"My mother died on Sunday."
It was Wednesday. It didn't really matter. Mum explained that she had been waiting for the right time to tell me, someplace quiet and still. It's strange - I didn't even know the woman mum was talking about, yet, I felt a resentment for her that I couldn't shake. I knew the circumstances of her life that had affected mine, the hurt she had caused my mother that became palpable in my life. When those stories were told, how could I relate to any other point-of-view? All I know is that she abandoned her children, while still young enough to be vulnerable, leaving them in the hands of an incapable and abusive father. She left them to start a new family, a better life - a decision that would leave her original children confined to an upbringing in institutions, a childhood engraved by cold-hearted matrons and disturbed Catholic priests.
Mum's voice cracked while describing the devastation, the separation of each child from their sibling, each person from their innocence. Visiting two brothers, the first time in years, for only thirty minutes. The unbridled enthusiasm they showed for the comfort of a familial connection, however brief. The boys running across a desolate platform while the train carried their sister away, legs pumping in tattered shorts, waving goodbye but, really, beckoning, begging not to be left alone again. Not like this. Motherless, fatherless. Alone again.
She was the last of them. My grandparents. All gone now. It's all I've ever known; a family tree of strong branches and no roots. Its all I've ever known, so it doesn't hurt. Mum is different. She has felt the void her entire life. That feeling that maybe she deserved to be neglected, wasn't worthy of love. I didn't even know my grandmother but I have felt the pain she has wrought. I see it in my mother's eyes as I tell her that I love her, that she has been a good parent despite learning it all from scratch. When I tell her I love her, I see my mother as she was, as she is.
A five-year old girl, shattered and vulnerable, not innocent.
That innocence left when her mother ran away.
