My Mother and The Sea
Do you remember the first time you realised your parents weren’t perfect? When something in you finally separates from them and you see them through the eyes of the disillusioned?
I do.
When I was a tiny child, my mother was beautiful, perfect. I remember her eyes as shining emeralds and her hair as beaten silver and my father would brush it for her every night. I remember her voice - she sang like an angel, lullabies with strange haunting melodies, that hung in the air like Christmas bells. I remember her kindness, her gentleness. I remember how much I loved her. And I remember when I first hated her. It was at the school sports day and I wanted her to run with all the other mothers in the egg and spoon race, but all she could do was sit at the side of the field in her chair with her lame legs wrapped in that green blanket. That was the first time.
They met in Cornwall, my father and she, and he brought her to live with him in the Northern mining town where I was born. But she pined for the salt air and the surf so much and so I would draw her pictures of the sea and they seemed to cheer her up when she was ill. She was so often ill.
When the mines closed down, my father said he was taking my mother home to live in her beloved Porthmegaven. He would find work, he said, anything would do so long as my mother was happy again. I did not want to go there. I did not want to live by the sea. I did not want to leave our large house and my school and my friends and once again I hated my mother for being weak and ill, and I hated my father for taking me away from my smooth green hills to sharp, craggy Cornwall with its salty breezes.
We moved into a small cottage by the seam of the sea. I closed my curtains against the hush of the waves. I was not moved by the beauty of the bright moon framed like a picture in my little square window which was set in the roof. I did not want to be there, in my mother’s rocky birthplace. I pined for my home, just like my mother had pined for hers. When I was tucked in at night in my tiny bedroom, I knew my father would wheel her outside where she could listen to the sounds of the sea and feel the cool spray on her face, but I did not let myself think of her pleasure above my own more important feelings.
I do not know when it happened, only that it did - I fell in love with the cottage in Porthmegaven. I grew to savour the salt air fresh in my face and the sand in my toes and the way the embracing wind rushed at me from across the sea. I would lie in bed and watch the moon through my little roof window, round and silver like a coin, caught in a fisherman’s filigree net of misty cloud. I loved it when the sky was blue and the water calm. I loved it when the waves rose as high and grey as the storm clouds above it. I deserted my colouring books for the outdoors and my mousy locks changed to silver gold, a perfect fusion between my father’s sunny locks and my mother’s moon-shiny hair. She never seemed to be ill in Porthmegaven. The change in her health was almost miraculous, although the miracle did not extend to healing her poor withered legs that lay limp and helpless beneath the wool blanket.
I found out their secret before they told me. One still night the sound of their laughter carried through the air, through my small square open window and I awoke and stole outside to see them swimming like children in the warm waves. My mother moved like a sleek, elegant ribbon around my father, disappearing underneath the brine and surfacing behind to tease him again, and he reached out trying to catch her splashing tail, which flashed long and silver-green, gilded by the moonlight.
My mother would never reach those standards of perfection of my early days, but her imperfections brought her firmly back to her old place in my heart. My beautiful mother, who danced in the salt waters of the sea with the grace of a thousand earthbound ballerinas. And never again did I wish for her to be one of those mothers who tripped and stumbled over the fields in those clumsy egg and spoon races of my schooldays…
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