Sarah
Sarah is a coach and facilitator in higher education, maternal support advocate, and birth doula.
Her mum died in 2015.
“Mum died a month after my first child was born. It was a sucker punch.
I had the brightest light in him and the darkest dark in losing mum. Reconciling those two things was impossible. It was like one big bomb that all happened at the same time.
I can’t say which event was the catalyst for starting to write again. I can’t separate the two. I just know that I wanted to mark the occasion of scattering Mum’s ashes by saying a few words and it came out as a poem.
I’ve always loved words, but I hadn’t written for a long time. Somehow along the way, I lost my confidence. Writing that poem - that feeling of getting across the emotion - felt so good.
I wasn’t expecting it, but that’s how it was.
Before that, I’d felt guilty about doing something creative, something just for me. But I started to give myself permission to write. I knew I needed it.
Slowly, I started unlearning all of this stuff about perfectionism and trying to be good. The fear of not being good enough - whatever ‘good enough’ is - had stopped me for so long.
Creative expression is a cornerstone of who we are. It’s not about saying “I’m an artist”. It’s about saying, “I’m a human and therefore I need to express myself in a creative way.”
When my kids show me their drawings, I’m not like, “You need to work on your shading technique.” If they weren’t being creative, I’d be worried, right?
It’s not about outcomes. It’s a practice, a process.
“Creative expression is a cornerstone of who we are.”
There’s an unhelpful narrative in our society about having kids. Like, you have your family you’re born into, then you meet someone, then you have your own family. It’s very isolated. But we need people around us, the so-called village.
Never is that more apparent when you have a baby and you don’t have a mum. I know we don’t all have good relationships with our mothers. But I really did…and then she was gone.
So who do you go to? Who do you trust?
I found it really difficult becoming a mother without my mum. Even the word ‘mum’. In the beginning, I found it really hard when people would use it, even in a positive way. I was repelled by it.
When you’ve got kids, the marking of time is very obvious. ‘He lost his first tooth today’ or ‘She slept through the night for the first time.’ After Mum died, I would write to her. “This is what happened today. I’m so sorry you didn’t get to experience it.”
I still needed to talk to her. That was my way of keeping her around.
People say it can help if you talk to the person who’s gone; that you can do it in whatever way that feels comfortable to you.
I guess this was my way. Little letters in my journal, almost like a prayer.
I’ve been talking about her since my children were tiny. I really want to keep her in our lives and not for it to be “Oh, Nanna died a long time ago.”
They go through periods where they talk to me about her a lot. They say things like, “I’m really sorry that your mum died.” It’s the beginning of those questions around life and death.
We talk about all the good things, the happy things. We have photos and some objects that belonged to her. It’s really important for them to know that’s OK and that I’m OK.
I tell them she’s still with us. She’s literally in our bodies, in our cells. We wouldn’t be here without her.
So many of my poems are still about her. It’s almost getting too much now, but I’m giving myself grace. Giving myself permission to feel the things I feel.
It’s how I’m processing her and all of those nuanced, confusing feelings about who she is and was and what she meant to me.
All of that love.”