Maria Housden - Unravelled - Life as a Mother

Despite the demands of our busy household, I am able to manage everything quite effortlessly. I love my life, and feel lucky to be the woman I am, the mother of 12 beautiful children, and James’s wife.

I hope your life is wonderful too, and that you will be coming to visit us here soon.

love Maria

As I reread my letter before handing it over to my sister, I felt warm and quiet inside. I loved this woman I imagined I would become, this capable, vibrant, sexy, beautiful wife and mother. I knew that her toes were manicured, her purse well organized and her children well dressed and polite. I loved her life, the wholeness and fullness, joy and satisfaction in it.

I felt as if great things were possible for me, things that felt real and familiar even though there was no evidence of them in the life I was now living. I was a secret being kept hidden until the time was right, ripening and waiting for the external world to change before I could be revealed. Sitting beneath the maple tree in our backyard, I felt a deep quiet in the centre of myself as I imagined this woman I would become, as if it were already done, already true for me.

Each of us, in the most silent part of ourselves, has always known who we are. The eyes that look into ours from the image in the mirror recognize something that does not change with time or age. It would take me 24 more years to spiral into this centre of myself, to discover and begin living fully the sense of happiness and possibility that I dreamed for myself when I was 12. And, in the process, I would have to learn to be fiercely honest with myself and with others, and to unravel, with integrity and discernment, all my ideas about the way life is ‘supposed to be’.

THE ONLY LIGHT IN THE ROOM CAME FROM A SINGLE KEROSENE lamp. I ran my hand along the wall beside the wide plank door, found a switch and flicked it on. A copper lamp with a fringed shade made a circle of light on the small wooden table next to the bed. I stood in the centre of the room and felt a sense of excitement growing in me. Although I had dreamed of this moment for years, envisioned this place many times before, I hadn’t ever truly believed it would happen. Looking around now, I felt as if something new was coming alive in me, a sense without form, poised to take shape.

The idea of a retreat had been planted in my heart in the first months after Hannah’s death. Holding her lifeless body in my arms, part of me had released itself; something in me had irreparably changed. I had known then that I would have to get away, to immerse myself in a silence that was only mine, if I were to ever understand fully what had happened, and to know what I was supposed to do next.

The Hermitage, the centre where I was now staying, had been established years ago by an elderly Mennonite couple who had converted a huge barn into several floors of small bedrooms, libraries and a kitchen/dining room. For a modest fee, guests were given their own room and bath, and encouraged to spend their days quietly on their own, reading, painting, writing or walking in the fields and surrounding woods. All meals, except for breakfast, were prepared by Mary and served to guests around the farm table in silence. It seemed the perfect space for my retreat.

Now, gazing around the room, I felt as if I had been transported into another, timeless place, far from any life I had ever known. The walls were panelled with knotted pine boards that climbed horizontally to the beamed ceiling. Two screened windows on wide hinges were open to the warm summer evening, their white lace curtains catching the breeze. A well-worn plank floor was partially covered by a brown braid rug, and along one wall, facing the largest window, was a double bed with a carved wooden headboard and muted patchwork quilt. A small teddy bear with button eyes and suede paws leaned against the pillow.

I laid my suitcase on the bed and began to unpack. I stacked my folded clothes in the drawers of the simple bureau, placed my new journal alongside a silver pen on the desk that sat beneath the window across from the bed; I slid several photographs of Claude, and our four children, Will, aged 10, Hannah, who would have been 7, Margaret, aged 3, and Madelaine, aged 2, under the edges of the window frame. In the drawers of the desk, I put pages of drawing paper, a few pencils and a deck of cards.

Beneath the second window, next to the dresser, was a small kneeling bench with a wooden shelf nailed to the wall above it. Here, I placed a votive candle and the gold cross I wore around my neck during the last year of Hannah’s life. When I had finished, I slid my suitcase under the bed, and sat down in the large, upholstered reading chair in the corner. From my vantage point, I could see fireflies blinking in the dark outside the windows. I sat quietly, not moving, feeling myself breathe, drinking it all in.

Mary had told me when I checked in that, apart from one other guest who was scheduled to arrive in a day or two, I would be on my own. Having shared a room with two younger sisters until I was 18, and never having lived on my own, the idea of such solitude and silence seemed too good to be true. As a wife and mother, I had become so accustomed to constant interruptions that I couldn’t help thinking, in the quiet of the room, that this peace couldn’t possibly last.

Sitting in the light of the flickering lamp, I heard a rustling noise just outside the window. I felt a shiver up my spine, feeling suddenly frightened of being alone, as if I might be smothered by the room’s unfamiliar silence. Quickly, I stood up and with a running start leaped across the floor onto the bed, just as I had as a little girl, afraid of monsters that lurked in dark corners. Undressing beneath the covers, I dropped my clothes on the floor and burrowed beneath the soft sheets and thick quilt. Closing my eyes against the dark and silence, I fell almost immediately into a deep sleep.

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