Writing, thinking, talking about our mother, Mavis Iona Smith, has never been easy.
I keep meeting unfinished business.
We confront each other occasionally – in casual social interactions when I regard, with an air of flippancy, a matter Mother would have offered serious consideration, or when I cook the “wrong” way.
It is among several of my chief regrets that I discovered, when it was too late, the importance of a man knowing his mother.
I hear Mom’s voice now and then.
Mom had a beautiful singing voice and would fill the house when mother sang.
“Just like Virginia Lee,” dad would say, “your mother sings just as beautifully. Listen, you can hardly tell the difference.”
Virginia Lee was one of South Africa’s top selling vocalists.
Sometimes my mother’s voice addresses me from some galaxy within my psyche. I usually smile and, despite her protestations, proceed however I choose. I get a perfected frown when I am tempted to bend the rules, stretch the truth.
I have seen Mother cast affirming smiles when I allow fairness, compassion, kindness and mercy to prevail.
I am regularly reminded that the umbilical cord is infinitely elastic; the woman who bore me, no matter how independent I appear to be, forever influences me, sometimes tugging a little, urging me toward what is right, good, merciful and honest.
(If the above is “bulky” in the reading it’s perhaps because dad permitted no pronouns when referring to one’s mother).
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