Net Carries Water

By | 1 May 2020

Personal note # 1
My everyday disposition is melancholy.

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What I am doing?
James Pennebaker, a leading researcher in the field of therapeutic writing says, ‘When people write about major upheavals, they begin to organize and understand them.’
Is this therapy?

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List # 1
Observations of the sweet and mundane ways mothers show their daughters love

  • cut lunches
  • celery sticks and apricot halves
  • warm smiles, eyes crinkling with delight as she looks at her daughter
  • that soft voice
  • the gentle and reassuring touches
  • the enveloping hugs
  • that impenetrable space of belonging between them both
  • her fierce instinct to protect her child.

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There are advice columns dedicated to the club you join after losing a mother that list common triggers for grief, like nappy commercials, Mother’s Day sales, seeing a mother and kid at the park, and I can’t join their club. I asked the screen as I scrolled, ‘How do you grieve for the loss of something you never had?’

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When my sister asked if I’d visit Mum I said, ‘No.’

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List # 2
What I didn’t tell her

  • I needed the geographical distance from Mum’s all-consuming, unyielding denial of me
  • I’d moved to the other side of the country to stop smelling Mum’s perfume, hearing Mum’s footfall
  • I’d carved Mum into small two-dimensional pieces in my books to find my own footing, hear my voice
  • ‘Mummy is a soft wall that hurts me.’

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Judith Harris says, ‘Stories exist to make order out of chaos, to structure and organize experiences into something separate from the events that first induced painful and chaotic emotions.’ Can I excise this experience?

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In the months following my sister’s call, I felt trapped within an accordion: time, space, thoughts, memories, contracted and expanded. I would often swell like a fat balloon of emotions, unable to name a single one. In the mirror, I saw the sparkle in my right eye fading and asked if there is a tiny sun in each person’s eye, a spark of life from our birth parents? Would the sun in my right eye burn out when Mum died? Are orphans’ eyes dull?

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Personal note # 2
When I am having a bad day I cry (with such futility) for my mummy.

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GRIEF noun \ ˈgrēf \

  • deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement: her grief over her mother’s death? Synonyms – affliction, anguish, heartache, melancholy, sorrow, woe
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