Lessons from my mother

I grew up with an unconventional mother- just me and her.  My dad died of cancer when I was seven;  she was just in her mid-thirties. She grieved him for much of the rest of her life. But that is another story.

She really tried her best to stay in the box while I was growing up. She taught at a technical boys’ high school for all the years I was at school, dressing relatively conventionally and wearing her long blonde hair in a bun. She always helped out with the art, costume design and make-up for school plays, and often sewed clothes for me. She was a very creative and exuberant person.

Somewhere around my late teens, she started to change. She became more and more eccentric and took to wearing long flowing clothes and wearing her hair in a long plait. She started taking part in and presenting self-awareness courses; and all sorts of weird and wonderful people starting showing up at our house saying they were sent by God. She gave up teaching completely and started making paper and unicorn art which she sold at craft markets.

We had never had money before, but now it was a scarcity. Friends coming to visit used to bring milk and sugar and somehow we got by from day to day. The housemaid left and our house started to resemble something out of Wuthering Heights. She literally gave up all sense of security and needless to say, the conservative Afrikaans family thought she was going completely bonkers, away with the fairies.

I remember one day trying to talk to her about these changes and how they were upsetting me. We were sitting on my bedroom floor and I was trying to explain to her how hard it was to see my mother change so much and not know why.  I felt so insecure and helpless.

My mother was very calm. She told me to really look at her. She sat opposite me and we looked deeply into each other’s eyes. She asked me then what I saw. Suddenly it dawned on me how happy she was. I realized that in all the time that I had known her, I had never seen her that joyful and fulfilled. I had only been looking on the outside,  just as my grandparents and her siblings had been looking on the outside.

She explained that she had finally been able to drop living up to all the expectations of the people around her, as she had done all her life, and was just following her own path and her own happiness from day to day. She no longer feared the judgements of the world, but lived according to her inner guide and light.

I never worried about my mother again,  as I realized that my love should give her wings and not hold her in the old patterns that I had grown up with.

I admire her immensely for her courage to set herself free, and live her life to the full.

For me, love is a huge infinite space. A space where I and those I love can soar free, play, and find our own true bliss. Then share that joy in intimate moments together. I thank my mother Hester, for this precious lesson.