Next week my mother would be 81. This past week my brothers and I traveled to west Wales at the headlands above Swan Lake Bay to a lone, white-washed farmhouse where my mother was born. On those green cliff tops we scattered her ashes.
My cousin, who also grew up on that windswept farm, joined us. She shared a story with us from my mother's childhood that has forever changed how I think of my mother.
My mum had four boys. She was forced to give up her first child from her first marriage when she married my father, with whom she had three more children. Both of my mum's marriages ended in divorce. She would tell us that she never regretted not having a lasting romantic love in her life. “I have you boys” she would always say.
I have always defined my mother by her role in raising us. She struggled to protect us from the outside world and to prepare us to function in it. But she had more hurdles than most. With no car, 3 part-time jobs and 3 children to raise, life was complicated. She kept a roof over our heads although we were sometimes hungry. I specifically remember as a child, complaining when all we had to eat was bread, not understanding how painful that must have been for her to hear. This is the mother I knew, that I have perhaps retrospectively idolized.
Twice my mother fled the farm where she was born. Both times she was pregnant and left to marry. Had she stayed, her brothers would have inherited the farm and she would have been forced to be their servant. Urban poverty was the price of freedom for my mother.
As I stood there on that Pembrokeshire hilltop overlooking the sea, absorbing the roar of waves and being pummeled by the ocean wind I could feel the power of nature that my mother grew up with. We were to scatter mum’s ashes at a place where mum would’ve been able to see both the farm where she was lovingly raised and the ocean where she learnt to swim.
It was here that my cousin told me the thing I’d never known of my mother. As a teenager, my mum would come home from school, do her chores and rush off to ride her horse across the cliff tops. More than that, she became known throughout the area as a “girl” who understood horses. People from all over the area would bring their horses to Eastmoor farm.
They would hand the reigns of a young horse that could not be trained to my mum. They would probably go into the farmhouse and have a mug of tea with my grandparents. My mum, June, would take the wild horse across the fields and over the bumpy headlands along the coast. A couple of hours later she would return to everyone waiting, and as my cousin had heard it, she would dismount the horse she’d broken-in and simply say, “There. It’s all done.”
This is a story of my mother that I never imagined, but one consistent with the mother I knew: someone who had a deep bond with nature, someone who was strong and powerful, and someone who could not simply follow the rules set down for her. I now think of the choices she faced, and the life and the skills that she was forced to leave behind her. And when I think of mum now I no longer remember her the same way. I think of the place where we scattered her ashes and her youthfully galloping over those wind-ridden headlands.
