When the Demons of Love Can’t Let Go

There’s a thin dividing line between being loyal to your parents and exorcising the demons they cause in your life.

I tried to exorcise those demons by writing a novel, Infinite Stranger, about the very close yet complex relationship between a mother and daughter, and the unattainable man who came between them. More specifically, it was about my  relationship with my mother, and the impossible love that tore us apart. I wrote the book after she died, because when she was alive, the two of us could never talk about all the things that had caused the tragic rift between us. 

But writing honestly about someone you love comes at a price. To this day, I feel guilty whenever I see that a reviewer of my novel has written something like ‘what a terrible woman’.

My mother was not a terrible woman. She was a damaged one. That’s how I prefer to think of her. At her best, she was an incurable romantic who believed in the impossible and who had an indomitable spirit. Someone you just loved to be with. At her worst, she could be utterly unforgiving and downright scary when angry. The worst enemy imaginable. And when I married the man she didn’t want me to marry, she became an enemy I never imagined having. Wore black to my wedding. I don’t even know why she came. But a terrible mother? No. In spite of everything, she was never that.

Right until the day I met my future husband, she was a loving mother. Someone who put me on a pedestal. Someone who wanted the very best for me. The trouble was, as I grew older, I soon learned that the best she wanted for me was not the same as the best I wanted for me.

By my early twenties, I was ready to pull away. To lead my own life. Marry the man I wanted to marry, not the man she wanted me to marry. I couldn’t have married the man she wanted for me anyway, because he was a Benedictine monk, bound by vows of chastity. I’d fallen in love with him, yes, but I’d given up hope long before my mother had. Did I mention that she was an incurable romantic? Ah yes, I did. An incurable romantic of Guinness Book proportions. She truly believed that this handsome young monk and I were destined to be together, in the same way she believed that she and the man she almost married were destined to be together – until Fate snatched him away from her.

When writing Infinite Stranger, I came to the conclusion that the romantic love I felt for my Benedictine monk provided my mother with a kind of replacement for the tragically curtailed love she herself had been dealt. I believe that she lived vicariously through me, and when I stopped allowing her to do so, by the simple act of growing up, the warm and cosy world we’d created for ourselves came crashing down.

The biggest tragedy of all was that we never managed to put it back together. Not fully.

So when she died, and I realised it was too late for any last-minute, heart-to-heart talks (something I had always hoped for), I decided to write honestly about her. Both the good and the bad. About the demons that tainted my life, but never made me stop loving her. I truly believe that those demons were caused by the tragic loss of the man she loved, at the cruelly premature age of twenty-six.

I would far rather she be remembered as the fun-loving, caring mother she was throughout my upbringing. The charismatic woman everyone adored. And in her youth, the vibrant girl with the Vivien Leigh smile, whose wit, intelligence and charm captivated the journalist who asked her to marry him after only a few weeks of courtship. Seven years later, when he was killed by a terrorist while visiting a friend in Cyprus, they still weren’t married. Because their relationship was complicated. Whose isn’t?

It’s the fun-loving mother I want to remember, despite everything that came afterwards. And when she died … my God, did I miss her. Looking back now, I could have done with a therapist to help me navigate the grief, regret and tangled memories she left behind.

I still think of her every day. The mother who placed me on a pedestal, convinced I was going to be a world-famous concert pianist; convinced I was going to end up with a loving husband – preferably the one she had chosen for me, and no other. Convinced that we would always remain as close to each other as we had been throughout my childhood and youth.

At rock bottom, I guess most of us love our parents, even if we don’t always like them. Even if we sometimes hate them. Because at the end of the day, that special, primeval kind of bond between mother and child – the intangible spell cast on us either by a good fairy or an unwanted demon – becomes part of who we are, for better or worse.