Today is a good time for me to re-share this picture of my Mum from a little over 20 years ago, shortly before she turned 50.
Mum should’ve been 70 today, but instead her life was cut far too short due to pancreatic cancer, which she was diagnosed with not long after her 50th birthday. She passed away six weeks after her diagnosis on May 3rd, 2005, two months after her birthday. There was no way to know she was that sick when she was adventuring across New Zealand’s north island with me and my sister that February. This picture is from the day we went caving, rock-climbing and abseiling.
I was 21, and just starting to get to know her better as an adult. I still wonder sometimes how differently my life might’ve turned out if I hadn’t lost her. If she’d been around to give me better advice than the paths I took. I doubt I’d have gotten married when I did. I wouldn’t have the kids I have. Both of those things were a direct result of losing her when I did, because I met my ex-husband a week after her funeral while I was still avoiding grieving her properly. I didn’t even think I wanted kids when she was alive, but when I asked her, while she was sick, what she was most sad that she wouldn’t get to do because she was dying (thinking she’d say something about the places she didn’t get to travel to), she told me the only thing she was sad she would miss out on was not getting to meet her grandkids. I wanted children after that because of her.
My twenties wound up being very different than I think she would’ve wanted for me. My Mum was a pioneer for women in engineering. The proof’s in this old newspaper article, talking about how she was the only woman enrolled in civil engineering and was the top third-year student, beating out all the men:
My mum wasn’t perfect, but she did what she thought was best. Growing up, and especially in high school, I felt like she wanted me to follow in her footsteps. I was encouraged to study math and science to get a “real job,” even though I had always shown a creative streak. She still supported my creative interests, like sewing me a Pocahontas costume, which I wore for a dance I choreographed for “Just Around the Riverbend” at my year 7 graduation, driving me to perform at stand-up comedy open mic nights and chaperoning me when I was an underage 16-year-old, and even coming to see me perform improv while she was wheelchair-bound and dying of cancer. She just didn’t want me to turn out like my dad, whose art background led to her becoming the breadwinner and him not having much work for years. That was a source of stress in their relationship, and probably one of the reasons they separated when I was nine.
So I don’t think my mum would’ve been okay with me giving up a career in IT for years to be a stay-at-home mum, even though I know she was sad that my dad’s work situation meant she had to spend more time working and less time with her own kids. She never told me that while she was alive. I read it in a journal she left for me. But with that experience, I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t have wanted me to rely on a man to financially support me and drag my career down, because relationships don’t always work out the way you hope they will. My marriage certainly didn’t.
And I keep picking men who turn out to be more like my dad so I wind up learning the same lessons my mum did about having to walk away from men who won’t learn to help themselves because they prefer to stick with a victim mentality. My dad will probably read this, but he’ll understand I’m not saying this to be mean to him. It’s something he’s been working on in recent years, and we’ve been having conversations around this since I started my Real Talk with a Vulnerable Angel & Friends livestream podcast. It’s a show I do because after my last relationship fell apart, I recognised that I had been holding back some vulnerability out of fear, and I wanted to work on being more open about what was going on with me again.
My mum was not a very emotionally open person, and I’ve always felt like that’s why she died so young from cancer. She was otherwise really healthy and taking care of herself. She’d managed to alleviate her RSI/arthritis symptoms from diet alone. It didn’t make sense why she’d get a cancer tied to her digestive system. Except that trauma lives in your body when you don’t find some kind of outlet for it, and then it festers and becomes physical illness. My mum had a lot of trauma that I don’t know that she ever properly dealt with. Her parents both died when she was a teenager and she had to relocate to live with an aunt in Wyoming after growing up in Indiana. I’m not surprised that she escaped to Australia by following a man who wanted to marry her there pretty much as soon as she could after her parents’ deaths. They met when they were both studying at the University of Wyoming. After he graduated, he got a job as an art teacher in Australia in the 70s, when the was a dearth of teachers in the country. Mum was only 19 and had only completed her first year of university when she followed my dad to Australia. In that regard, I followed in her footsteps. I did exactly the same thing. Married the next man who came along, and then escaped to Malaysia with him. But you can’t escape grief by running away from it to another country. It lives in you, and you need to find ways to express it so that it doesn’t turn into a cancer that kills you.
I’m nine years away from 50, the age my mum was when she died. I’ve been living for 20 years with the idea that holding my emotions in could kill me. And yet, there have still been times that I’ve kept them to myself in order to protect other people’s feelings, or out of fear that I’d be rejected, or various other reasons. My livestream show is the way I’m fighting back against that, because I don’t want to find myself in a hospice in a decade because I didn’t do everything I could to take care of my emotional health. Sometimes that means I have to speak up in ways that wind up hurting people I care about, but some people need tough love to be the catalyst they need to learn the lessons they need to learn. You can’t hold their hand through things when their eyes and their mind is closed to seeing things the way you do. Some of the hardest grief to experience is watching people you care about harm themselves because they aren’t willing to learn how to help themselves. I think that’s how my mum felt as she watched my dad battle depression and stayed stuck in a victim mentality for years. She tried helping him, but you can only take so much of that before you realise you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves.
I don’t know if my mum ever stopped loving my dad. She never dated anyone else after they separated. They never divorced, because they were married in the Catholic church and it’s against their religion to divorce. I know my dad never stopped loving my mum. He still thinks about her to this day. He was a bigger mess than my siblings and I were after she passed away. That was the catalyst that took him back to the church. Whether or not she stopped loving him, I’m sure she always wanted what was best for him, she just understood that it was his journey to take on his own because everything she tried to do to help wound up making things worse.
As I reflect on my mum’s journey with my dad, I see how similar she and I are, and how I’ve followed in her footsteps as generational trauma tends to do. I hope I’ve grown and adapted to the lessons I’ve learned from her, both in the what to do and what not to do sense.
I’m not just mourning my own mum today. My Australian bestie’s mum just passed away from cancer, too, and I’ve been checking in with her regularly over the last few months, knowing how hard that all is. Every check in I’ve had with her, I’m grateful that she was able to spend as much time with her mum as she did. Because that kind of loss, knowing you’ll never be able to ask your mum another question or get support or advice from her ever again is a phenomenal loss when your mum has been with you and supported you through so much. I have a blog post about my friendship with her sitting in my drafts since December. I hope I can get back to that soon.
