Mother's love
The unthinkable has happened. My wife of 64 years, my childhood sweetheart, my rock, and my soulmate Vivienne has lost her battle with pancreatic cancer.I cannot describe the deep sense of sadness I feel at having lost the one person who has always meant the world to me.Vivienne has been a constant in my life from the moment I first set eyes on her when I was 14.She fully supported my career and raised our six children almost single-handedly while I was touring the world playing golf. She was a devoted wife, a loving mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and a wonderful human being who cared so deeply for others and lived her life in service to others.Vivienne taught me the value of love, faith and trust. She taught our children those same values, and they were blessed to have a mother who lived those values every single day.When we first met, I had no doubt it was love at first sight and it turned out to be a love story of a lifetime. I believe it will also be so when we are finally together again. Until then, I will miss my Viv dearly.
It was a question that I asked myself. As a daughter, I was expected to love this woman who’d brought me into the world. Our libraries are filled with books that revere mothers; the artwork on the walls of the world’s most venerated museums deifies the mother-child relationship; our religious doctrines command that a child honor thy mother. Society’s view is unequivocal—nothing is more sacred than the bond between a mother and her child.
I tried to will myself to be a better daughter. After all, she’d performed her motherly duties. She bore me, she disciplined me without ever raising a hand to me, she clothed me and fed me and tucked me in each night. Sometimes I wished that she had hit me or cut me with a knife. A single bruise or scar might have sufficed, giving me the evidence to once and for all to prove our failure to bond was not due to something deep inside of me but to something she’d done. I curated lists of wrongs she had committed against me which were often beyond the norm—sharp criticisms and unpredictable rages—but I knew intuitively that these events could not explain the chasm between us.
It was only after I uncovered secrets she had kept hidden for a lifetime that I understood that it wasn’t my fault—and perhaps none of it was really her fault, either. It all began when I found my mother sitting alone in the dark, scribbling an unfamiliar name over and over again:
Dorothy Soames Dorothy Soames Dorothy Soames
I was nineteen at the time, and years would pass before she tried to tell me more. As a child, I knew little of my mother’s past and nothing about her family, not the names of her mother or father, or whether they were alive or dead. She would grow angry if I questioned her, or worse, would retreat to her room and brood alone in the dark.
When I was well into my adult life, my mother announced, “I want to tell you everything.” Her willingness to share was sudden, and a lifetime of secrecy had turned any curiosity I had about my mother’s past into resentment.
“It’s too late,” I told her.
The months and years passed, and we never spoke about what she wanted to tell me that day—and then she was gone. Moments after I watched my mother heave her last breath, I rushed from the room, sobbing wildly, struggling to breathe as wails erupted from deep inside. During the days that followed, I was weighted down by the emotions that had overtaken me, finding it difficult to perform even the most mundane tasks.
Why was I grieving a woman I did not love?
I would find out the answer after I traveled across the Atlantic to uncover the truth about a little girl named Dorothy Soames.
My mother did not grow up among London’s elite, as I had always been told, but at the infamous Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children, commonly known as The Foundling Hospital. For two centuries, illegitimate children would be prepared for a hard life of scrubbing floors for England’s ruling class. Once left by a mother eager to hide the shame of an unwanted pregnancy, the child would go by a new name. For my mother, she would be known as Dorothy Soames.
From that day forward, she would be referred to impersonally as Soames, and raised in a world reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, but unlike the rules imposed on Margaret Atwood’s characters, the strictures governing every aspect of my mother’s life were real. Each morning, she would don a cape and white tippet, and march with the other children in twos in complete silence. Each moment of their days would be laid out, when to eat, speak and even when to defecate, all under the watchful eyes of the women dressed in blue with white caps who enforced rules that had been etched in stone centuries before.
Physical abuse was widespread, not just accepted but expected. A whisper could result in a beating or worse. Solitary confinement was also a favorite form of punishment. My mother would endure being locked up in windowless closets time and time again. Some staffers evoked terror simply by entering a room, taking pleasure in the very act of inflicting pain on a child. In my mother’s time, that would have described Miss Woodward, the gym mistress. On one occasion, Miss Woodward beat my mother for talking in line so savagely that a purple-black mass of bruises remained for weeks. On another occasion, she threw her in the deep end of the pool, well aware that she couldn’t swim, pushing her down repeatedly with a stick as other teachers watched for entertainment.
What I uncovered about my mother’s upbringing explained some of her odd behavior—why she scrubbed the floors until her knuckles bled, or when, for a time, she found comfort eating thick gruel for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But what I learned about the impact of institutionalization on the ability of a child to bond with others was more profound. According to British psychiatrist John Bowlby, bonds established—or lacking—at a young age affect the ability of a person to form healthy and meaningful attachments throughout life. Without that security and nurturing, a child cannot grow to trust others or form healthy attachments. In the 1950s the psychologist Harry Harlow attempted to replicate the results of Bowlby’s so-called attachment theory, hoping to answer the question: Can you raise a healthy child without love? Monkeys taken from their mothers at birth would sit and rock, staring into space while sucking their thumbs, unable to interact with their peers. In another experiment, monkeys placed in solitary confinement—something my mother had endured repeatedly as a child—would emerge from confinement hopeless, broken beyond repair.