All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

I felt a massive wind blow through my body, and I had this strange feeling that all of me had been blown out of myself and was flying around the room like debris caught in a tornado.

I was an outline. Drawn in pen.

On the front was what had always been my favourite of Blue Mother’s sea paintings – the one with the choppy blue sea, and the bouncy clouds, and the sunlight caught on the sails of a yacht. It wasn’t my favourite any more. Because up behind the clouds the cancer bird was lurking, ready to pounce.

Lovely use of extended metaphor throughout the book - will definitely use this with students!

Keeping people on a string, like a puppeteer. But love is supposed to be a watering hole, where you come and go by choice, and leave refreshed. That’s what I’m aiming for, anyhow.

Was I being unreasonable, or was he? Sometimes you need an umpire in a relationship.

Hard relate!

But now I saw that reality is what’s left behind when the other possibilities fall away.

There we were, making a circle – you can have any number in a circle, and you can add people as you go along, odd numbers or even numbers, anyone can fit in, at any point.

We’re in it together, and we won’t sweep it under the rug. Because pain is better not covered up, but channelled into something else.

and some days we nearly forgot about the horrible bird of prey that had been after us ever since we were in Class 1 with Miss Dixon.

I would dominate the cancer bird with staples and paper clips and post-it notes. I would clip its wings.

The present was all there was and would ever be, that’s what I felt, and that’s what we must feel whenever we can.