My mother will soon become a British citizen, and she wants to travel. Finally, she says, and I wonder how many years she has been waiting to say it. Where I come from, a mother’s wishes often wait until everyone has eaten, until the children are settled, until whatever needs doing has been done. We learn to offer our parents the place of honour at the dasturxon, to pour their tea, to seek their blessing before a journey. We are taught to honour their sacrifices; it can take much longer to ask what they still want for themselves. I have written so much about love, identity, the things I keep searching for, and so little about the woman whose presence I have counted on all my life. Now she is preparing to go somewhere simply because she wants to, and I am discovering how much I have depended on her staying.
My mother is petite, and I have always thought her the epitome of beauty. She is confident, intelligent, stubborn, and capable of being profoundly annoying. She has the certainty of someone who has survived enough to trust her own judgement, including when her children would prefer her to question it. In our families, children grow up and have children of their own, yet their mothers still want to know whether they have eaten, whether they are warm, when they will be home. There is comfort in being loved like this, and there can be very little room to move. I wanted my freedom. I wanted to make decisions without her fear accompanying them. She made mistakes, and some of them hurt. I can acknowledge that without diminishing her loyalty, just as I can be grateful for her devotion without pretending I always knew how to live inside it.
My father was a big man, physically and in the force of his character. He was someone not everybody could handle. My mother, this tiny woman, could. She carried him through his life, and more than ten years after his death, she still carries him. She lives each day as a woman who is still married, faithful to him, protective of his honour. I lost my father when I was very young; she lost the man whose wife she continues to be. I am still learning to understand the depth of that loyalty. It is there in how she has cared for my brother and me, and later for my children: she does not stop loving someone because loving them becomes difficult. So much of what we call being fine has depended on her work, her vigilance, her refusal to abandon the people she loves. I have spent my life trying to make her proud, often without realising it. She has spent hers making sure I was alive. Perhaps we were both so occupied with these tasks that I rarely stopped to ask what she wanted for herself.
Now I want to make room for that woman, although I am not yet sure how. I know how to seek my mother’s blessing; I am learning how to send her on her way with mine. I want her to choose a destination without first calculating who might need her at home. I want to hear what she has seen, what pleased her, where she wants to go next. There will be an unfamiliar quiet in her absence, and I will have to let myself feel it without asking her to fill it. I bow my head to this beautiful, stubborn woman who has worked so hard, held to her principles, and stayed beside us through more than I fully know. It is time to let my mama go. I will miss her, but I will be fine. She has raised me well.
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