Our Mothers, Ourselves

Healing in a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.
-Hippocrates

I have been reading a series of young-adult fiction books about Enola Holmes, Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes younger sister. The books start with the disappearance of their mother and fourteen-year-old Enola running away to London to search for her. Enola is also running away to escape being sent by her older brothers to a girls boarding school to become a proper lady. Enola has her brothers intelligence, the money her mother hid away for her, and courage. When she gets to London she becomes a detective just like her brother. The books are about her cases and her attempts to stay hidden from her brothers. She does get help from her mother with whom she communicates with through cryptic messages they both leave in the agony columns of the London newspapers. In what I think is the last book in the series she gets one last message from her mother who has died by then in the form of a letter. When I started reading what Enola's mother wrote I  was reading a letter from one character in the book to another but by the end I saw it could also be a letter from my mother to me.

...you have always been wise beyond your years, so I hope you will be able to see that one cannot be a mother without first being a person; family, husband, and children should not be allowed, as is so often the case, to steal a woman's selfhood and her dreams. I consider that, if I were not true to myself, then all the mothering I could give you would have been false. I cannot be other than who I am, but perhaps I should not have been a mother. Such being the case, I find it no surprise that your brothers are both bachelors; perhaps you, also, will decline to beget children, and perhaps that would be for the best.

...I try to look at what I have done from your point of view and I realize I have surely caused you pain. Very likely you have wondered about my feelings for you as a mother. I myself have questioned whether I have given you all of the nurture that I could. Thankfully, the answer is yes I loved you as well as I am able, being the person I am. The paradox is that a different mother would likely have given you warmer love. But if you were the daughter of a different mother, then you would not be Enola.

...my daughter of whom I am justifiably proud, I write this to you because I owe you truth.

...I intentionally include no date. I desire no anniversary remembrance of my death.

It has been said that we "live on" in the memories of those we leave behind. With no desire to live on in any sense of the phrase, but trusting that you will not think too badly of me.

Your mother,...

Then Enola writes, Truly I owed a great deal to my mother as she hoped, I did not think too badly of her. By being herself, Suffragist and troublemaker Eudoria Holmes, she had given me the courage of her example, to be myself: Enola.

By this time I was silently crying. I see now that by being herself my mother gave me not only the courage to be myself but also the freedom to do so.  Such a gift.