My dear friend
I don’t think we’ve ever talked much about Mother’s Day so I’m not sure how you feel about it. My opinion of it has changed over the years. In my teenage years, I was somewhat agnostic about it all, taking what I believed was my own mother’s position that it was more a commercial enterprise than it was anything else. As a family, we didn’t reject it entirely, but it was reasonably low-key, a card and a gift (I add a note here that I am talking only about within my immediate family, there is a whole different story about my mother’s mother-in-law, suffice to say it involved a lot of deep inhalations on a lot of cigarettes as we drove along Port Wakefield Highway from Port Pirie to Adelaide and back again).
As I grew older, I began to see that there was much more nuance to her attitude to the day and that she rejected not only the commercialism of the day but also the romanticising of motherhood. I think it took me a little while to understand what it was that she didn’t like about this day because she was slightly prickly and if not emotionally distant then certainly reserved in her affection. As a child, I thought it was only the stereotype of mothering that she rejected. It wasn’t until I was older that I was able to see it was something much deeper than that, that it wasn’t simply the stereotyping, but the romanticising, the pretence that there was some magical ideal.
More recently, influenced by the great range of experiences that people have described to me through my funeral work (my meetings with family and friends being much more about a person’s life than about their death), it has become clear to me that if we are going to continue with this day then it should come with some radical reconceptualising far beyond rejecting the saccharine and the romantic. Because for a great number of people the idea of mothers—of being mothered, of being a mother—is extraordinarily complicated. And not at all romantic.
As so often happens when I write to you, I feel like the early, long-winded beginning makes it sound as if I am writing to you about one thing, when in fact I am writing to you about another. And in this case, it sounds as if I have started writing to you with the intention of describing my relationship to Mother’s Day and perhaps my vision for this radical reconceptualisation. But you know me well enough to know that while I excel in identifying opportunities for radical reconceptualisation, I am less excellent at identifying how to put such things into action.
Awkward segue alert!
I am, however, currently exploring (re-exploring? continuing to explore?) mothering through a project that came to me as one of those ideas, ‘oh! do you know what you could do, Tracy’ then slowly became ‘Tracy, you should definitely do that’ and that is currently in the phase of ‘this really is a good idea really one your best, I am having so much fun.’ Because I have been working on the project for a little while and because its deadline is approaching, I can also see that on the horizon the land of ‘what was I thinking’ is coming into view. So what I am actually writing to you about is this project, firstly because it is more than tangentially related to Mother’s Day and secondly, because it will be much nicer to write about it while I’m still in ‘this is a great idea’ phase and before I land on the shores of ‘what was I thinking’ and start breathing that land’s air of panic and dread.
The project is centred on my wedding dress, which my mother sewed for me. The sewing of the dress wasn’t intended to be anything more meaningful than the lovely act of having my mother sew my wedding dress, but with her unexpected and sudden death eighteen months later it also became the last thing my mother sewed for me.
For all these years and through all these moves I have kept the dress (technically not a dress, but a two-piece skirt and top). I have also kept: the dress she made for herself (mother-of-the-bride, although I cannot imagine she ever described herself that way, but nonetheless the closest we ever came to wearing complementary dresses); the hats we wore; the gloves we wore; and my shoes.
The missing piece of that puzzle was, for many years, the pearls. They were the pearls her parents gave her and I wore them to my wedding. The story of losing and finding those pearls became my first monologue Pearls.
This year is the 30th anniversary of her death, an anniversary which, by coincidence, is pearls in wedding anniversary land.
Of course when we were planning the dress, it was with the intention of ‘being able to wear it again’ but equally of course I never did wear it again. And I never will. It no longer fits me—not physically, not aesthetically, and not emotionally. But a wedding dress, especially one made by your mother is not something you can easily give away. So I’ve kept it along with all those other bits and pieces I described. The thing about keeping things is that one day you look at them and realise the moths have found them or they have developed a permanent fold where they shouldn’t be one or they have faded or are in some other way damaged. Over the years I have looked at the pair of dresses—most recently hung in my wardrobe squeezed into an ever-tighter corner—and thought ‘I really should store these properly’. And I would think briefly about how devastated I would be when I looked at those dresses and discovered that they had been munched by months or stained by the passage of time, but then put that thought into the overflowing too-hard-to-think-about-I-know-I-shall-let-it-fester-in-my-brain-a-little-longer basket.
But one day, the idea flashed into my brain. I thought, ‘Do you know what you could do, Tracy? You could unstitch your wedding dress and then stitch the text of the Pearls script onto the dress.’ And then the idea grew a little more as I realised this 30-year anniversary was approaching. There is a room in the Port Pirie Regional Art Gallery which was named after Mum—the Vivienne Crisp Gallery—because the tourism and art complex was opened not long after Mum died. And I had always wanted to have something there, that something being a bit elusive given that I’m not a visual artist. But here was something that could work. I approached the curator of the gallery to see whether she would be interested, and she said yes.
So here we are in 2023, the 30th anniversary of my mother’s death. And in August, the month of her death, I will be having an exhibition as part of the South Australian Living Artists festival. With the text of Pearls stitched onto my unstitched wedding dress and hung on the walls. Along with some other pieces I’m working on such as the picture of my childhood home worked in blackstitch (which I’ve been sharing on my instagram page).
It’s strange working in a visual arts way. I think the pieces are supposed to speak for themselves. But for 54 years, I’ve been teaching myself to be a writer, so I’ve been writing a lot as I go, and although I have never before planned my letters to you in advance, I have the beginnings of a few drafts. Actually, a lot of drafts of a lot of letters, because it turns out that this strange process of unpicking a dress has led me to think a lot of things I have never thought about before, and also to think more deeply about some things that I have thought but never fully considered. About mothers, about making and unmaking our lives, about the noise of being human, about the quiet, about being loved and not being loved, about restlessness and unrealised ambition and many other things besides. Given the well-established sporadicity of these letters I say tell you about these drafts not as a threat nor as a promise that your inbox will fill with a series of letters describing the project in more detail. But I’ve got this one finished, which makes its possibility if not its likelihood established.
I am off to water the saltbush and check on the avocado trees and then carry on through the day in a somewhat unplanned and meandering way. I hope that today is a gentle one for you and from now until next time, I am thinking of you with love,
Tracy
Beautiful, Tracy! I love the idea of this artwork.
Tracy, this letter grabbed me by the heart as I read it on Mothers Day, a day that beyond the Hallmark platitudes is hard. The best intentioned friends filled my inbox and my text message folder with flowers and hearts and Happy Mothers Day wishes whilst I hid in the garden and my art studio. It feels ungracious to not join in but it would be hypocritical if I did. So, I didn’t and now it’s almost over.
I will look forward to seeing what you create and as always your next letter.
Thank you
Kerry