Only since her death have I started to understand my mother

It’s been a long time since I was immersed in the ocean, cradled in its cool embrace. My body is supported by the water, my limbs suspended as if a puppet dangling from strings. I imagine the molecular motors, actin and myosin, microscopic filaments responsible for converting energy into movement, decoupling and gliding across each other, releasing each muscle fibre. With each breath, my body bobs in the brine and the stored-up tension dissolves, absorbed into the Pacific.

I float, my face warmed by the sun, thinking of all the things I have let go.

A chain reaction catalysed on that day in July 2013 with a knock on my consulting-room door. Memories flood back of two policemen, guns on hips, trying to identify me as my mother’s daughter, next of kin, in the small windowless room. Of the details of her fatal accident, hit by a truck when crossing at the pedestrian lights, crashing into my consciousness. Of reaching behind me in that room for my chair, looking for solidity when my world was dissolving.

I thought for years that I would come to better understand my mother. She was an enigma, a puzzle with pieces missing.Credit: iStock

I inhale, then duck my masked and snorkelled head beneath the surface, kicking down through the resistance of the water, my lungs bursting while I gaze greedily at the reef below. Fish of all sizes, shapes, colours darting in and out of their shelters, singularly or in schools. The coral’s colours duller than they were when I first fell in love with the Barrier Reef in the ’90s, but still magical.

I thought for years that I would come to better understand my mother. She was an enigma, a puzzle with pieces missing. Aged 45 when I was born, she had grown up impoverished in the Great Depression on bread and dripping, the fifth of seven children. Her family was one of the fortunate ones – they had money for school shoes. But not for books. Not for her to continue in school beyond the primary years. Not for her to have choices in life beyond marriage and children.

She held the cards of her family and early life close to her chest. But there were clues. Clues in her stockpiling of emotion, allowing it to build until it overflowed in an eruption of fury.

One Christmas morning as a teen, I remember poking my head into the small, laminated kitchen of the weatherboard house my father had built. I could hear Mum humming, like a bow drawn across a tightly strung instrument, a frequent habit when she was stressed. Around 60 at the time, with closely cropped hair and dark, often averted eyes, she was preparing a traditional lunch for the extended family. This space was her domain. She did not welcome offers of help, preferring to remain in control.

I must have felt courageous that day. Questions about emotions weren’t asked in my family. Perhaps I was in that adolescent stage of questioning everything that parents represent.

“Why are you always so wound up at Christmas, Mum?” I asked.

“My father used to drink a bit,” she murmured, turning back to the turkey.

She was like the security door she’d had installed; a strong, tightly meshed structure that she could see out from, but no one could see through.

This way of mothering was infused into me, something I needed to decouple when I became a parent.

My husband and I wade out into the water as the tide is turning. We’re the only ones on the beach. Picking our way gingerly across shards of shell, we reach a small coral bommie. There are clams, their lips sinusoidal, painted a vivid emerald and sapphire. As shadows cross, they shut, protecting themselves from imminent danger.

My mother appeared forever ready to engage in fight or flight, her shell primed to clamp shut when a shadow passed over. Wary of cameras, dismissive of attention, seemingly also wanting her children to be a smaller target. Often appearing disgruntled when my father glowed with pride in the small achievements of his children. Or perhaps she was jealous?

This way of mothering was infused into me, something I needed to decouple when I became a parent. Naturally I had a strong desire to control, a way of managing my own anxiety as my mother had before me.

Fortunately, my son is not the approval-seeker that I once was. Instead, he is a strong-willed, sometimes infuriating, lovable ratbag, determined to live a life of adventure and risk. Through his nature, his ability to embrace the joys and immediacy of life, I learnt the beauty of letting go, providing space to discover who he is and what he wants from life. Space that my mother never had, and that I didn’t find until later in life.

I had been a liquid that took on the shape of the vessel that was my family, forged by a mother who had experienced untold trauma.

It is only in recent years, since she has gone, that I have been able to find my own natural shape. I explore the small inlets, investigating nooks and crannies in the fringing reef of the shoreline: brain coral, staghorn, plate. Suddenly a large shape appears below me. It’s a sea turtle, dining on algae. Its shell looks weathered, scarred and aged.

I dive down, keeping a respectful distance but still able to investigate those knowing eyes, deep pools, unworried by my proximity.

I wonder if it has lived more than half a century as I have, how far it has travelled, what it has witnessed, what it has learned. I follow along with it, wanting to hold on to this precious experience, unwilling to let go.

But knowing that we must let go to move forward.

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