Time to remember: a portrait of my mother

Abstract

This creative work is a personal response to difficult events. The matter of this work concerns the nature and processes of writing about universal themes of love and loss. It explores ‘Life Writing in Troubled Times’ through processes of storying an intimate and foundational relationship – a relationship which continues to have an active presence in my world and inner life. I am mourning my mother. She has been gone twelve years. Venturing into history, into what this amazing woman gave and has given to me, and as a way of mediating emotional pain, I play with concepts and expressions of time, while excavating deeper stories and past-present-future relationships. For me, and for my mother, writing has had an important role to play in processing life events and the human condition, in processing moments-years-decades of loss …and love. My mother’s own writing has supported a process of witnessing her life and lived experiences. It has offered a ‘protective workspace’ for my own contemplation and writing, magnifying my awareness of relationships and enabling a ‘being with’ and a ‘writing together’ even though she is no longer here (Walsh and Bai 2015: 26). Writing this piece sustains my connection to her in her absence. It offers a place to dwell amongst generational and everyday stories, the fragments that are known, read, or overheard. And, it creates new spaces – authentic, honouring, embodied, and generative spaces – enabling mourning, connection, responding and becoming.