‘The Missing Mother’ by Annie W
Julia Haworth was an extremely intelligent woman. Not in the typical fact-spouting, full marks, know-it-all type that comes to mind, but one of those rare, driven individuals whose eyes light up at the sound of something they love, as if every mention of it spirals into a new and wonderful idea. The kind of idea that you yearn to know about, and yet can never quite reach. Perhaps that was why people pressed and pushed her for answers, delved into her life in the naive hope that she would let them in and share her discoveries - only to be turned away like embers from a flame.
She was quick and bright, her very essence contagious - yet an internal character, who adored her close connections and startled at the mention of anyone out of her circle, speaking little to anyone outside of the hole in which she buried herself.
I will find my mother. She always told me that I inherited her stubbornness and ambition. But why would she ever run from me?
*
“Mrs Haworth’s case is, coming from our centuries of experience, most likely a tragic misunderstanding of emotion - there was certainly a mountain of pressures piled onto the poor woman, with her busy writing career, possibly tense home life, and please dear, correct me if I am wrong, but did you mention a tendency of burying her emotions? Perhaps the woman felt the need to…”
Victoria Balfour, of Balfour and Family co. Therapists, paused, drawing out those last syllables with a lingering look that suggested we were infants and she was our school mistress, gently coaching us to quietly disregard my mother’s disappearance like her usual clients - deeply troubled and slightly soft in the head. This woman had been drilling into my family and I for the greater part of an hour now, with her clicking heels and false beam, yet another ridiculous figure hired by my grandfather in the short time since my world was turned on its head.
All of this silent frowning, awkward glancing and hidden crying turns the air thick and heavy, like the dusty cloak the inspectors found in mother’s wardrobe this morning, midnight-black velvet with a creamy pearl trim, giving it an elaborately gothic appearance, like something out of the books I read as a young child. Every time a Balfour, inspector or member of staff inquire about the cloak, my grandfather is said to shrink slightly, dropping eye contact and fumbling with anything he can reach, pride lost like my mother is as I write.
She’s most likely grappling with the prospect of her shambolic yet free new life, away from the clasps of my grandfather and his folk, greedy for anything they cannot possibly have, those nightmarishly intrusive characters who follow every thread of her life, and finally my siblings and I, as lost as she is, yet still confined to the lives we do not wish to lead. So as for my grandfather, I suppose he knows his stoic reputation is falling apart and is grappling for memories of my mother’s childhood - the typical frolicking, tantrum-throwing infant, gigglish and innocent, unaware of the toxic legacy she was being ushered into, like a lamb to slaughter.
Or perhaps my mother knew her fate all too well.