All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

‘Green Mother is full of hope and healing.’

I believed her without thinking. Because I loved her. Already.

he said just because we know there are wasps about, it doesn’t stop us going on a picnic.’ ‘I like that,’ I said, repeating it in my head. ‘I’ll remember that.’ ‘“Enjoy the picnic,” my dad said, “and if a wasp comes along, we’ll swat it away together.”’

Do happy people have less need to remember the details of their life, I wondered.

Some days heaven touches earth. And do we notice it at the time? Or do we know it later – when heaven is snatched away?

You can’t change the truth of life, whether you’re living it backwards or forwards.

‘I guess there are moments when we’d all like to climb out of time,’

We prepare for everything, thinking carefully ahead as we put things in our suitcase for a holiday, for example. But we cannot pack for death.

‘Love and grief, joy and pain,’ he said. ‘They’re very close together. Or perhaps sometimes they’re not even different things.’

I wanted to say that you don’t grieve in the same way for love you’ve never had, but it still feels like a punch in the stomach. I wanted to say that you don’t get any sympathy cards for the love you’ve never had, however much it hurts.

Mothers are artists,

‘I just can’t imagine not being able to look at your face every day,’ I said. ‘I love your face more than any face in the entire world.’

the only way out of sad was through sad.

I hadn’t realised you could feel angry with people who were suffering more than you were.

The world was, apparently, made for extroverts.

She said that, on the worst days in her life, she would go for a walk and pray that she’d see something lovely. It might be a cat sitting in someone’s window. Or a blossom tree. Or a baby in a bobble hat. She hoped that might help me, if I ever felt lonely.

Which is what love can be, I suppose, for lots of people. 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.

I exploded into a strange paroxysm of grief, as if everything I’d ever been sad about in my whole life was bursting through my eyes, out of my veins, through my skin.

People don’t know things unless you tell them. This is an important point to remember.

So perhaps there is hope in our suffering.

Was it always about me and my needs? Is that the danger of love, that it faces in, not out?

‘You don’t get over death,’ I said. ‘You swallow it inside you. And your grief forms a layer of you. Because that’s what we are, layer on layer of experience,

I thought: I’ll ravish you, or you ravish me, or we could ravish each other – I’m easy. And anywhere would do. Even here. On the pavement.

I knew the feel of those hands. The warmth and safety of them. The treachery of them.

I felt guilty, inappropriate, stupid, which were all the things he should have felt – how could I be in the wrong here?

why were women made to feel bad for saying things that were reasonable?

We can convince ourselves about absolutely anything – this is our intrinsic weakness as human beings.

It is, surprisingly, possible to feel deep joy inside deep sadness

I recommend it. Finding your thing. Your place in the scheme of things.

it felt sad having nobody to say goodnight to.

Success is almost as good as love, I find, but not quite.

way we catch each other’s feelings, that’s the joy and the agony of love.

I often find this with jolly people, whose jolliness, though apparently welcoming, can keep you out.

Life stories are allowed to be selective.

let myself think of your father, just for one day each year,

Other things that begin badly, like my life, might end well, in a big flourish of loveliness to make up for the crap start.

‘You said that the energy between us is so powerful it can turn our life around,’ I said. ‘But you also said that it’s powerful enough to destroy us.’

‘Over six thousand days of love. But no matter how many days you have, it’s never enough.

But enough of grief. Here was joy.

We all find different ways to cover up our pain. Most of them don’t work.

Because pain is better not covered up, but channelled into something else.

‘You will always be beautiful to me,’ I said. ‘I love the way you’ve always said that,’ she said. ‘Even when I look awful.’ I said, ‘Awful can be beautiful.’

‘The sacrament of the present moment,’

‘Reality is so constricting,’

We were both looking for something we couldn’t have again. The past.