The long nights before Christmas
By: Iris Pope
Tags: Mothers, Toxic Parents, Mental Health, Christmas, Family

After months of no contact, she tried calling me last night, my mother — at 4.37 am, which must have been around 10.30 her time. Either she forgot the time difference, or a sense of urgency outweighed her better judgment about waking me in the middle of the night. As the phone was on silent, I didn’t answer, so she left me a short message: I love you and I’m sorry our relationship is so terrible. I’ve always loved you but

I failed.

It’s the extra spaces that get me, not only a pause before a devastating conclusion, but also the suggestion that she first wrote something else, then thought better of it.

She wouldn’t have told my father she was calling me, as he would have tried to stop her. She doesn’t want to talk to us, he would have said, or It’s the middle of the night in England. But she’s always been a sneaky one, my mother, sneaky but obvious, like a naughty child, watching people with a beady, avian eye, calculating exactly what she can get out of you, but somehow also so openly, nakedly vulnerable. I imagine she was curled up in bed when she called, propped up on the pillows with her iPad against her knees. My dad would have been moving through the house, clearing the final dishes away, listening to music, closing the sliding doors to the garden.

Funnily enough, or maybe completely predictably given the outsized amount of space she takes up in my subconscious, I was dreaming of her last night. I was in a video game where I was constantly being shot at, and was struggling to reload my weapon, low on ammunition or fumbling the bullets. The game was in a house that was filled to the rafters with cabinets that were thick with dust and sticky with grime, and were stuffed with objects from my childhood, paperwork and toys, pictures and old knick knacks. I was sifting through the flotsam and jetsam trying to find something worth keeping. She was there too, ordering fried chicken from someone, speaking in Chinese.

I don’t know what to do with this message. It’s a plea, an apology that’s years too late, and an entreaty to let her in. It’s a sign that she’s willing to prostrate for readmission into my life, but I don’t want prostration, I want change. I feel like I should choose carefully how to respond, that this could pave the way for a better relationship, for forgiveness, for the end of that jagged grief that ribbons through my days. But another part of me thinks that this is a fallacy, that she’s letting the power temporarily shift in my favour to bring me back into the game, but that the game is rigged.

And really, it’s suspicious how this message was sent 2 days before Christmas, and how it succeeded in making me cry before 9am, the dog anxiously thumping her tail at me while I uselessly held the phone.

At almost forty (ever since I’ve turned 38, it’s just almost forty), I’m too old to still believe I have any say in changing the outcome of this relationship, the course of which was set years ago. Yet I still yearn for her. It’s the yearning that connects us, really: two women, one entering and one exiting middle age, fatigued by month nine of a global pandemic, both facing Christmas alone in their own ways, both dreaming of a missing home.