I will be okay<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
When I was six, my mother and I were out walking. Not six and a bit. Not six and a whole half, as I once said \u2013\u00a0will say. Six exactly. There we were. Walking. Through a wood, actually. A forest. Along a long, looping path; a path that to me, at that age, was long and loopy. On our way. When my mother told me that her mother died when she was six.<\/p>\n
The way on, lost and gone.<\/p>\n
This,\u00a0then, was six. Stopping to say such things so the day darkened around us.<\/p>\n
I cannot imagine what prompted this. How could I not know? How could I not have already known? I could not imagine it, and yet I did. Imagine!<\/p>\n
The wood leant in.<\/p>\n
The path was soft under my feet; bitumen beneath swings on a hot day. It gave under my sneakers. The trees, too, didn\u2019t keep to their sides of the squishy, giving path but came in close. The smell was wet and animal. I came to my six-year-old self, in the middle of the journey of my life, in a dark wood. The direct way lost and gone. My mother and I, her mother \u2013 who never got to be a grandmother \u2013 with us, too. Entering a tunnel of trees.<\/p>\n
Until I, clever as clever, offered something like\u00a0I will be okay.<\/p>\n
And you? Let my hand go.<\/p>\n
So, we had been holding hands then.<\/p>\n
What I meant was \u2013 insofar as a six-year-old means \u2013\u00a0I am myself: already. Reassuring you. Reassuring me. I was complete. It would be okay if you were no longer you; no longer mine. If you were\u2026 no more.<\/p>\n
Just me, six, forever.<\/p>\n
The wood, wet and dark, arches over us. Together, for ever.<\/p>\n
Or maybe what I meant was more like:\u00a0how are you okay? How have you grown up? How\u00a0are\u00a0you grown up? Without a mother?\u00a0Never imagining my hand would be dropped like it was hot. A cold wind blew through, stirring bracken on the forest floor.<\/p>\n
This was six. Something dreadful being said by someone.<\/p>\n
How dark the wood was! Trees and trees and trees. And then\u2026 forest. Us, side by side like out-of-time twins, both made motherless in that moment.<\/p>\n
Sometimes what we say is not what we mean. Sometimes it is what we mean, but not what we ever meant to say.<\/p>\n
Fear settles in the lake of my heart. The long path loops and a small hand hangs heavy. Silence takes up residence in the story of my mother. And me.<\/p>\n
What happens when the child without a mother becomes a mother? What happens to the child of a mother who was not much mothered herself? And when she \u2013 however much she might not know how to \u2013 grows up and becomes a mother herself?<\/p>\n
The stories we tell ourselves, tell our families of ourselves \u2013 tell our friends of our family \u2013 convey as much in what they don\u2019t say as what they do. Listen! Attend to the silence, the whispering woods, as much as the words.<\/p>\n
What is unsaid lives on. What was never known can still be passed down.<\/p>\n
Imagine memory as such a place. A palace? A forest, clearly marked on some map, but which a traveller, once entering, cannot rightly say begins here. Or ends there.<\/p>\n
Your skin \u2013 whose? \u2013 gets clammy. The light has a yellow cast. Shadows stretch and lengthen as ghosts gather. See? Six-year-old me already embarking on her long, looping way.<\/p>\n
My mother and I were \u2013 are \u2013 best friends. Holding hands on life\u2019s journey. Not the journey of our lives, plural, but the journey of one life. In the middle of which I came to my single, solitary self.<\/p>\n
Maybe what I meant \u2013 meaning to be as mean as only a clever kid can \u2013 was to hurt my mother as much as she had hurt me. To take myself away, as her story had taken her.<\/p>\n
Abandoning her, again.<\/p>\n
Childbirth? Motherdeath. I would be okay.<\/p>\n
Memory is no direct route to truth. Only what is true for me; true for now. True for you? Every time I remember that wood, I remake it. Shape it. The bowed branches; the soft, giving understorey.<\/p>\n
Six-year-old motherdaughter remembering back. Six-year-old daughtermother dreaming forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I will be okay \u00a0 When I was six, my mother and I were out walking. Not six…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":904887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,105],"class_list":["post-904886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/904887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}