When people assume you have a mother

A guest post from Kezia Rice... and some memories from my university days

Hi everyone, I’m sending this newsletter a little early this week, as I’m off to Glastonbury! Then I’ll be off for a fortnight, as I have another festival AND a deadline for some paid work. I’d love to be able to put more time into this newsletter, so please do consider becoming a paid subscriber, or just share Crocuses In The Snow with a friend, that also really helps.

(I have also used festival time to explore grief… like the time I went to a death cafe at a music festival. You can read that here.)

If you’re new here, hello! Welcome! I have over 200 pieces, all exploring different angles of grief, in the archive, I keep all articles discussing grief free to read, as I think it’s so important for these discussions to be accessible, which is why I need to hustle a little harder for paid subscribers without pay-walls helping me out.

Right, on with the newsletter. First is an intro from me, before a beautiful written piece and poem by Kezia Rice.

(me, just before going to university)

I had no idea how young I was. I was a 21-year-old Fresher, two or three years older than my peers, at an age when years felt like decades. I had also absorbed the message that grieving should last six-months, to a year, tops.

I’d taken three years out: one for travelling, back when my mum was alive, then just under a year taken to care for her and, finally, one to ‘deal’ with my grief. It was, I told myself, enough. It was not enough. There is no time limit on grief. But… I didn’t know that back then.

What I did ‘know’ was my maturity. That tequila slammers wipe away pain (temporarily.) That all parents eventually die, so the fact that my mum was dead, that really wasn’t a big deal, no, no, not at all. I tried to convey this with jokes, dropping in her death, in a way I thought was casual but was, in fact, way too loud. I remember, early on, in a beer garden, another student looking me dead in the eye and saying “you really shouldn’t make jokes about that.” What else was I meant to do? Cry? Did he have any idea how boring that was? How much time I’d wasted on gut-wrenching, agonising, I-can’t-breathe sobs? When I could have been here, in a beer garden, with other people my age, laughing and drinking and flirting and all the things you’re meant to do in your early 20s?

I joked because I could not bear to feel anything else. This is so often what people do, particularly in the early stages of grief, we arrange our faces into something resembling a smile. Left cheek up, right cheek up, we role play as normal. Not just because it’s expected of us (which it so often is) but also because it’s the only option. If we allow ourselves to crumble, we might disintegrate. I felt like if I let the sadness in, it would engulf me.

When I launched this newsletter, I wanted to create a space where everyone could open up about the realities of grief. Particularly the unspoken ones, perhaps the ones that made them feel ashamed. I don’t believe anyone should feel ashamed of how we grieve, but the reality is: we do. The only thing that stops us from feeling ashamed is learning that others have gone through similar, that others feel similarly.

Kezia, who writes so beautifully below, got in touch with me via my Instagram, wanting to share her story. Reading her words opened up some memories, of those early days at university and how, when you lose a parent young, your (as she writes) ‘identity is formed by absence.’ We’re trying to carve out who we are, trying on different personalities for size, but, unlike most of our peers, we already have this defining quality, a quality that reminds us daily, of our darkest days.

I wasn’t mature, I was only just beginning to grow. But I didn’t know that. So I coped the best way I could, to survive, I made jokes and I offered up my pain on a platter, before anyone else could harm me with it. Kezia learned to do the opposite, and held her grief to herself, privately and tightly. On

CAFÉ ANNE

recently, I learned that there’s two types of conversationalists – ‘volunteers’ and ‘invite onlys.’ Coach Hailey Magee says “"Volunteers share information about themselves without having to be asked first," she says. "Invite-onlys only feel comfortable talking about themselves if they've been asked a question."

This is fascinating to me, and definitely explains my own personal communication style (I’ll drop in an excruciatingly embarrassing story about myself, rather than sit in silence) but I also wonder if it could apply to some elements of the grieving process? This isn’t me trying to therapise, or come up with a ‘solution’ but just simply pondering the different ways we find to learn to live with our grief. This newsletter is a place for us to explore them together. Which is why I’m so pleased to be sharing Kezia’s piece and poem below, and please do let us know if you relate – what survival tactics did you learn? Are there some that worked back then, but no longer work now? Let us know in the comments.

And please do support Kezia’s work… her poetry can be found on YouTube and Instagram and her pamphlet is available to buy via Instagram DM.

Website: keziarice.com YouTube: @keziarice Instagram: @kezrice

When people assume you have a mother, by Kezia Rice

Photo by Ilya lix on Unsplash

The first time it happened, I was in a tiny room, surrounded by sewing machines. I had found myself, caught up in the new-found informality of calling a university lecturer by her first name, describing a rash that had spread across my right calf. 

