The Cat’s Mother by Clive Collins (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Series)

The Cat’s Mother
by Clive Collins

“A quarrelsome woman,” Cousin Phil said
though she was dead by that time, burned, ashes
scattered from some stranger’s hand in a garden
her children would never visit, scattered across
the world as they were themselves.

Well, Cousin Phil was right, she liked a row,
a fight, a barney. She’d rail at relatives, neighbours,
teachers, priests, police; you might add life to the list
for it was that she raged at most, the one she said
circumstance had fashioned for her.

She asked for much of what she got. My Dad,
for instance, the 1916 April Fool, volunteer
Royal Dublin Fusilier, untrained survivor of the scrap
with erstwhile neighbours, then the Somme’s last fling,
whose luck ran out the following spring.

Missing a lung, one leg inches short, he limped through life
without ambition, unlike his wife. “Ever a stop to me,”
she said once he was gone. “I wanted better but not him.”
I knew her dreams: the bigger house, the country pub,
the little village shop.

But losing her first son, Peter Roy, was not her choice.
Ten months old he was when he died. His coffin, claimed
from the hospital, was closed, already screwed down tight.
White, she said it was. Two more girls came after. Comfort?
Consolation? Maybe. Who knows?

My arrival was a shock. At forty-six, thinking herself
done with all the fuss of babies, she swore at the doctor
who told her she was not. Her cussing altered nothing
and at least I was a boy. A second coming? A revenant?
No, another disappointment just.

True, she cuddled, coddled, cossetted, cocooned me,
but belted me as well, threatened me with training ships
and worse. After Dad died, my sisters cut the strings, wed
or fled from home; we were alone. At table, she’d dish up
stories of their sins.

Which were debauchery, ingratitude, abandonment.
I sickened on such fare, grew pale and thin. Fear
was what she fed me, fear of all she felt bested by,
as if this would shape me, make me what she wanted.
But it did not.

Ever conscious of my shortfall, at times I wished
her dead. Still, I wailed the day she was, in hospital,
hours before her discharge, quarrelsome as ever
if not quite to the last. Here, Death had the final say,
not her: myocardial infarction.

I loved her, I did. Just not enough or how she wanted.
Helping put away her things, a plaid half-folded skirt
undid me. I quit the house, the town, as my sisters had,
caught a plane to what was now my home. And drew
the final curtain with a last let-down.

PAINTING: Woman with Anemones by Henri Matisse (1919).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I don’t believe anyone has a simple relationship with their mother. I was left alone with mine from a relatively early age, until I went away to university at 19. Reading helped me begin to unravel the complexities of my relationship with my mother—Shakespeare, Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Lowell—though the unravelling remains a work in progress. It probably always will.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: My mother and me walking together. My father and two of my sisters are also in the photograph. The date would be the early 1950s somewhere in England.

AUTHOR’S PHOTO CAPTION: Some words about the title: at home with our parents, my sisters and I would often be admonished for the repeated use of the gender-specific third person singular pronoun “she,” instead of the name of the person being spoken of by being asked: “And just who is she, the cat’s mother?”  I chose to use this idiomatic expression as the title of the piece because the word “mother” does not appear in it at all.

PHOTO: The author’s mother during the early 1920s.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Born in Leicester, England, Clive Collins has spent the greater part of his life working as a teacher in Ireland, Sierra Leone, and Japan. He is the author of two novels, The Foreign Husband (Marion Boyars) and Sachiko’s Wedding (Marion Boyars/ Penguin Books). Misunderstandings, a collection of short stories, was joint-winner of the Macmillan Silver PEN Award in 1994. More recently, his work has appeared in online journals such as Penny, Cecile’s Writers, The Story Shack, and terrain.org. He was a short-listed finalist in the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.  Carried Away and Other Stories is available from Red Bird Chapbooks. He is a poetry editor with The Sunlight Press.