T The Last Link in the Chain

This morning, while walking the dogs with my partner on the way to my shop, this is how we usually dispatch the morning walk before the day begins, I found myself reflecting on my upbringing.

How dismissed I felt most of the time. How profoundly alone.

My thoughts drifted, as they often do now, to the relationship between my mother and my grandmother. I thought of my poor Nan, who later in her life, as she became more dependent, became a burden in my mother’s eyes and was treated horribly for it.

The shift in my mother was striking, and yet entirely predictable to anyone who understood the pattern.

As soon as my grandmother could no longer care for herself independently, as soon as the balance of power tipped and my Nan became the one who needed looking after, my mother’s behaviour turned volatile.

It was as though the dependency itself had flicked a switch in her.

She was no longer the daughter. She was the mother again, and she mothered my grandmother the only way she knew how, which is to say badly, impatiently, with resentment simmering beneath care.

And watching it from the outside , I recognised something that turned my stomach.

The impatience, the volatility, the barely concealed resentment of being needed, it was not new.

She had treated us children in exactly the same way.

The same sighing exasperation, the same fury at being relied upon, the same ability to make you feel that your very existence was an inconvenience she had not signed up for.

The feelings that were created by my grandmother’s dependency had simply revealed what had always been there, the same raw, unprocessed wound, reaching out in every direction, striking whoever was closest and most vulnerable.

First her children. Now her own mother.

But then I thought of my mother, how she herself was treated by my grandmother when she was small.

And I saw it clearly, this awful, turning wheel.

Generation after generation, the same wound passed down in different hands.

The very dynamic that had damaged my mother as a child was now reversed and replayed, and it did my grandmother no good at all.

To be old, to be ill, to be frightened, and to find yourself back in the hands of someone who handles you the way they themselves were once handled, that is a particular kind of cruelty, even when it is not deliberate.

Then I thought of all my ancestors.

Women who were not mother material, who never truly wanted to be mothers and were never any good at it, but whom society and its rigid norms forced to breed regardless.

They did not know, how could they have known, that somewhere down the line, a woman like me would arrive and inherit the accumulated weight of every one of them, seven-fold.

Their unresolved grief, their unloved existence, their quiet desperation, all of it compounding, gathering mass with each generation, until it landed squarely on my and my sister’s shoulders.

And here I am, trying to walk with a straight back, doubling over beneath the misery of every women who came before me in my line, wondering for years why my life felt as though it were sliding endlessly downhill.

Nobody placed the right tools in my hands in time. Nobody warned me, ‘B, this will be hard, you must be careful, you must set the weight down before it crushes you.’

I had no tools because they had no tools. Just blood and suffering and toiling, pretending at family whilst they themselves barely survived.

My grandmother is free of this chain now. Free for ever, or at least until her next life. And I hope, when she returns to this Earth, she will have the choice and the clearer understanding to decide for herself whether to bring children into the world or not.

Even though I know that without all this suffering, I would probably not exist, I think I would prefer not to exist at a price like this.

Perhaps that realisation, half-conscious, half-instinct, is what led me to decide fifteen years ago, in my early twenties, that I would not continue my bloodline.

It will end with me.

Every ounce of suffering I have carried will come with me to the grave and be buried alongside me.

All the agonising depressions, all the unloved years, all the endless, turning cycles of unhappiness and regret, they will be laid with me into the soil and become one with the earth.

Finished. Dissolved. Gone.

And even though I have never been maternal, there is a love in this decision too, a fierce, protective love for another human being who does not yet exist and never will exist by me.

Because I love that unborn soul enough not to hand them this inheritance.

I love them enough not to be wanting to be saved by them.

I love them enough not to need them to fill a void, to heal a wound, to justify my existence or give my suffering a purpose.

They owe me nothing. Not even their being.

I love them enough to spare them what I was never spared.

That, I believe, is the most selfless thing a woman in my line has ever done.