Every person in the room was silent. I was new to them; they were new to me. “Oh, that looks like you’re allergic to your laundry liquid,” my lecturer said. “What kind is it? Just call your mum and ask her what type she uses at home. Maybe she can send a parcel for you.”

I didn’t know how to answer. I was unable to say the truth but unable to skirt around it. If I spoke my voice would crack, and the grief I was holding just below the surface would be revealed. My peers were all looking at me and I couldn’t compute the life this lecturer thought I lived, which was so far removed from reality. 

The reality was I did my own laundry even when I lived at home. The reality was, that was the way it had been since my mum had died one year before. I was frozen there, too stunned to find an answer, until the lecturer clapped her hands and moved the conversation on.

Until that moment in my costume design university seminar, I’d never had someone just casually assume I had a mother. Most people I encountered in my hometown already knew of my mum and knew that she’d died. My teachers took care of telling my year group, ensuring I could slip back into lessons like nothing had happened. They also assured me that they’d told my chosen university and it never crossed my mind that the pastoral care I’d receive there wouldn’t be as comprehensive as it had been at school. But either my forms were never read or the correct people weren’t told or maybe, having a parent die at the age of seventeen wasn’t considered worth mentioning. But throughout my three years at university, I had to endure the mutually excruciating process of explaining to every lecturer with whom it came up that my mum was not alive like they’d assumed.

It wasn’t just with my lecturers. When making new friends, I’d clumsily attempt to weave this fact of my life into conversation so their assumptions wouldn’t catch me off guard at a moment I couldn’t control. It had been a year since she died. I still felt her absence so strongly. I thought I knew how to be okay without her but now I was living away from my family and closest friends who’d understood the nuances of my grief. All I knew now was that the facts of her death felt like a barrier between me and a new person, like I couldn’t connect with them without first sharing this part of me that was missing. My identity was formed by absence: this gap holding meaning like the space between words; an in-breath in all its truth; the silence that makes itself known before the beat returns again.

Five years after my mum died, I moved to a new country. Feeling anonymous was one of the things I loved the most. In my hometown, I bumped into people I knew every time I left the house; now I was living among millions of strangers, only a handful of whom I’d ever interacted with. When I met new people, family occasionally came up, but I mentioned my dad and stopped there, and they normally got the hint. In the years that had passed since university, grief had eliminated all I had remembered about my mother. I realised I liked it like that, that living without any memory of her was a way to sidestep grief entirely. I now formed my identity without her death attached. Talking about family meant talking about my dad. The other parent? It was like she had never existed at all.

People might think this sounds cruel. That I’ve disrespected my mum’s memory or that she wouldn’t have wanted to be forgotten. They might tell me that although there is no right way to grieve, there are definitely far healthier ones than simply stopping acknowledging the person who has died. But if I never mentioned her name, people realised by themselves not to ask, and I didn’t have to deal with their assumptions. I could be friends with someone for months before my mum’s death came up. I felt close to people without sharing what had once been the biggest part of me. If it’s cruel to eliminate a parent from your life story then I’d rather be a cruel daughter than a sad one. 

I don’t remember much but I remember her holding me as I sat on her lap after school and told her about my day. I remember her bony arms squeezing me and the weight of her thick wool jumpers and her Body Shop night cream smell. When I was sad, she held me like that and made it better. I don’t need to share these memories for our time together to have mattered, when sharing them often feels like my past spearing its way sharply into my present. If the assumptions are too much for me, I don’t think she’d have minded fading away to keep me from hurting. If living like she never existed keeps me from grieving, I don’t think she’d mind at all.

Poem…

Poems should start with memory
but I’m empty of them. End the night
with a dream she took
a taxi away for the last time
I asked her “Are you scared
of dying?”
I woke before she answered.
In the cupboard, a carrier bag
of shells she left. Sea-worn sea-glass
cobalt shifting green my eyes
could be described the same
but she never told me so.
Never said the words “beautiful”
and “you” never wove words
that could snap like that
never let me build myself
out of such fragile wicker
but laughed at every joke
I made. The greatest beauties
the things I created with
my own mind, my own hands
she let me hold a needle at
three years old to learn how
thread is guided. How stitches
are weightless knots sustaining
pools of cloth; I wanted to ask – before
the taxi left to the hospital, her last
breath – “Did you love me
for my whole life?”
I wanted every moment
to be secure
with it.
She didn’t answer.
There was no time left.

From How & Other Poems by Kezia Rice

Website: keziarice.com YouTube: @keziarice Instagram: @kezrice