mother
when you think about your younger self
and i’m talking specifically about those years that you’ve mentioned
those years you’ve repressed
specifically those years you really struggle with
struggle to think about
struggle to connect with
struggle to be present in any shape or form with
those years
picture those
in your mind
picture your body
picture your clothes
your presentation
note how you carry yourself
how you interact with yourself
hold that space
sit with it for a minute
sit with that person
those emotions
can you describe what you’re feeling?
my butch lesbian therapist asks, over a slightly too milky cup of PG tips, at 10 am on a Saturday morning whilst I’m nursing a particularly potent vodka tonic hangover.
I guess I’d start by saying that thinking about my younger self feels like being 4 pints in, staring at the ashy butt of a cigarette I’ve just smoked, a little blurry where it’s been casually flicked into the gutter — staring at it sat there, very materially other to me and my current state, but knowing that all its shit, all it’s tar and toxins and the build-up of all those fags that came before it, are now clinging to my lungs, a repository for years of this shit, despite every weekend swearing this ashy butt will be my last.
uncomfortable, I say.
My mother calls on my walk home.
How’s that cough darling? You don’t sound well. You’re overdoing it again. You should have some raw ginger and garlic. No, not on some pasta. You and your carbs honestly. Do you know what the glycemic index of white pasta is? Full of sugar. Just crush it up with a pestle and mortar. What? You don’t have a pestle and mortar? Fine, a grater will do. Mix it with some hot water and swill it down. And make sure you gargle it.
I hang up, exhausted. Coughing.
Asthma runs in our family. My mother has it and so does my brother. Which makes the smoking all the more masochistic. Mine started pretty young. 4 or 5. The asthma that is.
Most of the time I was fine, but then, out of nowhere, I'd have these attacks. And all of a sudden paramedics would be in the house. Casually popping me on a ventilator. So I wouldn’t die from lack of oxygen.
There’s no disease present. The doctors said. After I’d puffed into this tube and that. In my case, asthma was a convenient diagnosis for what was essentially a capacity issue.
Basically, my lungs were too small for the rest of my body. Underdeveloped. They couldn't process enough air for my greedy muscles.
Our doctor's advice was to take up a wind instrument, you know a trombone, a trumpet, one of the brass variety preferably. Apparently, discipling my breath, learning how to take big gulps in, timed to a beat, followed by strong, controlled exhales, would allow my lungs to strengthen and expand. Over time, and with a great deal of concerted cyphers and tantaras, this would eventually increase their puny capacity.
This was the same doctor who’d told my mother that stuffing her bra with cabbage leaves would cure mastitis. She ended up needing surgery for a breast abscess. I do question why we continued to go to this doctor. Why eyebrows weren’t raised. But, this was the NHS, in rural South Wales, in the 90s. And to be fair, taking up a wind instrument seemed like fairly innocuous medical advice in the grand scheme of things.
*
My mother, I think in many ways, has always viewed me as an extension of her. Her only daughter after all. A term she’s yet to let go of. But what else am I supposed to call you? You’re not a child. You’re 30 years old. I can’t call a 30 year old ‘my child’.
Pictures of us both as children are uncannily similar. The same strawberry-shaped face. Dimples. Freckles. Pigtails. Pinafores. Mum always says I take after my Dad. But remember darling, intelligence is inherited through The Mother. There was a Radio 4 segment about it.
Whether or not this particular claim is grounded in any rigorous science, or whether or not said Radio 4 segment actually exists (after all this statement was said in front of my Father) there’s certainly a long lineage of feminist philosophy, albeit that being of course also a white and heteronormative one, engaged with notions of generational knowledge as passed down through the mother. Specifically through the mother-daughter line.
As Virginia Woolf’s infamous line reads ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women’ 2.
Cute. Sure, until that generational knowledge starts to muddy with generational trauma. What then?
Resisting the urge to fall into the easy liberal feminist trope of ‘speaking for the masses’, a common experience of ‘womanhood’ (or AFAB experience) does seem to be, at some point, coming to wrestle with the idea of yourself as simply a repository for your mother’s shit.
