My mum and me.

This next chapter is for both of us.

Today I am older than my mother. I have lived longer without her than with her.

It’s been interesting to think about how relationships can continue to deepen, even when someone is no longer here. There’s a depth of understanding, relating, and witnessing of my mum that only emerged through the unfolding of my own life.

When I left for college at 17 and moved across the world, I finally understood what it had meant for her to do the same. My mother made the bold decision to leave England close to the same age. She paid £10 to board a ship alone and head to Australia with a job and housing lined up as part of the package. It was the tail end of a wave of migration intended specifically to increase the white population of Australia.

As I found love and made my home in the US, I understood her choice and also the loss that is a part of building a life so far away from family. In 1970 my mother met a dashing Indonesian man, himself in Australia for university. They married, had kids, moved to Jakarta. She made a life in a place that was vastly different than what she had known. She committed to that life completely.

We both had big ruptures in our life when we turned 45. Hers was a serious health crisis - lung cancer. Mine was a loss that dismembered all I thought to be secure and safe. Something in my mother, and in turn in my own bones, meant that we both galvanized that rupture to return to ourselves with urgency and love. In the next few years before we each turned 50, we had found clarity, tenderness, and a new fierceness. My mum started to do Reiki and to do art. I started to listen more closely to myself and to also make art. We both knew we wanted to live a life on our own terms and so we began to make it so.

I don’t know what happens next in my mum’s story. It got cut short.

But I feel like part of the excitement and hope that I have for this next decade is for the both of us. I get to keep living the life she was just beginning to create. It is all new territory from here.

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