When I became a mother for the first time, my mother was there for her baby, not for mine. It had been a difficult birth. 'Heavens,' said Mum, 'You look just as you did after a hard day at school.'
Dimitrios was brought to me, and of course I thought he was beautiful, but I still wasn't blind to his cone-shaped head, his bruised and puffy eyes, and his generally battered look. Nor was I deaf to his full-throated bellow. 'Poor little pet,' said the nurse, 'he's got a shocker of a headache.'
Me, I felt as if a speedy arrow had found a bull's eye in my heart. 'Oh, Mum,' I said, 'I'm so worried about him.' My mum laughed her head off. 'You're stuck with that feeling now,' she replied. How right she was.
It's not fair, but everything, for good or ill, and life being what it is, the admixture of both, begins with the mother. And it's all in the luck of the draw. My best friend, for example, had a cold and rejecting mother who actually told him he was a mistake.
Once we discussed Winnicott's concept of the good-enough mother, and I mentioned a reference made by Canadian writer Robertson Davies, who makes one of his characters say that he is fed up with people moaning about their mothers. I quoted: 'We can't all have the Grand Champion of Mothers.' And then I laughed.
'But you did,' my friend replied.
The wistful yet matter-of-fact statement wrenched my heart. 'You're absolutely right. I did.' I thought of what I had had, and what he had missed: the luck of the draw.
*****
I cannot believe that my mother has been dead 18 years, for I still see her in my mind's eye as a beautiful woman and spirit at every stage of her life, and I still hear her unfailingly witty good sense clearly in my mind's ear. Greeks who knew her considered her like Nana Mouskouri's voice: too perfect.
Parents are not necessarily naturals at their task. Mum's own childhood was not perfect, not by any means, but she had great skill in giving her three children most of what she had lacked, a skill that must have come in part from her wonderfully nurturing older sister. Muriel stood in for an over-taxed widowed mother, who was often so exhausted that she fainted in