All My Mothers

by Joanna Glen

(My poor mother, you’re probably thinking, and that’s right, but she’d made her bed – and now she had to lie in it. And she did love lying in bed.)

I didn’t know why she was always feeling faint, or anxious, or collapsing into bed as if she didn’t have enough strength to be a normal human being.

(I think that sounds mean, but take it from me that a fragile mother is a scary thing for a child – it feels like your whole life is made of paper.)

Because – and this came like a punch in the stomach – my mother and I did not match. It was obvious. I’d somehow ended up with the wrong mother.

That was it. My preparation for womanhood. Pain relief.

after I lost my virginity. I don’t remember feeling I’d lost anything, but it was hard to see what exactly I’d gained.

She’d given so much of herself to find her children’s potential and, along the way, she’d lost her own.

To be a man. What the hell is a man if he can’t cry for his son? Being a man was so much of the problem here.

I wanted to say that I’d let him turn me into someone else. That it happened gradually. That it was my fault not to stop it.

But love wasn’t only found in blood-mothers, that’s what I’d realised. Love wasn’t only found in romance with men,

‘It’s so hard being a mother,’ she said. I told her about my endometriosis. ‘It’s so hard not being a mother,’ she said. (These two statements are both true, I think.)