My Biggest Influence Writing Competition Spring 2013

Mother Loss
Amelie Tobben

If I were to guess my mother’s first words to me, they would be something along the lines of, "Of course, as you already know,

ν = {γ/2n}{[(θ₀-θ)/2]sin³}[(θ₀-θ)/4]}/sin{[(θ₀+θ)/2]cos³[(θ₀+θ)/4)]}"

She would have said it gently, and the "as you already know" might have been in Greek, Latin, German, French, English, Dutch, or unspoken but assumed. The equation would be hand-written in her distinctive style, and I would have looked at her longingly and felt inadequate, because I didn’t already know.

Here she is, cigar in hand, busying herself with her equations. She uses the many houseplants as ashtrays, rotating them so that they take it in turns to sit at the prominent position on her desk, then on the shady windowsill in the study, eventually to work their way around to the sunny side of the house and then back again. They seem to thrive.

For relaxation she reads the newspaper cover to cover remembering everything; her general knowledge is phenomenal. To me, she’s tall and beautiful and there’s something dependable and unswerving about the depth of her understanding. You could put your whole weight on it and it would support you.

I want more of her and when the guinea pig develops ringworm, I scratch my hands until I have similar looking wounds. This secures me three weeks off school and there’s quarantine for ringworm so I don’t even have to pretend to be ill. In the mornings I work my way through Dutch grammar books, but after lunch she draws up a chair next to hers at her desk, and I’m initiated into thermodynamic theory. She explains Gibbs-Helmholtz, Marangoni flow, Legendre transformations, and it never occurs to her that eight might be a little young. On a pad of rough paper (the reverse carries a draft of her latest manuscript) she patiently derives one equation from another so that each step appears obvious and inevitable.

Soon, I’m friends with differentiation and integration, sines and cosines, Hooke’s Law, and Schrödinger's cat.

Emissaries of love.

Comfort blankets.

"Why does ε₀ have to be a constant?"

I don’t really want to know but experience has taught me that almost any question here generates a warm spark of approval. She responds as seriously as if she’d been asked the question at a conference by one of her contemporaries or at a seminar by a graduate student. Why does ε₀ have to be a constant?

She takes a slightly longer drag of her cigar. Clearly, it always is. But why?

I have to be careful now. If I’ve inadvertently stumbled on a really good question, she could be lost for days. Weeks even. But no, she’s just thinking of a way to explain it to me. She’s remarkably good at it.

It becomes clearer how to narrow the intellectual divide between us – and it looks achievable with her support and the constant immersion in matters scientific that shapes our home life. I’m surrounded by scientists and opting out is inconceivable. As she continues to push forwards the frontiers of knowledge, I jump through academic hoops, trying to catch up. Wait for me!

I collect prizes, scholarships, degrees, and a PhD. Surely now I’ll feel adequate in her presence?

But I can’t find her anywhere.

Where did I lose sight of her? Somewhere in the mists of a miserable marriage or recklessly hurtling down the precipitous descent called Alzheimer’s?

Facts and figures have deserted her. Latterly, words too. She starts a sentence but by the time she gets to the end, the beginning has eluded her.

Out of the window she might see the lawn – reproaching her because the moss needs to be raked out and she considers that’s her task – or she might be back in 1940 and see flames rising ominously from the nearby Volderstraatje. Visibility was poor and the English pilot, charged with bombing railways and bridges in Germany, accidentally hit the densely populated area around Den Bosch. Only that day she’d been playing skipping games in the street with those children and they’d challenged each other to balance on the wall outside her house.

The worst is when she sees the present-day lawn but is overwhelmed by an inexplicable sense of loss. She searches for a way to make sense of the chaos around her but finds no formula that fits and is just left stunned by the wanton destruction.

I too feel bereft. Too many decades separate me from my academic credentials. My own war, so unexpected, seemed to start when I walked up the aisle half a lifetime ago.

Where do we go from here?

Maybe we could just sit side-by-side for a while — mother and daughter.