hello friends!
I am stretching out to say a little hello and send a little love as I know it continues to be such a tumultuous time in the world.
I am currently writing this little note to you from my mother’s house, from under the duvet of her bed that I am sharing with both her and my sister. I can very much report that it’s quite a full house right now, a very full small two-bedroom apartment with my two brothers staying in the other room and our two sweet rescue dogs sprawled out on the living room floor on the three giant dog beds my mom has allocated to the two of them. Somewhere between the pandemic, our combined ‘busy’ schedules and just general life stuff that gets in the way (various pets, bouts of financial insecurity, etc) means this is the first time in 4 years we’ve actually been in the same space altogether.
Unusually for the south of Spain, it’s been raining for two weeks straight, so our plan to spend the days outdoors hasn’t exactly worked out. And so, we are bound to the walls of this apartment and thus, bound to each other. We attempt to tidy the house up twice a day, but it seems pointless, our endeavors are undone within the blink of an eye. There is stuff everywhere, a myriad of random laundry drying off anything possible, every surface is covered in books, random snacks, and used mugs of half-drunk tea. Each morning we attempt to split the contents of the giant Moka pot into 5 while tripping over miscellaneous shoes while racing to beat each other to the one bathroom with the good shower. The bathroom itself is an explosion, with 5 different people’s skin and body care routines laid to bare as if we are partaking in some kind of product testing group gone mad. We are simply too big and too many for the minimal approach, but somehow I feel more at peace in this mess than I have in the longest time.
But things have definitely not always been like this. In the past, this was nothing short of my idea of a complete and utter recipe for disaster. If asked to partake I would’ve said it would never be anything short of an emotionally charged trigger dome! We would fight, it would be messy, loud with no privacy and I’d be completely stranded without a car nor means of escape. AKA hell! I used to think of time all together in small spaces as something to be avoided, the avoidance a courteous way to ‘keep the peace’. Meaning a lot of my ‘adult’ Christmases have been spent somewhere far far away, usually in the warm, with friends and their families instead of my own.
When I think about why this came to be, it’s probably a lot to do with the sadness that all birthdays and holidays brought with them after my father passed away. His passing changed the course of everything. Where and how we lived, our relationships to ourselves and each other. So often in our society when we speak of death and grief I often find it falls so flat, that the language we have falls too short to describe the expansiveness of these experiences. That we speak of these things as if they are just events, things that happened, like nouns with a clear beginning and end. To me, they are verbs, things that stretch over the length of time, with aftershocks, page breaks, and surprises. They are things that bring about an insurmountable amount of change, physical, mental, emotional, and abstract. I can’t say how much it changed me and my mother’s relationship because I was still a child when he passed and of course, relationships change over our lifetimes but it definitely put it under strain, as overnight she had become my sole parent.
I was only 9 but I could clearly see how sadness had permanently moved into her eyes and how the shock, disbelief, and heartbreak emaciated her. I think becoming a widow in Japan was a super lonely experience for my Dutch mother, things were just so culturally different. She often spoke of how she missed the touch of a hug, someone to be able to hold space to cry with. I became her trusted confidante, hearing things that were beyond my years and emotional capacity.
Soon after, we left everything we knew and randomly moved to Spain, a place we knew no one or not much about in an attempt to hit refresh on a new life. In my teens, our dynamic turned into an explosive one. I had strong opinions about things she did, things I felt were mistakes and not being able to talk about them I instead thought they gave me the permission to live exactly how I saw fit. I thought I had it all figured out and I was acting out, I wanted to rebel. I took my newly arrived teen beauty, new boobs, and sass out into the world. Drugs and alcohol were never my problems but boys and teen sex were my vices of choice. There is no doubt I was an absolute literal nightmare, it’s still a moment in time I feel deeply apologetic to my mother for, to myself for, but I can also now see the ways in which I was also in such deep pain.
In the years since I moved out at 17, things have undoubtedly improved a lot between us but the investment of time was somehow still pretty minimal. Phone calls were always part of a multi-tasking mission, on the way to somewhere, while doing something. I am embarrassed to admit that I used to think I was almost slick for having a ‘no more than a week at home’ policy. There was simply always somewhere better/more fun/more interesting to be. But most nights as I laid my head on the pillow before my mind allowed me to sleep it would refresh the nagging indelible feeling of guilt that things weren’t better between us.
But then, the pandemic gave me a chance to try.
This time last year, I came home to Spain for Christmas just before the B117 variant caused havoc in the UK and the borders between it and the world were closed once again. I ended up staying here for four whole months, the longest amount of time I had been home since I had left.
Those four months taught me how much time is very much a necessary ingredient to have better relationships with the people we love but time living under capitalism has become the most precious of commodities, one we have been bred to believe we are always short of. Our relationship to time and therefore the ‘lack’ of it is one of the biggest stressors of our society and has us all running on this proverbial treadmill to this yearning of what we’ve been (mis)sold as the ‘good life. My and mama needed time just to get to know each other again. To spend time together as two adults. Time to do the simplest things together. Walk the dogs. Food shop. Make soup. Watch ‘Blown away’ on Netflix. Time to get used to each other again so we could see each other as we really are now, our flaws, our ticks, our rich humanity with patience, humor, compassion, and care. With tenderness. We needed to remember that we had already survived so much and we were still here. Time showed me how lucky I am to have the mother I have, with her pink dyed hair, her insane outfits, her insatiable taste in hats. Time reminded me how funny she is, how caring she is and what a one-of-a-kind human being in the world she is. Time showed me how to really love my mother again.
That really has been one of my biggest lessons of the last year, to try and at least notice my skewed relationship to time when it tries to rob me of the joys of the present, of the things that are already here right in front of me. I am not starting this new year with any specific goals in mind and instead, I am just trying to hold so much love in my heart for all the things I already have.
When I look around this room, at our 3 mattresses covered in mismatching bedding, pushed up against the wall next to each other, where we laughed till we cried till sleep came for us, I am reminded of how when we were living in Japan as kids, this is how we slept together. My parents and us, shared breath every night in futons that we laid out after the day was done, on the tatami floor of the multi-purpose room that was the living room by day and bedroom by night. We’d read stories to each other, cover each other if one had kicked off the covers, and let each other sleep in our futons after bad dreams. As I look around at the disorder of this room I’m in, I somehow see and feel…complete and utter comfort. I see and feel love. These are my people and this is our mess.
This is the mess we make with the ones we love and I’ve never been so grateful for it.
This is beautiful. Thanks for sharing. Happy new year! X
May the year ahead bring more awakenings of things that truly matter and may we all nurture the love in our lives to the fullest. Thank you for sharing, I love you so much! Xxxx