Tag Sister

Three Conversations With My Mother

Kate McCalmont-Woods 4 Comments

Some were surreal, others were sad. Sometimes she was lucid, sometimes she was delirious, sometimes it was morphine. Three in particular have lodged themselves in my memory. My logical brain tells me that she wasn’t herself, that her brain chemistry was all over the place, trying to cope with the enormity of it all.

It’s just that the last conversation I had with her, was the last.

I suppose I could talk about them to someone, together with the rest of it, but I’m not sure the spoken word will work: the words will come out of my mouth and vibrate through the air to enter someone else’s head. Then they are gone. I need a more substantial, tangible way of dealing with them, through the written word and imagery. I need to be able to confront them, physically.

I’ve had some inner conflict as to whether I should publish the image in which her face is visible; when she was ill and at her most vulnerable. This was a woman who dragged herself through the house, after breaking her leg, in order to phone for my sister to come over and make her look presentable before calling for an ambulance. She was a very private person. But she is no longer here. If it helps me come to terms with it, I think she would be ok with it. My sister’s on board – she reads this blog. She has her own conversations.

Three Conversations With My Mother No 1, Montotype on A4 Cartridge Paper

Three Conversations With My Mother No 2, Monotype on A4 Cartridge Paper

Three Conversations With My Mother No 3, Monotype on A4 Cartridge Paper

I don’t need to reflect on them. I don’t want to reflect on them. Not yet.

Reflecting on Resentment II

Kate McCalmont-Woods 3 Comments

I’ve rewritten this post so many times. It has become progressively shorter. Sitting back and reflecting, I can see what is important. The first version was just a rant.

In late 2022, my mother was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. No treatment was offered. At best she had 6 months left. Her GP had messed up. The hospital messed up. My sister and I cared for her full-time. It was the worst, and darkest period of my life.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Six months to live? Well, we could go places and make the most of it, create some new memories. But she was already too weak. Instead, the memories I have of that time seep into my mind when it’s not thinking of something else, usually before I go to sleep; then I can’t go to sleep and I sit up alone in the kitchen turning it all over, reliving it. Nothing makes it feel any better.

My mother died at home in the spring of 2023, three days before her 85th birthday. I cannot say with any honesty that she experienced quality of life in those last months. She was waiting to die, and I was just watching her gradually turn into a skeleton.

I resent that medical professionals have failed my family, not just in respect of my mother, but also my father – I made formal complaints in both instances – lessons will be learnt, apparently – but this has done nothing to ease my resentment.

I resent that because she was old, my mother was effectively written off.

I resent that everything was such a battle and I had to spend so much time chasing and making sure things were done.

I resent that there are old people in hospital who are overlooked, and who don’t have a voice or someone to speak up for them.

I resent that my sister and I were left to deal with everything, both before and after my mother’s death.

I resent that in the last few months of my mother’s life the days were short, and the nights were long.

I resent that those last few precious months were stolen from me.

I resent that the last words my mother spoke to me were when she wasn’t herself.

But, most of all, I resent the resentment that I feel: it’s preventing me from moving on.

The Invasive Sibling

Kate McCalmont-Woods Leave a comment

My daughter turns 21 next year and my husband and I have decided to throw a bash not only to celebrate her birthday but also some milestone ones of our own which have gone by not properly celebrated.

I was chatting to my daughter the other day about the fact that my brother, who lives in Belgium, has declined the invitation. I explained to her that I felt really quite upset because the last time I had seen him was when we interred my mother’s ashes in April this year and before that, at her funeral in May last year.

My daughter is not one to get into emotional discussions, despite (or maybe because) she is studying for a psychology degree, and in response she informed me that I shouldn’t worry about not seeing him because he’s inside me. Inside me? Yes, she informed me as I tried to quell the rising tide of nausea – when he was born he left some of his DNA behind in the womb and that then ended up in me.

Microchimerism, it’s called – I looked it up. It means the presence of a small number of cells in an individual that have originated from another individual and are, therefore, genetically distinct.

As I understand it, on my very limited research, when a baby is in the womb the umbilical cord can act as a two-way street – the mother’s cells travel to the baby, and vice versa, so that some foetal cells can remain in the mother, even if the baby is not subsequently born. As they are effectively stem cells they can travel to parts of the mother’s body and grow as other cells eg cardiac cells (so the baby is forever part of the mother’s heart) or they can hang around and become part of future offspring. From what I can tell, the research has mainly been in terms of cells left by male babies, as it is easier to distinguish rogue Y chromosomes in the mother’s body, however, it is generally thought that it equally applies to female cells and that female babies may leave more cells behind than male babies. This process can play a part in autoimmune diseases and also the sex of the baby may influence the development of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. All exciting stuff!

I was talking to my sister about it and the possibility of expressing this by making something akin to a set of Russian dolls with her as the outside one, and my brother and me on the inside – she wasn’t keen. I fear that our conversation may have been a contributing factor to her dream that night in which she was being chased by an artist who wanted to possess her body!

Sisters

Kate McCalmont-Woods 2 Comments

“A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. My mother is my best friend. My husband is my best friend. No. True sisterhood, the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb, were pushed screaming through identical birth canals, is not the same as friendship. You don’t choose each other, and there’s no furtive period of getting to know the other. You’re part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord – tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential – and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”

‘Blue Sisters’, by Coco Mellors

I stumbled across this passage whilst I was having a mooch in Waterstones on Saturday. It cuts right to the heart of what it is to be a sibling. I find the imagery particularly strong – the inhabited space of the womb, growth and development, umbilical cord, connection. Lots of food for thought.

‘The Two Fridas’, Frida Kahlo 1939 (oil on canvas)

On the subject of thinking, this image above has been floating around in the back of my head whilst I’ve been contemplating my role as a sibling, and as a mother, but more on the latter some other time. In this painting, Kahlo’s traditional identity is connected by an artery from her complete heart to the heart of her modern identity which has been torn apart by her divorce from Diego Rivera. I find it a very powerful image: full of pain and conflict, but, at the same time, resilience. It’s already informing some ideas for a piece of work.

I’ve been experimenting with pressing charcoal drawings onto a gelatine plate and then printing – the archival quality it produces is interesting – and also applying paint onto the plate randomly. It was all done in a bit of a rush as I suddenly thought: less thinking, more doing. I didn’t find the process satisfying: the colours are really unappealing and murky – in fact they are just varying shades of grey. I’ve been meaning to try this process for sometime now, since I saw it on a facebook reel, so I was really quite excited at the outset but I ended up feeling underwhelmed – the subtleties inherent in charcoal are totally lost. Maybe starting with a cross-section of an unlovely umbilical cord inadvertently set the tone, but my quickie self-portrait certainly expresses how I felt!

So, here’s the bad and the ugly…