A Second Unedited Page From My Journal

The Vulnerability Chronicles Part 2

Welcome or welcome back! Series three, episode five of A Writer’s Life! If you’d like to hear me read this, then click below: (Music by FASSounds and Music_For_Videos from Pixabay.)

4 minute read

Music by Oleksii Kaplunskyi from Pixabay

The smell has faded 
from the scarf she wore 
but your warm hugs linger 
the sound of your soft voice 
a memory echo now 
but your kind words remain 
the warmth of your smile 
no longer brightens the room 
but the glow of 
your love remains 
your charm 
your grace 
your thoughtfulness 
your generosity 
your sense of fun 
your love touched so many 

I miss you 
so much 

mum.

*written when I had a cold and I just wanted my mum 

From my book Warrior Wisdom Sun. It seems to fit this post.

This is part two of a three-part series with me diving deep and uncovering what has influenced me in the way I present to the world and how I feel about myself. As many of you may know, much of this comes from our childhood. I wrote about my dad last time so it only seems fair that I write about my mum now.

Mum and me aged 6 months

What a wonderful woman! Everyone loved, respected and admired her. She really was a bright light in the world. My dad passed in 2009 and my mum passed in 2015. In the last few days of my mum’s life, I experienced what seems to be a whole timeline of her precious contribution. My mum had been unwell for a while. Following a blood test, our GP had Mum admitted to hospital. They did a scan and she was diagnosed with cancer. Eleven days later, she was gone from us.

Eleven days. I am the last remaining child for my mum. I had two older brothers but they have both passed away. One died in 1991, along with his three young children, when I was only 18. The other died in 2006. Yes, I am familiar with bereavement. Eleven days to say goodbye. Everyone wanted to say goodbye. At one stage there were about 17 people in Mum’s room. People came all day every day and I had to be the perfect host, perfect daughter, perfect everything.

Can you see where I’m going here? My mum was amazing and I have always tried to live up to that. She also had very high expectations. I can understand why. Mum had left home and travelled to a foreign country to make a life for herself and the children she would have. It was the Windrush generation and to say it was hard would be an understatement. My peers and I were all taught at a very young age that we would have to work harder, be better and never accept less if we were going to make it in this life and in this country where we had been ‘othered’. We were Black, after all.

I was a straight-A student at secondary school (age 11-16) for the first few years. I brought home a report card that had all As and one B. Mum was not pleased. She wasn’t unkind about it and didn’t shout but she did expect an explanation. I remember being confused about why she had focussed on the grade B when everything else was an A. The B was for effort in music (I mean, really?). Perhaps Mum was hoping I would be a concert pianist. (She did make me have piano lessons when I was younger.) But this was a lesson I learnt. A persona I had taken on. Focus on what didn’t go well. What wasn’t right. What could have gone better. Forget about what you did do well.

Me aged 11

And so the perfectionist and people pleaser was born, or evolved. To this day, I can recall a sponsored spelling test that we did at school. It was thirty words. I got the highest score in the whole school. Was I happy? No. I scored 29/30. I should have gone with my first instinct and not put the letter g three times in the word ‘beginning’. I knew it didn’t look right. But you can imagine the pressure I had put on myself.

I have no memories of my mum being unkind. She had a look though, that was present when she wasn’t happy about something or more appropriately - didn’t approve. That suggests judgement and perhaps criticism to some extent. Hello to my own self-criticism and judgement!

I find it interesting that no matter how much we love our parents, how well they treat us and how much they love us, they can still leave us with certain less than positive traits. I am so grateful for both of my parents. I am also grateful that, with support, I have been able to explore, uncover and understand where some of my programming has come from. I am working hard on it. I wouldn’t have been able to do that without knowing the source first.

Mum and me aged 34 (?)

I am whole. I am totality. I am still working on embodying and living this. Truth can be hard but unless we live it, we miss out on all we can be. And all we can have.

---

Next time, the final in this series (and subseries), I’ll be reflecting on celebrating what I have overcome, sharing how I’ve moved forward and maybe considering what’s next!

More from me here: https://linktr.ee/Writingforlight