My Story

7 minute read

Mum died just after her 42^nd birthday and my 13^th. Ten years later my father also died suddenly. Three years after that my remaining grandparents passed too, and so by the time of my mid 20s the immediate family I’d known had dissolved and I was set adrift.

I’ve started this project because it offers, or hopes to, what I needed myself when I was growing up; it hopes to offer connection and a community of people who resonate with the experience, and a space for expression.

I didn’t need silence or pity after mum died. I needed to know there were others who understood. I needed recognition and the permission to be authentic in my feelings. I needed guidance and a bit of womanly advice growing up and I needed a sense of an unconditional safety net well into my 20s. More than anything I needed someone to give me the permission to believe in good outcomes again, a restoration of faith.

Instead I was handed an identity of victimhood and an imperative to keep small, which I accepted.

What happened

My mum, Eleni, was golden when she lived. She was sweet and she was strong and she had integrity in the things she did. As a mother she showered me with love and affection and she would tell me that I was beautiful and clever. As a teacher she’d give her students free tutoring at home to get them through their A’Levels. A spiritual seeker she always sought to understand the truth behind everything and she was sensitive to people. She was also playful and could talk to anybody, she was glamorous and liked to wear colour, and she loved pink roses.

She’d had breast cancer before when I was around 10. Nobody told me she was ill again but when I realised something was wrong I thought she’d get better like she had last time.

One morning I went to school. When I returned home she was gone. She had died at 1pm in the afternoon and we hadn’t said goodbye.

After mum died she was never spoken of again, not at home nor with neighbours nor at school, never. When I returned to school after her funeral the teachers had told my classmates not to mention her. One London’s top performing girls state schools, it lacked the feminine wisdom to acknowledge the passing of a mother.

At home dad dedicated himself to the upkeep of the family and did his best in the ways he knew. His love shown protection and safety and routines, by dispensing life ‘warnings’, and he cooked enormous amounts of fantastic Greek food. But neither he nor my grandparents could ever speak of mum, nor share their devastation, nor express their emotions because they didn’t know how.

The silence over mums death and life continued for the next decade until dad died, then it enveloped him too. One morning he wasn’t feeling well so we went to A&E. Two days later he was on a life support machine. The day after that he died of multiple organ failure. Without warning in four days my beautiful father had gone too.

Then the same thing happened – his life and death was shrouded in silence and somehow myself along with him. There were kindnesses and invitations to lunch and dinner in the weeks after he died, but my parent’s names were never again mentioned at those dinner tables, no memories were ever recalled. Like mum he had been wiped from the annals of memory. My parents had become unmentionable because they were dead, and I was their muted daughter representing their misfortune.

My role, it seemed apparent, was to move on and show everyone how infallible I was in spite of it all.

Life was fuelled by a constant urge for travel and new experiences but it actually went around in circles. Each time the doors to the things I really wanted in life would open, I couldn’t quite walk through them. I felt a constant imperative to retreat.

In my late 30s I understood that at 13 I’d experienced mums death as a traumatic abandonment and it was one which I thought was my fault. I wasn’t conscious of it, but on a deep level I believed I’d done something to deserve her ‘leaving’, and because she wasn’t spoken of again, that belief was reinforced.

It’s a text book case some would say, of children self-blaming for an event not explained to them, but I realise now so much of it was socially mandated, shaped not only by how her death was handled at home, but by how it was responded to collectively. The abandonment was a societal one too. The blanket silencing around her passing handed me the shame of a broken family and an imperative to hide. It combined with the guilt and the self-blame children often experience after a major disconnect to create a diminished sense of worth.

Mum’s death was an event not an identity. It was not who I was, nor who she was. But the silencing around it handed me a limited identity – a requirement for inauthenticity and a need to keep small, borne by the collective fear we hold around death and the loss of mothering, the pity and shame we dispense around ‘failed’ families and the inability to truly witness and address those disconnects.

There were other cultural mandates which influenced how I navigated life.

Messages which said I had to be strong and independent created compulsive self-reliance. The learning that I couldn’t expose my vulnerability created periods of withdrawal and isolation.

