Subj: my mother
by
Catherine DeCourten
Zu DEUTSCH
In a few days I will be travelling home to my mother for Christmas. As far as I can think my mother prepares the same Christmas dinner: gammon, pickled cabbage and mashed potatoes. And every year she is baking the same four types of Chrismas-cookies. I remember how one year she happily tried out some recipes for new cookies. My father got angry about the disturbance and insisted on keeping up with our family's tradition. My mother cut back again to the usual variety of cookies. Only the last years - my parents got separated since, but my father is still visiting us on Christmas - my mother is baking additional kinds of cookies and broadened the menu by red cabbage for all those not liking the pickled cabbage. I like the way my mother is celebrating Christmas with care and love. Holding on to the perpetual belongs to this.
This year I became half as old as my mother. Recently I am questioning again our relationship - it is ten years now that I moved out from home and six years that I am living in a town abroad far away. The few times I am visiting home my mother has the refrigerator filled with all my favourite food and wants to wash my clothes. That's the way she is showing her love and thus she gets on my nerves. Maintaining in our well-established mother-child-relation makes me sad. I wish we would be able to talk about our experiences, wishes and dreams. I'd like to share an intimacy with her beyond motherly care and all understanding love, an eternal being-here-for-you. We often fail. My mother is very soft and powerful in that. Intense arguments I had with my father. Whereas my mother always adored her father a lot. On my search for my femininity she is a deterrent example to me. I sense the contradiction in my longing for the notion of a warm nest. The one offered by my mother scares me off and lets me strive for the movements and changes that make up my life. I love my mother.
telematic workgroup/december 1995
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