05/10/2026
Happy Mother’s Day! Perhaps you see your mother in a different light—through the lens of decades lived. Sometimes relationships are messy and complicated and we seek to understand who this strange person is who nurtured us (or didn’t).
From © Echoes of Women - Fiona.F.
“…mother starts out as weather. The air, the temperature, the way the room feels when you walk into it. She becomes a separate person later, gradually, and that transition never completely finishes, because you can’t get distance on the thing you were inside of.…mother was the landscape, and you can describe a landscape, but you can’t really know it the way you know a person, because you were never outside of it long enough to see the edges.
…Every time you think you’ve finally seen her clearly, you’re still only seeing one angle of something you were too close to from the beginning. The woman who seemed controlling in your twenties looks terrified by forty-five. The woman who seemed cold looks like she was holding herself together with whatever she had. And then five years later you think, actually, she was controlling, and the terror was real but so was the control, and both things were true, and the fact that you can’t settle on one version is maybe the most honest thing about the whole relationship, or maybe it’s just exhausting, and you can’t always tell the difference.
…We get glimpses. We see her sitting alone in the kitchen after everyone’s left, doing something for herself, and we think, oh, she was a person this whole time. And then we lose it again and she’s back to being the person who did or didn’t do enough. The woman who existed for you and the woman who existed for herself keep interfering with each other.
Maybe understanding your mother is one of those things that doesn’t have a clean end. You just stop revising for a while, sometimes for years, and then you’re at a funeral or washing a dish or walking past a shop she would have liked, and you find yourself doing it again, rearranging it all again. Sixty years in and you’re still at it. That probably isn’t going to change.”
