DO WE EVER GET OVER OUR MOTHERS?

To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part…

No doubt you recognise those timeless words. Perhaps you recited them at your wedding, or heard them recited at someone else’s wedding. But doesn’t it occur to you that they could also apply to the bond between a mother and child? Your mother, my mother. The woman who gave birth to you, held you closely as an infant and continued to hold you close to her heart from that day forward, no matter what your circumstances, until death finally parted you.

Okay, as usual I’m being a bit hyperbolic, but today, on my late mother’s birthday, please allow me to indulge.

Molly Williams, co-protagonist of both my life and my novel, would have been 94 years old today. She loved me wholeheartedly, unfailingly, even ruthlessly, you might say, from the day I was born until the day she died – almost twelve years ago now. Despite the passage of the years, never a day goes by without me thinking of her. On special anniversaries such as today, I read my old diary entries, look at old photos, light a candle, remember. In fact, I remember her on all days of the year, not just special days. Because my mother was quite a woman. A woman to be reckoned with, admired, adored, at times feared, but never, ever forgotten. If any of you have read Infinite Stranger, you’ll understand.

But come to think of it, will you understand? Do I really understand? When you’ve had such a turbulent relationship with your mother, and yet you’ve continued to be tied to her and somehow need her, in spite of everything, can you ever truly fathom the complex workings of the heart that are at play in such a primordial conjunction of genes and inherited history?

My mother, Molly Williams, was brought up in the old mill town of Preston in Northern England, where she always felt like a fish out of water, to coin a phrase. She was feisty, outspoken and brave, but also a dreamer and an incurable romantic, to coin another phrase. She was surrounded by Lancashire-accented, hard-working people in her childhood and youth, all of whom had lived in Preston forever and showed no aspirations to move away or do anything different with their lives. As she grew up, she felt increasingly as though she were  in a prison. No escape. That’s what she often told me in later years, when I became the apple of her eye, to coin a third (and last) phrase.

And then, at the tender, hopeful age of nineteen, she met a certain Peter Fox. Ah, Peter! – the sharp-minded, witty journalist who would change her life forever. They would fall head over heels in love, go out together for almost seven years (with a couple of impetuous break-ups), and she would always believe, at the bottom of her heart, that one day they would be married, have children, also have fulfilling careers – Peter a foreign correspondent, my mother an actress – and live happily ever after.

But it never happened.

Instead, this is what happened.

At the still-tender but somewhat wiser age of twenty-six, my mother lost Peter to the gaping jaws of death. While visiting a Polish journalist friend in Kyrenia, Northern Cyprus, Peter was murdered by a Greek-Cypriot terrorist.

And that was that. My mother’s life as she knew it was over. Something in her died too, the day Peter died. That’s also what she told me, in the years to come.

She would never be quite that same Molly Williams again. But she would somehow find the strength, and the money, to travel to Kyrenia: the place where Peter’s life ended and Molly’s continued. She would start a new life without him, yet never forget him.

She would marry on the rebound just one year later – to no other than Peter’s Polish friend, Wacek Skorupski – and she would become Molly Skorupski. Their wedding would be celebrated Greek-Cypriot-style, with the lapping Mediterranean waves providing a muted sound track, competing with the Zorba-style music and the chatter and clinking glasses.

She would give birth to a son another year later, and redefine herself in motherhood. She would love and cherish that son, and name him after her deceased fiancé, now buried several feet beneath the hot soil of the British Cemetery of Nicosia. In another couple of years she would give birth to a daughter, who she would also love and cherish, and inject with her indominable romantic spirit.

Mother and daughter would become very close – almost too close, as the daughter would begin to feel once she grew up and became a young woman, now studying music in England, harbouring her own dreams. And then, too soon, things would fall apart, never to return to the way they once were.

The way they once were. Such a haunting phrase.

Can I blame my mother for letting things fall apart? For not laying to rest the ghost of her beloved fiance? A loss that caused her, bit by bit, to live vicariously through her daughter? Dreaming her daughter’s dreams, loving her daughter’s loves, yearning for that mother-daughter closeness to last forever.

How can anyone be to blame? Mothers are human, marred, imperfect. Mothers all too often love not wisely but too well, to quote our famous British bard. Mothers show us the possible and the impossible, and we try to grasp after one or the other, also none too wisely.

Maybe that’s the key word. Impossible. Maybe a mother’s love will always be impossible to discern.

My own mother did everything she did out of love for me, I truly believe that. And yet at times it hurt so much, I eventually had to write an entire novel about it, to exorcise the painful memories, the questions; to mute the overriding question that was constantly humming away at the back of my consciousness: why?

Painful or not, the love lives on, even after death has fulfilled its part of the bargain.

To all of us who have lost our mothers and are still not quite ‘over’ them (and probably never will be), all we can hope, for better or worse, is that one day we will be reunited with that special mother-bond, that indefinable mother-nurture, in whatever form the reuniting takes.