Messages which said that my fulfilment was conditional on my worth prescribed struggle, perfectionism and the perpetual delay of the things I really wanted.

We all live in the current of those beliefs; that we have to compete for the things we want, that are not enough as we are, that there exist conditions around love and belonging. But for me, without family or guidance those mandates were magnified out of proportion.

There was no soothing or balancing of those social directives at home – they were amplified to the point of my own self-abandonment.

The term ‘grief’ which we ascribe to losing loved ones doesn’t begin to describe my own experience because there were so many other hurdles before I could get to grief. There were core survival issues; issues of feeling unrooted and unsafe, issues around trust and commitment and self-belief.

It’s so easy to pathologise all that as a direct result of the childhood adversity, as if it were mum’s fault because she died, or dad’s because he didn’t know how to handle her death. As if it were mine for being ‘affected’. As if it’s a disease caused by the ‘misfortune’ of the adversity (as if death were an adversity anyway when it’s a fate that befalls us all). But the defences I built to navigate life didn’t happen in a social vacuum. To label them as the direct impacts of early adversity skirts any social responsibility for them.

Society didn’t create the losses and disconnections I experienced. But in its fear of them and in its relentless forward trajectory, it pretended it didn’t see them.

Looking back the real tragedy was not that mum died early or that childhood adversities and disconnects happen. It’s that without recognition and repair young people are so fiercely defended then can’t then allow themselves to receive the things they need, the receipt of love and the freedom to trust.

The real loss is the loss of faith and trust unrestored. It’s that without repair, the behaviours we term as ‘mal-adaptive’ are so entrenched by adulthood, they take a lifetime to dismantle; patterns of isolation and withdrawal or extreme behaviours or addictions, which aren’t actually mal-adaptive – they’re perfectly adapted to conditioning we all live which says they’re unlucky and alone.

We now designate the ‘problem’ to be healed by therapists behind closed doors but the experience is a chronic one. It can’t be healed behind closed doors when the world outside continues to shun it.

If I had to surmise my experience, it was of severance of connection, to myself, to others, as well as to my mother.

That can happen for young people in so many ways other than though the death of a mother. It can happen through a mother’s own trauma and inability to nourish her child. It can happen through illness, or divorce, or poverty or other reasons that lead to a loss of nurture and connection which isn’t intended. And it’s not even about one mother per se, but rather the loss of what the Mother IS and represents.

The Mother represents natural connectivity, unconditional love and belonging, abundance, receptivity, sweetness. To lose that is to lose an entitlement to all those things. It’s a wound of disconnection and separation from a greater whole. It’s one which to a degree everyone’s familiar with.

When I finally started tending to the separation from my mother – mourning and missing her and remembering the connection I’d known, I found little glimpses of myself, fragments of my nature I’d forgotten about; the girl in the playground who would organise treasure hunts for her schoolfriends and make them giggle. The DJ’s best friend who could light up a dancefloor. The people-lover who is more open and trusting.

That’s the transformational potential of this experience – a greater sense of wholeness and the freedom to be yourself. Childhood grief or adversity resolved is authentic joy and belonging reconnected to. But it can’t be the responsibility of one mother alone to heal. Its a collective responsibility, grassroots and bottom up because we all play a huge role in shaping the identity and the defences kids build around the experience for themselves.

And so this community project is meant for girls and their families that are experiencing the early loss of mothering, however it may have happened. And it’s intention is to connect them locally so they meet their peers and know that they’re not alone.

If I had any advice to give a younger motherless daughter or a son, above all I would tell them that there’s strength in numbers –that they should seek their peers, that sharing their inner world with people their age who get it isn’t something special, that it’s actually integral to their future because they will seek their mother throughout their lives.

I don’t know why my mum died so young. I wish I knew more of her ways. I wonder what we would have been like as women together and who I’d have become had she lived. But sharing a bit of my own experience is already bringing me reward because there’s power in it.

And if shedding light on the experience is helpful to someone else, it would mean that the difficulties of navigating life without her, wasn’t without meaning and purpose after all.