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| Mary Cooper, also known as Rosemary. |
I don't know where the idea came from to write you a letter, it's nearly 25 years since you died, there's plenty of time in which I could have written. Anyway, here I am.
I think about you every day, mostly just a glancing, passing thought, sometimes prompted by the photographs of you that I have on my desk. As times goes on you are increasingly a collection of memories to me, like a skeleton in a way. I still feel a fuzzy grief. I don't get to talk about you much, most of the people in my life today never met you, and on the rare occasions people ask about 'my parents' and I mention that you are dead, the conversation doesn't continue. But here you are, this quiet part of my life, always with me.
When you died I was 18, on the cusp of adulthood, and you were 48, not so much older than I am now. We never got the chance to talk together as grown women, I think we would have been great friends. This is the thing that I regret the most, and it's a strange thing to miss since I'm looking back on a future that never happened. Within the context of this vacuum I long to know what you would have made of me if you had lived and were now in your early 70s, facing old age. Mum, what do you think of what I've become? I would be different if you'd survived the cancer, what do you make of how I turned out without you? I so miss that impossible conversation, there's so much we never got to say. I'm realising maybe that's why I'm writing to you, to give voice to those things. Ok, now I understand. Let's go.
I imagine that it would be astonishing to you how much I have capitalised on things you considered shameful and wrong when you were alive. I remember your casual homophobia and I wonder if you would have changed with the times regarding my queerness, or the ways in which I choose to live. I'm sure you would have. I know you were a feminist even if you never used that word to describe yourself. You valued friendships with other women, you understood and supported women as autonomous beings, you were interested in women's empowerment and you instilled those values in me. I can imagine you coming into your own so powerfully in your 50s.
The fat stuff might be much more perplexing. The pressure to lose weight when I was growing up came mostly from you, and I can't say for sure if you would ever have been able to acknowledge that this was a damaging thing to do to me. I understand that you were desperate to pass as middle class, and you understood fatness as a lower class embodiment which would hold us all back. It must be weird to you that I'm proud of our heritage and don't want to become middle class, as if I could. I note your nursing training, based in scientific positivist rationalism long before Health At Every Size became a possibility within that tradition, and the postwar authoritarianism within which you grew up and worked, where your betters knew best. I think this underpinned your belief that fatness indicated pathology, must always be rectified by weight loss, and that you were an agent for such an intervention. We couldn't be more different! Feminism may have enabled you to challenge these beliefs but I wouldn't count on it. I imagine we would have argued about this stuff.
How would you understand me? I seem to have disregarded or surpassed the plans that you had for me. I remember you saying that when I went to college to do A Levels I would probably lose weight and find a nice boyfriend. Everyone says stupid things from time to time but the naïve limitations of this promise still make me cackle quite bitterly. I'm sorry I'm taking the piss, you didn't know any better, you might have known you were dying when you said it, maybe it was a self-soothing fantasy. I think you had children because this is what women of your generation were supposed to do, I also think that people have children with the hope that they will push further than they have been able to push. I've gone so much further than you were able to imagine, and this is a great achievement. I'm sorry that I can't reach back and pull you up with me.
Dear Mum, if we were sitting here talking today, I've no doubt that there would be areas of our lives that would always be a puzzle to each other. But some things aren't. I treasure your grit, work, intelligence, ability to recognise beauty, and your blatant, enduring love for me, which I've known all my life.
Your very own,
Charlotte x
