without her. 

At school, I was known for having ‘Loopy Laura’ as a mother. I kept to myself a lot. I didn't have many friends. 

I met Ben when I was babysitting. He was older than me, had left school and been working at a mechanic for a few years. His boss, the dad to the kids I was watching, took his crew out for a Christmas shout. Ben had come home with him, somewhat drunk.

“It was love at first sight,” he would tell everyone. “ I took one look at her and I was a goner.” I would just smile and agree, but the truth was it took me a little longer than him to feel it. But he wore me down, and we started to date.

He proposed to me on my 21st birthday. I’d already moved in with him fairly quickly, eager to get out of my house and away from my mother. I left school and trained to be a nurse, which I both loved and excelled at.

We got married at the registry office, something his mother still hates me for. But I couldn’t see the point of spending so much money for a single day. For a dress I’d never wear again. Flowers that would die, and fancy food we didn’t need. It all seemed such a waste.

Now, I do wish I'd at least had more photos. 

Ben died two and a half years later. Car accident. I was working. I realised it was him when I saw the workshop logo on his overalls. He was already dead by then. I only had an hour left of my shift, so I stayed on and when I got home, I remember I made tuna melts, too many just for me, and then I cried until I was sick.

Three weeks later, I realised I was pregnant. I was both thrilled and terrified. How would I know how to be a mother when I’d never had one myself? I hadn’t even managed to keep brine alive. But this child was a part of Ben, a piece of us, and I loved them already, sight unseen. 

I read every book I could, took birth classes, and painted a nursery. I ate spinach and salmon and took folic acid and did gentle yoga stretches. I did all the right things. My grief at losing Ben was eclipsed by my joy at becoming a mother.

I told my mother about the baby because she served me at the supermarket. It took her several minutes of scanning items before she realised who I was. I hadn’t seen her, I realised, since the funeral.

“I’m having a baby, ” I told her as she weighed my bananas. “Due in July”.

“Oh fuck, thats a bugger,” she said sympathetically. 

“I’m actually really pleased,” I informed her quietly.

“Oh, well then,” She paused to bag my oranges. “Good luck”

I wasn't upset by her reaction. Or angry. Or anything really. I was a bit immune I suppose.

But two days later, she came by with a badly wrapped box. Inside I found a grey crocheted teddy bear and a onesie with ‘nana’s angel’ printed on it.

She was on meds at the time, and doing okay. She started them after I moved out I think. She had her supermarket job, and she joined a group, made a couple of friends. 

As the months went on, she and I developed something resembling a tentative relationship.

She helped me paint, came with me to the birthing class, joined me some days to walk around the gardens. I softened towards her a little, accepted her olive branch and began to think I could forgive her lack of mothering. She seemed to want to make up for it as a grandmother.

I went into labour early. Too early. When I got to the hospital, I rang and asked her to come. By the time she arrived, Bella was dead. Wrapped in a muslin shroud, her tiny face blank and waxy. Like mine. 

I didn't cope. 

I couldn't work. Couldn't be around death. Or birth.

I stayed at home and didn't eat, didn't shower. Tried not to feel.

Initially, my mother visited, then rang. She was, she told me, grieving as much as me. Then she started with ‘ probably for the best’, ‘you can have another’ type comments and moved to ‘ you need to move on, get over it etc etc’.

I knew I was depressed. But grief is like a lake, inky and dragging. It pulls you in, promises oblivion in its depths. I wasn't interested in surfacing, in looking at the sky, the sun. I wanted to swim to the bottom, wind myself in the weeds, and cease.

Months passed.

Eventually, I went back to work, to life. Lived my life, except it wasn’t me living it. I was a clone. A functioning replica. At night I sat in my nursery and rocked. 

Time passed. 

The night of the anniversary of her death, I couldn't stand to go home, be alone. So I went to my mother’s who hadn’t remembered. She was in what she called a ‘fun mood’. She invited me to join her and her new man for dinner.

We sat, ate spaghetti, and drank red wine. My mother was very animated, laughed a lot. They made plans to go to the beach. At one point the new man, Dave, asked me what I did. 

“I’m a nurse.” I told him. 

“And your husband? Are you married? Do you have a family?” he asked, his mouth full of overcooked pasta..

“Plenty of time for that,” my mother told him. “ no need to get tied down too young, I can tell you that for free.” She laughed, sloshing her merlot onto the off white tablecloth.

And I realised. Like an anvil on the head. No. no I didn’t have a family. 

I never really did.