White Flowers

I went out and bought white flowers. Brought them back. Sat them on my table. I resolved: I no longer want to live in somewhere with an air of mild depression, where the carpet crinkles under my foot, constantly shedding anxiety. I said: I have built a pretty fortress, a sanctuary of steel and concrete, where I can rest away from harm, but where I am always alone.

     
These flowers make me happy. They honour the whiteness lighting up parts of my mind. They cherish the rain pounding inside me, and open like my springtime would, if only I’d let it.

     
I’ve been away from home a long time. This soup is thick and I am hungry. I'm craving sustenance, a liquid to keep me alive. My body is thinning, as my mother's thins, and will thin, one day, to nothing. That’s the day I give her back – my earth, my body, my shrine, my home. But I cannot wait until that time to start the letting go, for my own body to separate from hers, to find itself among the brambles, slightly cut, with the rain beating on it again. 

I came from her body, it is no surprise that hers became entangled in mine, or that it becomes me who is lying there in that nursing home bed, flaccid and paling into the vacuumed air. It is no surprise I don’t want to let her body go, or that I compare my own flesh to hers every day – see my arms fattening as hers do, lines appearing in my skin as hers wrinkle, my thighs plumper as hers slacken under sheets.

     
When her body transformed the first time, from healthy and normal to deadened and useless, I loved it even more. As the metal of the hoist came nearer, we let out nervous laughter, held the bar steady, trying to make sure she didn’t fall any more times than she already had. We all did things that broke us and made us bigger by the breaking.

     
But it isn’t me in a hospital bed, in a calm and shallow nursing home, waiting to die. I'm not yet 72 years old. I've not yet been a mother. I touched her body like it was a precious sculpture when I was little, when she was so beautiful. And I see no difference now - still beautiful, still wandering in her mind, inaccessible, all-giving. But the earth is taking her, and I won’t let it take me with it. My time isn’t done.

     
My body is abundant with grief. It yelps up my spine and faces me in the morning. It's a beautiful and peaceful thing, my body, when I accept it. At night, I dream I’m covered in mud, and that starlight is eating me – creeping up my toes, into my creases, nestling through my hair like sand over moon-stained beaches. Backed onto a cliff edge, I throw back my arms and laugh. I give my mother back to all that made her. My own child will survive if I learn how to look after her.

     
My friend said to me Go back to that place, back to where you felt safe. So I walked up the drive to the Poor Clare's Convent and knocked on the door. The windows streamed light through them, the benches were hard and I could hear the nuns singing for Jesus.

     
This is the place where saints surround me and I can, for once, look my mother in the face and say It’s okay, Mum, and mean it. Cause I saw another face in hers. Taking my coat back out into the world, I am not the same person as when I entered.

     
The white flowers live for all of us. They bloom, shrivel; they give off scent while they’re still living. We can make this life more beautiful. Let’s do that. Let’s make it better than it could be. Make it bloom.

For Better, For Worse

I'm back in Brighton after four days at home in Wales. I saw my sister, I saw my Mum. I even visited the nuns at Poor Clares. And I went to a wedding.

I usually tend to subscribe to this commonly held misconception: the present is what's here now, the future is yet to come and does not yet exist, and the past, well, is in the past. All that sails into it is gobbled forever.

This weekend I remembered a different reality: that the present is disappearing even as I live it, that the future can never be separated from what is happening now. And the past? Well, it never really goes away.

So, at the start of this new year, after eighteen months of watching my mother ebbing away before my eyes, after losing a dear friend, I turn around and suddenly notice that nothing has ever really left me, and that no matter what it feels like in those emptiest of moments, nothing is ever lost.

I don't understand this, but I know it's true. And as I sat at a long table in Wrexham Lager Club, melodies from old Motown songs swirling around my ears, a cocktail stick with cheese and pineapple on my plate, I became absolutely certain of it.

The most painful thing about the passage of time is that you can't bring back what has gone; you can't turn the clock back, you can't undo the mistakes or right the wrongs. You can't recapture what is lost. You can't ever, as it were, go home again. But what do you know; sitting at that table, I realised, it all goes on living inside us anyway, the good and the bad. Something endures.

