A while back I was invited to attend a friend’s family celebration. It was her mother’s 90th birthday. Many generations were settled into a round of couches on a large, open verandah as cake was shared around. I was sitting beside my friend, on the other side of the circle from her mother. The mother called across the verandah, offering my friend a second helping of cake. My friend declined.
I watched them: the frail, determined old woman standing to cut another slice of cake, the same chocolate cake with frosted white icing she’d been baking for her family for seventy years, in the same silver aluminium tin that had ‘come from America’. Cupping the cake tenderly in her palms, the old woman walked around the back of the couch on which my friend was sitting, leaned forward and made an offering to her daughter. Here was an act of love, a hymn of such grace and reverence the old woman might have been a disciple placing a thousand petalled lotus at her daughter’s feet. My friend tensed, caught her breath.
“I told you mum, I don’t want it,” she snapped.
And there we have it. The sins of the mother. The old woman was neither embarrassed nor diminished by her daughter’s sharp rejection. I happen to know she was long-accustomed to the rudeness. And I know that much to my friend’s chagrin, her mother would make the same offering again. And again. And again.
‘See me,’ the older woman might be saying, ‘see this love I have for you. It cannot be extinguished by your rudeness or your clumsy attempt at autonomous existence. We are bound, you and I, mother and daughter. See me, for I am you. You are me. We are one woman, my darling, one lineage, one moment in time. See me, for this is my offering and soon I will be gone.’
Such are the forces that frame our living. Not just mothers, but mothers too.
My looked at me, whispered quietly: “what do I do?”
You write, I said. You write. You pour your heart onto the page. Self made visible to your own telling. Self made matter. Self, aligned to the moment of telling.
Honouring the artist: Vasyl Mushyk.
Stephanie Dale is an award-winning journalist, author, researcher and founder of the International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute. In 2014 she launched The Write Road, a wellbeing-through-writing initiative for rural and remote Australians. She is passionate about pilgrimage, and in 2017 initiated Walk&Write holiday writing adventures.