Whilst it might have been cute to compare the vision of me with my mother as a child for everyone else — playing dress up with pinafores and pigtails — as soon as I was cognizant of the gendered associations those comparisons were laden with, say around 4 or 5, I hated it.
I hated all of that performatively girly shit. I hated the summer dresses we had to wear at school. Those shitty blue and white checked ones from Tescos and Asda. I hated the little frills on my white-collar neck school shirts that Mum got me because she thought they were quaint. I hated tights. I hated the little gaps and buckles on my school shoes that somehow gendered them. I hated skorts. Detested anything sparkly. Loathed entirely headbands. Bows. Cardigans and lace trim.
I remember one year, proudly announcing that I would like a denim jacket from Father Christmas. Micheal J. Fox in Back to the Future idyllically affixed in my mind's eye. I can still feel the palpable dismay of my 8-year-old self, on Christmas morning, careering down the stairs. Seeing the jacket-shaped wrapping. Tearing through its seams. Only to sinkingly reveal. The jacket was pink. Isn’t it lovely darling, so feminine. Mum said. I coughed in the corner.
I may not have been versed in Freud yet, but I was astute enough to understand that these aesthetic conditions, even at such a young age, were signifiers for something that ran far deeper than ponytails. I didn’t understand why I looked like that little girl of my Mother’s past self but didn’t feel like her.
There was nothing inherently offensive, from a material perspective, about the lace trim lining my M&S cotton socks, even if it was a little dowdy. It was the politics that was embedded within that material that was the issue. The politics embedded in what that material represented when mapped onto my femaleness. And subsequently, the politics embedded within the kick I got from folding them inside out as soon I was on the school bus.
*
After the potentially questionable clinical advice, the next Saturday, Mum drove me two hours to a second hand brass instruments shop.
I remember climbing out of our purple Ford Galaxy, Mum taking my hand and walking me up to the threshold, where she crouched down to eye level and said, just choose the one that speaks to you the most darling. Mum often favours these profound statements, but, ever the pragmatist, off I popped, to look for a talking trumpet.
There were piles and piles of instruments. The top shelfers sat proudly in a dusty velvet display case at the front of the shop, marked inquire for price. Black and white pictures of famous jazz musicians were propped up behind them, adding to their sense of reverence. There were the mid-rangers lining the walls, sitting precariously but majestically atop bashed in nails. Little hand-scrawled price tags with the year of original manufacture and maker dangled proudly from their tubes. Then, lining the floor along all four walls, were the bargain bins — which, probably to my mother’s delight, I instantly gravitated towards.
These crates were filled with odd bits and bobs, unsalvageable parts, dented and mangled valves, cast-off piccolo trumpets in piles and flugelhorns just a little too weathered for the wall or the display case, spilt out onto the floor. Perhaps I was drawn to their inherent sense of unsalvageability. Their brokenness mirroring my recently diagnosed in-capacities. Or maybe ToyStory was fresh in my mind and I was particularly empathetic towards these cast-off band members.
Atop the bin furthest from the cashier display case, marked ‘misc’, I spotted my prize, a battered little cornet. Sporting a muddy ochre tint, formed from years of handling, it had lost its once golden brassy gloss. It was dented with drop marks on its bell and its valves were thin and worn away. Some of its tubes had clearly been replaced with parts of other instruments, with blobs of silver lining its lead pipe and valve tuning slides. It felt different, like it had been lovingly discarded.
this one. I said.
*
Mum loves music. She played the bagpipes as a child. She still has a pair. Sometimes she gets them out on Burns Night. Just before the veggie haggis is served she’ll squeeze out a spluttery and heavily punctuated rendition of Scotland the Brave which is met by polite claps and Sláinte!
The other 364 days of the year the pipes live in the attic, cohabiting with the dust and power tools.
Some of my favourite childhood memories are of Mum picking me up from nursery. It would just be me and her for the whole afternoon. She’d make me cheesy pasta with Quorn pieces and peas and we’d practice times tables and spelling (which we were both shit at — go figure). Then Mum would throw on my Dad’s old vinyl player. Splish Splash by Bobby Darin. Blue Moon by Billie Holiday. Hound Dog by Elvis Presley. We’d shake our tail feathers in whichever room needed a spruce up that day, me brandishing my kiddy-sized feather duster, Mum the antibac.
