Zoe’s Story
As many mothers and teen daughters relationships often pan out, I was a defiant teen growing up with a strict mum and our relationship was extremely turbulent. My mother Jackie divorced from my dad when I was 11, and she was a single parent of 2. She was always stricter than other parents, but in hindsight I understand why now. Not only was she a single parent but she worked in a high pressure banking role which often led to her coming home late at night, tired and stressed.
She was hardworking, passionate, headstrong and defiant. As an ignorant teenager, I always felt like she was against me and treated me unfairly. Besides looking 10 years younger than her age with her slim figure, sleek blonde hair, stiletto heels and Chanel sunglasses, she was always known by my friends as ‘the scary one’. This stayed that way right up until I went to University.
When I left for university at 18 I suddenly had a LOT more freedom than I did at home, and I thought ‘this is GREAT!’ And so for the first 2 years I spent most of my time partying and very little time visiting home.
When it got to third year, and the pressures of university got a big tougher - I started to realise a lot of things about a lot of things. I remember phoning my mum and sobbing down the phone to her about how I couldn’t do my final assessment, and that I was going to fail university. I had never realised before but she was my safety blanket. Within 2 hours of the phone call there was a knock at my university flat door and there stood my mum and my little brother. It was this moment when our relationship changed for me, I realised that everything she did - was for me and my brother. The hard work, the late working nights, the early curfews. It was all for us. She dropped everything and ran to me because I needed her.
After I graduated I went travelling to Australia with my boyfriend for 8 months. My mum cried like a baby in the airport which was incredibly embarrassing at the time, and we kept in touch almost every day. The plan was to spend a year over there but our trip was cut short when I got the phone call from my stepdad telling me that my mum had lung cancer. Being 20 years old and as far away across the world as possible I felt completely and utterly lost, and terrified. I remember wanting to just click my fingers and to be at home to hug my mum.
After finishing up a few loose ends, within 10 days I was home. At first when I got home everything seemed normal - mum was just mum, And for a while it stayed like that. After her biopsy she was diagnosed with non small cell lung cancer in both lungs and in her chest wall, and we were told it wasn’t ‘curable’, but it was treatable. She began chemotherapy and initially responded well to the treatment. She used the cold cap to try and save some of her trademark blonde hair and it did work for a while. But then we got the news that the treatment was no longer working and stronger chemotherapy was the next option.
This round of chemotherapy really took it out of her and she spent most of her time in bed. The chemo was given every 3 weeks, and for 10 days of that 3 weeks she was in bed, but she would start to feel better towards the end of the cycle - and then it would start again.
She also completely lost her appetite and felt nauseous most of the time so she got thin pretty quickly. The cold cap also didn’t work and her hair started to fall out. We never directly spoke about it, but I could see how much this impacted her by looking at her face. I would brush it for her and strands would just fall to the floor. We’d carry on chatting like neither of us had noticed. Her hair soon became sparse and tufty, she started wearing scarves and hats to try and hide it.
One day she turned around to me and said, ‘Zo, I’ve booked an appointment at a wig shop, will you come with me?’ And I said, of course. We went to the wig shop that week and when she started trying on the wigs we couldn’t stop laughing. She looked like Rod Stewart in most short wigs and looked like a crazy witch in anything too long. When the woman pulled out a medium length sleek blonde wig, my mum pulled it on her head and after a moment of silence we both started to cry. It was a bittersweet moment, sadness because of the reality of what we were doing but also relief that we found something that made her look like ‘her’ again.
Her treatment journey was up and down, like most cancer patients. We lived from one scan to the next, praying for positive news but often left disappointed. A pivotal memory I have from this time is when she was having treatment at a London hospital and one of her chemo appointments clashed with my birthday. She asked if I would go with her so we could spend the day together after her treatment, and so we arranged to go somewhere nice for lunch and to go to a show. I could tell she was struggling that day after her treatment but she didn’t want me to know. In hindsight, it was stupid of us to try and do so much that day.
I seem to split my life into 3 parts now, before, during and after - fife before she was diagnosed, life during her illness and then there’s now. Between life before and life during, it feels as though we slowly swapped roles. Before, she was the mother, caring for me - her child. And when she became ill, I became the caregiver, a daughter caring for her mother.
This took me a while to come to terms with, because my mum had gone from being this independent, strong and defiant woman, to somebody who was very frightened. Seeing this shift in her was the hardest thing for me. I selfishly longed for her to be strict and fiery, because when she was scared, it really scared me. I had to pretend to be strong and positive, even when she would be so terrified of what was happening to her.
Some of my fondest memories do come from this time though, because her hard shell was completely gone. She was softer and more vulnerable, and I feel honoured that I got to see this side of her that not many did. I also feel great comfort from the fact that I was able to return what she had done for me for my whole life, when she needed me the most I was there to help and care for her.
Her health started to slowly decline further and she started having problems in her back and legs. A scan revealed that the cancer had spread to her spine and that she needed urgent surgery to remove it and to insert a metal bracket to support the disc that had been affected. This was a huge setback for her health overall, and only a couple of months later after the operation she was admitted again to the hospital. This time, she never came home. Just over two weeks later, she passed away peacefully in her sleep. Those last few weeks in that hospital will stay with me for life, and for a long time I struggled to think about anything else. Watching any human being at the final stages of their life is not easy to watch, but this was my mum, our family linchpin. I was 24.
After she died, a lot fell apart. Our family was lost, and everybody grieved differently. It damaged relationships that still to this day haven’t fully recovered, and I don’t know if they ever will. I almost instantaneously became the new family linchpin, and found this hard to navigate at the same time I was trying to grieve.
Sometimes I can’t stop and think too hard about it all, or about how much I miss her, because it’s suffocating. I have to compartmentalise certain parts of my memories but the worst is when it hits you out of nowhere. It isn’t necessarily a birthday, or Christmas, it could be a stranger in the street that just for a second looks like her. Or a song on the radio that makes me think of my childhood and when she used to dance in the kitchen.
Navigating life as a motherless daughter has been tough. Since she died I’ve bought a house, I’ve gotten married and now I have a daughter of my own. For all of these things I’ve felt her absence so strongly, but particularly with the birth of my daughter. Giving birth and raising a daughter without a mother has been the hardest part of my journey so far. The ‘bible’ of mothering is passed down from mothers to their daughters, through own experience and words of encouragement. Whilst I had my husband, my mother in law, other family and my friends to support me - it is not the same as having your mum. I wanted my mum to hold my hand and tell me it was all going to be ok, just like when she did when I was a child and just like when she turned up at my university that day.
Through having a daughter myself I’ve now been able to see my own relationship with my mother, from the perspective of being a mother. The love I have for my own daughter has shown me just how much my mum will have felt the same for me. The amount of time you give of your life to your child, she gave that all to me.
My daughter will sadly grow up without her Nanny Jackie, but she will know that she is with us every single day and when she’s old enough to understand, we will always celebrate her life.
Zoe
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