Being raised by a hopeless mother did my children a great deal of good — that is my own entirely unearned claim.

Hopeless mother × loving yourself = children who grow

A law I made up on the spot.

We built a relationship of doing what you can, when you can.
Which sounds rather fine put like that.

My life has been unruly — too free. Ten-odd years ago I announced that I was resigning as a wife, and resigning as a mother too, and chose a life in which the family came apart.

“I wish you had been a normal mother.” That was the teenage years.
“I’m glad you weren’t a normal mother.” That was at twenty.

And now my two sons are twenty-seven and twenty-five.

Even so, parent and child, family — these are bonds you cannot cut, tied together by love.
Not normal, but more fun and more full of laughter than normal: the best relationship there is. That is my pride.

The boys are each independent, and each has what they want to do respected.

Each thinks of the others when it is needed,
each properly enjoys their own life,
and each cheers the others on with everything they have.

We are a hands-off household, but with their mother’s cancer I let myself say: look after me, would you. Do this. Do that. Child and parent swapped over.

Leaning on your children is not a bad thing. Rather than “I am the mother so I must hold it together”, or “a mother has to be this way”, you show the weak parts too, exactly as they are.

Better that than a family that looks correct from outside and is thin on the inside. I stand by it: this was right after all. And the illness made a new bond between parent and child,
and made us talk. That was good too.

I even asked him to look after the scar once I was home.
How a young man who is not yet married takes in the scar where his mother’s breast used to be — even so,
this is his mother as she is.

Falling ill makes you notice a great deal.
So rather than resenting the illness so much, it is worth looking for what you can be glad of because of it.
I was given time to think about myself here, now, and about myself dying and going over to the other side.
Because I fell ill, I could think about being ready for a life.

Ready to go to the other side.
And all the wanting we feel here in the real world — for money, for standing, for all sorts of things.
You can let go of clinging to those, too.

Not only when you are ill: even in good health, supposing yourself dead just once
changes what you can see.

It has to be this way, it must be that way —
let go of that once and living gets a little easier on the heart.

People live by being a nuisance to one another.
And every one of us is walking towards death.