It’s hard to give form to that slow realisation, during the creep towards adulthood, that your parents actually had a life before you. I remember thinking that Mum must have lived forever. What was it like in the Victorian era? I asked once without even a hint of sarcasm.
I’m not a parent. So I don't know how much of yourself you compartmentalise when you become one. How much of yourself you lose. It seems like a lot.
Mum recently got out some old pictures to show me and my partner. Wild house parties in the 70s. Skiing holidays in the 80s. Go-go boots and shoulder pads galore. You know darling, Mum said as she flipped through some pictures of what looked like a particularly raucous New Year’s Eve in her early twenties, I haven’t got the faintest idea who any of these people are.
*
Mum drove me to my cornet lesson every Tuesday night. I soon got the hang of the pursed-lip technique. I took to the hand-breath coordination like a natural. I learnt Happy Birthday. Away in a Manger. I Saw Three Ships. Old King Cole. It won’t be long before you’re blowing the house down with Miles Davis darling, Mum said.
I moved through grades 1 and 2 with ease. I joined an orchestra band our neighbour’s kids went to. Mum drove me there on Saturday mornings. All the other kids had new, shiny, top-of-the-range brass, wind, strings and percussion. My battered, discoloured, dented squashed trumpet-like thing stuck out like a sore thumb. The other kids laughed, but I was proud of it. It made a great sound, despite my puny lungs.
We’d always get a cupcake afterwards from the bakery counter in Sainsbury’s. I liked the ones with marzipan animals on top.
But despite the pernicious renditions of Greensleeves, the asthma attacks persisted. Our doctor was not enthused by the progress I was making towards improving my capacity issue.
Your peak flow test results are still not great. Your lungs aren’t increasing in size. Maybe try a tuba instead?
Mum consoled me. It will just take time darling. Keep going. You’re doing great. Your lungs will catch up.
My lungs didn’t catch up.
I passed the benchmarks where they said I’d ‘grow’ out of it. Mum took me to a homoeopath. An osteopath. We tried the Alexander Technique. Reiki. Sound healing. Acupuncture. My peak flow results remained firmly below average. I started carrying an inhaler to school. Puberty hit. I gave up the cornet playing and reluctantly embraced the skorts. I laid down with the idea of becoming a woman that I was given. That my friends were so excited about, that I couldn’t understand.
My tired cornet in its soft case rested under my bed. Gathering the dust that was triggering my lungs.
*
‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’,3 another infamous line with crucial significance for both Western feminism and queer theory, delivered by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex.
Beauviour eloquently summarised, in one quick quip, the long-standing feminist effort to divorce the female body, and female experience, from notions of biological determinism. That is, assigned sex at birth does not preclude gender or gendered assumptions of what one is capable of being or becoming. Hugely important for female liberation, and trans liberation, this notion asserts that fundamentally, having what one perceives to be, or clinically determines to be, a sexed body, in this case a female one, does not necessitate becoming a ‘woman’ in the patriarchal definition of the word. This becoming occurs via culture, socialisation, language, and oppression.
Thinking about this in relation to Woolf’s assertion ‘we think back through our mothers, if we are women’ — it is the conditional ‘if’ that becomes the sticking point. To think back through our mothers then, is conditional on us becoming the Western philosophical definition of ‘woman’ — the version of woman and that pained stereotypical femininity that our mothers are or were constrained by and fought against. The same idea that the female liberation movement has long resisted. The same idea that ironically, many of our mothers wish for us to become.
Jack Halberstam explores this idea in The Queer Art of Failure, drawing on the Beauvoirian feminist framework and inverting it to argue for a form of feminism that is rooted rather in a sense of ‘unbecoming’4.
Halberstam asserts that by ‘refusing to think back through the mother’ we are refusing to ‘become woman as she has been defined and imagined within Western philosophy’. By breaking the hereditary link that forces the daughter (or anyone with an assigned female experience) to co-opt notions of woman that productively engage with heteronormative, reproducible patriarchal power, we are imagining ourselves as an embodiment of more than a repository for generational oppression.
Basically, more than our mothers, and their mothers’, shit.
