Earlier today, I passed a store front with buckets of daffodils in the windowsill and a sign wishing the neighbourhood moms a happy Mother’s Day. The surge of emotion surprised me, even though I’ve come to expect it every year as the cards, signs and marketing emails start to pile up.
About six years ago I decided to blow up my life – and when I say blow up, I mean I pressed down full force on the red nuclear button. Just before moving to the UK from France for my husband’s work, we had decided to end our 12-year relationship. Together along with our four-year-old daughter, we moved into a pink house on the high street of a village in Suffolk. He slept downstairs across the hall from her and I slept in an attic room next door that was connected to our little house by a back staircase. At night when she couldn’t sleep, she would take turns either meandering across the hall and crawling into his bed, or climbing the rickety wooden staircase into mine.
Around Mother’s Day in 2019, my ex learned that his company would not be renewing his expat contract. He could stay on in the UK, but he’d lose his pension and many of the perks from his job that made living in this country affordable. We started mapping out our options, but none of them were good. Had this happened 20 years ago, we both would have been able to find an affordable two-bedroom flat in commutable distance to London, where I had found my first salaried job as a junior journalist, but housing prices were just too outrageous. After examining all our options, we decided on the most obvious and painful one: that he and our daughter would move back to Rennes, and I would visit as often as I could. The quality of life would be higher than anything we’d find near London, she’d go to the best school, and would grow up surrounded with all the love and support of his extended Breton family. Perhaps there was another glaringly obvious solution to this mess, but then and now this looked like our least bad option.
I waved goodbye to them at London City airport and promised my daughter I’d see her in a few weeks. On the way home I sat in a window seat on the DLR train, looking out at the Thames, and got to thinking about river formation. Water flows from high ground to the sea, and along its journey cuts deep permanent grooves into the landscape. Sometimes in the summer the streams dry up, but the riverbeds remain behind, exposing their slashes in the earth. On that day it felt like a giant dam broke inside me and water poured through every crevice of my being. The paths this water carved are now permanent. Sometimes they dry up when my daughter is around me, only to come flooding back the moment we say goodbye. Sometimes the banks overflow, as they did today.
When we think of longing, we often think of the desire one feels for a lover. This craving is often expressed as a need to feel our beloved next to us, to hold them tightly and feel their skin against our own. One thing this experience has taught me is that longing is not exclusive to one type of love. For mothers separated from their children, this yearning to feel them reappears at unpredictable moments – like when a waiter in a cafe wishes the moms around you a happy Mother’s Day and you wish you could pull out a napkin and wipe whipped cream from the corner of your child’s mouth.
This isn’t a longing that comes once a year: it comes packed into everyday moments of walking past a school at the end of the day and watching all the moms line up to pick up their kids. It’s hearing giggling girls in their uniforms walk to school in the morning on the sidewalk ahead of you and wondering which one would be your daughter’s best friend. It also comes accompanied with the deep shame that follows the uncomfortable pause after you tell somebody that your child lives with her father in another country. Men are allowed to leave their kids with the mom and go off to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Society doesn’t look so kindly on women.
I know I’m lucky because I do get to see my daughter during the school holidays, but there are other women who can’t. There are mothers in prison, mothers separated by crisis and conflict, and mothers who have had children removed because of addiction or self-harm. In none of these cases do mothers let go of their children easily. We all feel that longing to hold our children tightly, particularly on the one day of the year when the sacrifices of motherhood are acknowledged and celebrated.
Charlotte Kilpatrick is a Franco-American journalist living in London
