My favourite photograph of my mother, Linda, and I was taken at my wedding. I’m not sure we realised we were being photographed. Two artist friends were walking around with film cameras, shooting the kind of things they knew that Hiraki, my husband, and I would like. My mother and I are standing shoulder to shoulder, under a young tree. I love how the shapes of our necklines are like a sartorial call and response, how our smiles are so peaceful, how we are both looking outwards.
It’s not that this picture captures a specific moment. Rather, it taps into a certain quality of my mother’s love that is timeless, unbound by circumstance or context. She has always loved my sister and I exactly like this: gently, spaciously and alongside.
Because I’ve lived in a different country from her for longer than we lived together, her voice on the phone and the way she says things are a massive part of how I have experienced that love throughout my adult life. She has several phrases she always says, which feel like facets of the same well-polished gem. She tells me to keep short accounts – that is, to forgive easily. If I’m down (she always knows before I’ve told her), she tells me that it’s just a temporary loss of perspective. She often insists that I buy myself some flowers and “smell the daisies”.
These are different ways of reminding me to breathe, I think. To still my thoughts, or heart, and remember that I’m loved in a way that weighs as much as whatever heartbreak, life stress or exhaustion I’m experiencing might weigh. Hers and my father’s love and faith cannot be undone. So when she’s telling me to breathe, she’s also reminding me to pray – and she’s saying that prayer will be like coming home. There’s something deeply ecclesiastical at work in her words. Eternity really has been set in her heart. It has shaped how she has taught the world to me.
For sure, being told to breathe when I’m seething or feeling desperate can be infuriating. But when I look at this picture, I can feel exactly why, eventually, the core of her advice to me rings like a glass bell, clear and true. It’s because she has never not been there. My father, too. They have, with that consistency that child psychologists say children need most, always simply stood by my side, even if on different continents, encouraging me to live, in love, outwardly.
“So beautiful the lungs / are breathless. The hand remembers: / I was a wing.” I read those lines, by the Polish poet Aleksander Wat, from a poem called Songs of a Wanderer, this week and loved how they chime with my mama’s words. Take a beat, she says. Breathe. Remember who you are. You’ll feel the wind on your face, even when whatever you’re going through makes being airborne seem impossible.