I finally found an hour on Monday to visit the Convent that sits next to our old house. I wanted to say hello, keep up the contact I've begun. I sat in their chapel listening to the sounds of nuns laughing and running for lunch, then I got down on my knees and prayed. Strange as it sounds, I find it hard to pray very much in Brighton. But there, in that quiet, holy place, it felt the most natural thing in the world. And I remembered that thing about the past again; I felt the holiness pouring through the windows, through the wood of the bench I was sitting on, through my own bones. Something that's there all the time, I just can't see it, flooded the chapel with light; it bounced off walls and reflected off bronzed figures, hitting the sides of benches and lighting up the corneas of my eyes.

I remember this light from when I was 8 years old and kept a picture of St Francis above my bed. I would peer from my bedroom window into the Convent garden next door, watching the nuns as work or giggling together. I never thought one day I'd be on my knees in their chapel, feeling that holiness from inside those walls.

The wedding on Friday was of the father of my ex-boyfriend to his long-term partner. I've known my ex for nearly 19 years, and when we were still together, his family were like my own. He is my kin. And I know what it took for my ex-boyfriend, his brothers and their father to get to the point of making that wedding happen. I also know what it took for me to be there. The amount of love I experienced that night was so strong that for at least part of the evening I was pinned to my chair by the sheer force of it. I caught the train home, humbled and exhausted. The feeling I had was the same as on that chapel bench.

Time passes, but the bonds of real love remain untouched, perfectly in tact. I want to try and remember this. And I know I'll forget it again. I know I'll see the failing flesh of my mother, the darkening of her eyes and I'll not be able to see past the withering skin and mind; it will engulf me. That is the other mystery. We remember, we forget. Only to remember again.

I've been having email contact with the Poor Clare Colletine Community lately, whom I spent almost twenty years growing up next to in North Wales. I initially emailed them because I visited their Convent earlier this year when I was home to see Mum in the nursing home, and the experience affected me deeply; it was very healing. It's been lovely to have the contact with them, and keep up my connection with St Clare and St Francis, and feel there are presences and people out there who are praying for Mum, for all my family really. It makes holding the hugeness of our situation easier to bear.

Today, they sent me some pictures, which was touching, and I've included them in this post as it was St Clare's Day on Saturday.



Here is the dormitory where she lived and died.



And here's a picture of Mum before her last stroke, opening presents on her 69th birthday. I haven't been able to look at photos of her for a while now, it's been a bit too much to take. So it's good to look again, and see her in all her loveliness and with her hair in plaits.

Mother's Day

They are selling cut-price flowers in Tesco's, for this special day, for all those last minute sons and daughters.

I came back from Wales yesterday, on a long Pendolino train which arrived at 11 o'clock in the evening, then I caught the last bus home. Today, I am shattered, and have been attempting to cultivate a pottering state of mind - one which concentrates only on the unpacking of tea cups, the re-aligning and colour-coding of books on shelves, and the playing of crap bubble-bursting logic games on my mobile phone.

I knew at some point today I would need to sit myself at my computer and attempt to recapture the last few days, and I knew it wouldn't be easy. My heart feels like it has been pumped with helium, so swollen with life, it is, so engorged with feeling, I fear it might just sail right out from under my tee-shirt, out of my living-room window and into the dark rainy night.

I arrived in Shotton at lunch time on Tuesday, tired from the train journey, the early start and the lack of sleep I've become used to in these recent weeks of late night music and writing sessions. I have been wanting to see my sister for some time, we met jubilantly on the station platform, caught the train together to our village and walked home.

As I sat in my Mum's old bedroom, which looks out over the playing fields, I could see, through the trees in the distance, the partly hidden walls of our old sprawling family home, the house I grew up in from the age of four until I moved out at eighteen. With its vast tangle of bushes, trees and flowerbeds, its large echoing rooms, the endless driveway, it is still very much a mythical place for me, a place I still dream about, I still think about. It is a house of so many memories, and I'm still trying to understand and come to terms with what went on within its four walls.

I've known for a while that I needed to go and have another look at the old house. I hadn't seen it close up in some years, I've avoided going up our old road. Right next to it stands the Poor Clares Convent, just on the other side of the wall. I hadn't been back to the Convent since I was a little girl. I have known for a while that I've needed to return here aswell. I've wanted to see what it was like on the inside, as I can't remember from all those years ago, and I've needed some answers in order to piece together the missing pieces of a puzzle that is my childhood. So I have needed for a long time to go and visit the Poor Clares. This week felt like the right time.

