I'm in a situation that is fairly common for women of my age - no longer young and not in a relationship, and living with my aging mother as her carer in her final years,

I'm in a situation that is fairly common for women of my age - no longer young and not in a relationship, and living with my aging mother as her carer in her final years,  Seeing my mother's progression through all the awful things osteoporosis does to the human body, and also a foretaste of my own future.  

Like many women in this scenario, I am using this time to explore my relationship with my mother, all those unspoken, almost impossibly hard-to-articulate webs of connection and hurt that seem to make up the warp and weft of most women's relationships with their mothers.  I refuse to descend into the kind of sentimentality that so many of my friends have done in their own efforts to make some kind of peace with their mothers, a sentimentality that denies the anger, hurt and betrayal that those women still feel after their mothers' deaths.  I accept that my mother- while not a bad woman or even a particularly inept mother - will never have the faintest idea who I am, nor will we ever arrive at any kind of understanding. She's never been able to give that to me and I have long since stopped expecting or needing that. She is who she is and made her own choices in life, as I have and both of us have become who we are because of those choices.  

All I can bring to this process is acceptance, This exploration is a kind of delicate tip-toeing through a foggy bog, trying to find some pointers, some solid ground, unfurling a thread that may or may not help me return to my beginnings, but might just as likely disappear into the murk and swamp and leave me none the wiser. The only guide I have is a determination to remain honest, 

These two poems have come to me, They are a few years old now, maybe more will come as this process continues. 

DELINQUENT DAUGHTERS.

Mothers, thank the Lord for your delinquent daughters,

Who went off and did what they shouldn't ought ta.

Who danced to a different drum

And followed the Moon and not the Sun.

Found themselves, silvered driftwood, on an empty shore

Still following that elusive star.

Whole, though scarred, and eyes too wise,

A hatful of dreams and no compromise.

They are the ones who flutter home

To a nest that's no longer lined with down,

But with silver gossamer

And two silvered heads, one haloed white,

One speckled black,

Lean together in the slowly dimming light.

© Catherine Blackfeather

THE SEPARATION OF DIFFERENCE (TO A MOTHER FROM HER DAUGHTER)

We are constantly being born.

That first wrenching parturition

Constantly repeated.

To blend is bliss

But to separate is to become.

This mother’s womb does not devour,

Suffocate,

But still, it clings,

Reaches out to a hand long gone,

Though still-present.

That never knew oneness, sameness,

Only ever the separation of difference.

And I cannot go with you,

Small hand in yours,

On this last journey,

Alone.

©Cath Blackfeather