Halberstam draws on Saidiya Hartman’s pioneering text, Lose Your Mother5 to advocate for this unbecoming feminism — ‘losing one’s mother [...] actually enables a relation to other models of time, space, place, and connection.’ That other also being experiences that aren’t rooted in white, cisgendered, heteronormativism.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently in relation to my capacity issue. My lungs were not reaching their full inhalation potential, the doctors said. All of that blasting out Greensleeves was about increasing their capacity. Conditioning my body, one C major at a time to become — larger, more developed, stronger, controlled. To have the capacity to take in more, absorb more, be more.
But what if my capacity issue wasn’t about needing to become at all. What if it was actually about needing to unbecome.
Or to think about it in less philosophically grandiose terms — to breathe properly, I needed to get rid of some shit.
*
My mother detests smoking. Detest is in fact too soft.
There is no combination of words in the English language, to my knowledge, that can quite communicate the brevity of disgust this woman feels towards smoking. Which is either heavily ironic or perfectly reasonable, considering she used to smoke.
Anyone within 20 metres earshot will hear about it if my mother so much as whiffs the passing gust of a cigarette. I’ve witnessed her shout down smokers outside of train stations, wear a balaclava to a beer garden, storm out of restaurants and cross streets, all over so much as a single fag.
One time she found a loose cig in my cardigan pocket. She didn’t speak to me for 3 weeks. With your lungs, really? After all of those renditions of Greensleeves?
I’d first started smoking when I was 16, having long given up on improving the capacity issue. this was around the same time that I was doing anything and everything I could think of to feel anything at all. I began to become drawn to anything that mirrored my own brokenness, my own inherent sense of unsalvageability. It’s hard thinking about that person, the partying, the recklessness, the point where youthful hedonism gave way to nihilism, the lack of care they had for themselves. the lack of love.
Those years 16-19 are the worst. Blurry to the point of indiscriminate, chunks of timeline are disassociated from memory. Bitten off and spat back out into the space-time continuum.
I’ll never forget the phone call I made, the night the suicidal ideation reached its peak. Mum, I can’t stop thinking about hurting myself.
Mum drove 6 hours to collect me.
*
Mum quit smoking with a somewhat unusual method. For one month, she placed every fag end that she’d smoked into a jar of water. After a months supply of fags (fuck knows how big this jar was) she sealed the lid and watched the toxins dissipate into the increasingly blackening water. Everytime she craved a cig from there on out, she’d look at the jar, or picture it, and imagine all that shit sticking to her lungs.
Albeit unconventional, the jar method was effective. Mum hasn’t had as much as a drag since. Not so much the result of the method, but more, I think, because of the strength of her stubbornness.
If my mother decides to do something, I'll be damned darling, she’ll do it.
It’s interesting that I quit smoking (save that occasional weekend delight) by unknowingly adopting the same method. I was living in a house shared with 3 other people and was the only smoker. We had a postage stamp garden that was never used apart from my evening light-up. At the end of the tenancy, I went out there to sweep up, for the first time in the daylight. Hundreds of cigarette butts littered the floor, oozing away in probably an inch thick of sticky black gunk. The immediate visual was enough to kick the habit cold turkey, shut the door and accept the deposit reduction.
I didn’t know at the time, but suicidal ideation is a perfectly normal response to extreme distress. In my case, the distress of performing a version of myself, a version of woman, that was anything but biologically determined.
It’s this same shit, oozing on the back step, that comes to mind when I think about that younger self. Those years of breathing in the context of what was expected. The osmosis of those projected versions of becoming. Maybe one day I’ll be able to write something that talks about excavating all of that shit, or at least learning how to breathe a little easier with it.
For now it’s enough to simply recognise that those fag ends exist. To appreciate that those past selves didn’t have the capacity to understand, despite their draw to the ‘misc’ section of instrument shop.
*
The weather is turning now. It’s getting colder, the air drier. My chest always flares up this time of year.
My mother calls on my walk home.
Hi darling,
did you listen to the Radio 4 segment I sent you?
Notes
- Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of One’s Own, Hogarth Press, London
- Beauvoir, S. (1964). The Second Sex. Penguin Vintage Classics, Reprint 2015, London
- Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, Durham and London
- Hartman, S. (2007). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York