I can't locate much in my memories of childhood that, looking back, seem normal or ordinary, if there is such a thing. At the time, I thought that was just how things were in family life, it was all that I knew. But I so longed to be normal and ordinary, in an ordinary house, with an ordinary family, ordinary friends, ordinary wishes and an ordinary experience. The more I look at it, though I know that the idea of a normal family-life can only largely be myth, the more I think what an extraordinary existence in some ways my childhood and teenage years were.

However, when I remember, it is usually the bad that I remember, the darker parts, the shadowy overhangs of branches in our gardens, the crawling in the undergrowth. It is the creaking in the loft above my head, it is the white statue on the lawn that, in the night, always seemed to be moving. It is the death of the bumble bee in the spider's web next to our back steps, it is the crying in the night. We kept the back door locked tight and the front door gleaming with red gloss paint and a brass knocker.

This is what stays with me most, the feeling that someone was always hiding in those tall poplars that lined our long driveway, that there were forces out there, surrounding us that me and my family didn't want to know about. We were all haunted.

But then there was the Convent, with its clock that chimed on the half hour, with its Cross that stood tall above all our heads. I would hear the nuns singing in the morning at dawn, as my mother took me by the hand and gently led me down the front lawn when I was little and I couldn't sleep, and the sun was just beginning to shine and birds were just waking.

There was something about the Convent that I didn't understand, but which has affected me all my life. I am only just realising why. The nuns would come and visit my Mum and they would bring us hand-carved Crucifixes and tiny painted nuns made out of wooden clothes pegs. I would keep the prayers of St Francis on my head board, stuck with blutack, and I would pray every night and feel the kindness of those words trickling down my forehead.

..Lord .. grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life..

A thread has run through my veins and through my life from as far back as I can remember. I still don't quite understand it, and it is still unravelling. It runs all the way back to my childhood, to the old house and to those closed Convent walls.

We sit on the bank. It feels like spring has come and is spiralling into summer. My feet are twitching in the heat, his eyes are melting. The sky is the bluest it has been since winter came.

Downhill, the graves perch up against each other. Chimney stacks form a fortress above a blue haze of rooves and painted walls. If you scrape back the turf, you can find the names of the dead.

I am unnameably happy. But I sit here crying in the grass with my soft-haired lover, because I don't understand what I feel. And I know that somewhere behind me in this graveyard is the cherry blossom tree that I once stood under, where, a long time ago, I named my love for another man and I meant it forever. He disappeared with the petals that blew on our faces from the branches, and he had a son.

And his son was named after a saint, and now this saint stares back at me from these church walls, a seer and a poet. And this name lives in my own, buried between my forename and my surname, as it is buried in the walls where I grew up, between the winding hedge of our garden and a Convent's vegetable patch.



Poor Clare's, nuns with their recorders, giggling in the garden, their Crosses tied at the waist of their dark brown habits, glinting in the sunlight. They sent poems to me over the wall and I stuck them above my bed. At night I would pray to them.

But I also remember the dark evenings when God was an evil eye watching all the time. I remember turning to the left-side so I could seek out the Devil. I felt him on my back all the time, as soon as the sun went down.

That was when I was younger. An atheist by eleven, I started to scorn the nuns and their silly smocks, their locked up world. I would never give myself up to a man like that. I loved Sylvia Plath and The Women's Room. Then, at thirteen, mixed up teenager, I came across Buddhism, experienced a flash of insight, some kind of breakdown and a resurrection and the feeling never went away.

I remember searching even then, through the curtainless window, past the dark, long, empty garden, into nothing. I remember how it felt to want wings and to fly at night when no one was looking. And to fall, back on the hard carpetted floor, when the sun came up in a voidless sky.

I look now to four solid walls of stone, and a cup of wine. I am too much of a Catholic by temperament to become one now. Too much of a Buddhist to ever be ordained. And I love the stories of the saints, they all seem crazy; they scissored like epileptics across their beds in fits of holy abandon, and wrote, frenzied into the long dawn. They couldn't live a normal life.

I like to read about them as I like to read about Rimbaud or Baudelaire. There isn't much difference to me, there isn't a difference in any of it to me. The cup, the wine, the blood, the calling, the sex, the hunger, the deathly embrace. The space between words, the words themselves. The crucifixion. The flame of light. The empty corridor. The black bull. I can see the pattern in everything. After all, it was all born in my blood.

I look up. The angel's face is covered by branches, and they look like flames.