I Don’t Know What I Miss

I thought not remembering my mum meant I couldn’t really miss her. I was wrong.

Words by Bridie Ellis Bukorović

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The Trouble with Not Remembering

It was January 1996, two months before my third birthday, when my mum died.

There is something almost convenient about losing a parent that young, at least in the way other people understand it. I was only two. I couldn’t really remember her. And if you can’t remember someone, how much can you really miss them?

Quite a lot, apparently.

My mum, Karen Elizabeth Bukorovic, died of skin cancer on 7 January 1996. She was 36 years old, married to my dad and a mum to two daughters. I have spent most of my life trying to understand what it means to lose someone before you have really had the chance to know them.

I wasn’t there when she died. I don’t remember anybody telling me she was dead. I’m quite certain I didn’t go to her funeral. My dad tells me, with some relief, that I never asked where she had gone because it was a conversation he had been dreading.

At some point afterwards, I told him I had seen my mum with a dog she had owned years earlier, a dog I had never met. “Mum and Barney,” I apparently said. This was enough to convince him she had visited me herself. I can see why that might have felt easier than explaining death to a two-year-old.

It was the mid-nineties. Children were resilient, feelings were best not over-examined and, if everybody kept moving, perhaps the difficult thing would somehow become less difficult.

My sister and I have different dads and, after my mum died, we were brought up separately. I stayed with my dad; she lived elsewhere. So my mum’s death didn’t only remove her from my life. In another sliding doors moment, it changed the shape of the family around me too.

The general thinking seemed to be that if I was fed, safe and loved, I would be fine. Love was love. What did it matter who provided it? This sounds fairly convincing until you are the child in question.

If the same thing happened today, I imagine there would be conversations, books with age-appropriate language, art and play therapy; somebody helping a bereaved parent work out how to keep talking about the person who had died rather than quietly hoping the subject might never arise.

Instead, my mum became an absence. And the strange thing about an absence is that it can take up a considerable amount of space.

Oh. You Have a Mum for This Too.

The hardest part of my grief has always been that I have nothing tangible to grieve. I don’t know my mum’s laugh or her smell. I don’t know what her hugs felt like or the sound of her voice. I don’t remember being tucked into bed by her, being told off by her, annoying her or making her laugh. There is no sensory archive to rifle through when I miss her.

So growing up, I learnt what I was missing indirectly. At school, at friends’ houses, in films. The lifts home, the phone calls, the arguments, the casual “ask your mum”. Tiny domestic rituals nobody notices because why would you? They are part and parcel of most people’s lives.

Every age seemed to reveal another use for a mother. School plays. Periods. Boyfriends. Break-ups. Clothes shopping. Skincare. Leaving home. Engagements. Weddings. Oh. You have a mum for this too.

I don’t remember feeling resentful. Envious, definitely. But even as a child I understood how lucky my friends were. Mostly, I wanted them to understand it too. My grief was assembled backwards. I worked out what I had lost by watching everybody else have it.

How to Be Fine

When I was around eight, my dad met someone. Their relationship was artificially accelerated after he was involved in a terrible motorbike accident. After weeks in hospital, bone and skin grafts, we “temporarily” moved in with her so she could help while my dad only had the use of one arm. The temporary stay never ended.

She became the first and only woman to occupy anything resembling the role of stepmother in my life and, sadly, completely abused that privilege. Slowly, and then ominously in “episodes”, it became clear that she was very mentally unwell. I became the focus of much of that illness. What followed were years of emotional abuse, repeatedly explained through the lens of depression or bipolar episodes. There was always a reason: a bad episode, a difficult period, something I had supposedly done wrong.

The hardest part was how cyclical it all was. In the good moments, I caught small glimpses of what it might be like to have a mum. Then I would come home from school to find my bedroom and bathroom doors unscrewed from their hinges because I “didn’t deserve privacy”. The first Mother’s Day card I ever bought anyone was gratefully received on the Sunday, then shredded across the kitchen floor by Monday afternoon, along with the flowers and balloon I had given her. You learn quickly, in that kind of environment, that love can change temperature without warning.

Things finally came to a head while my dad was overseas on business. I was largely left in her care but, for a period, she simply disappeared. I was already a pretty competent latchkey kid. I could cook for myself, get myself to school and generally operate with an independence that probably looked impressive if you didn’t ask why it was required, so I carried on.

When she returned, she was in a violent rage. A confrontation became physical as she tried to force me out of my own home. By the time my dad came back, she had disappeared again, this time taking almost everything we owned with her. My clothes. My belongings. My bed. What should have been devastating actually came with a strange sense of relief. It was finally over.

As an adult, I can have compassion for mental illness and still believe absolutely that it does not absolve an adult of what they do to a child. Mental illness can explain behaviour that otherwise feels impossible to comprehend. But explanation and absolution are not the same thing.

People are often surprised when they hear that this was my reality because I didn’t go off the rails. I’m never entirely sure what they imagine the correct outward manifestation of a difficult childhood should be. Drugs? An arrest? A dramatic expulsion from school? Instead, I did well academically. I was capable, conscientious and apparently thriving, which is actually quite a useful disguise if you are deeply unhappy.

Underneath it, I was hyper-alert. I had learnt to measure safety in fractions: a look, a sigh, a slight change in someone’s voice. I could read a room before I knew “reading a room” was something adults had a phrase for.

But children are incredibly adaptable. Present something as normal for long enough and they will find a way to build themselves around it.

So I adapted.

I also became very good at reassuring other people about my mum. If somebody asked about her and then looked mortified when I said she was dead, I would immediately make them feel better.

“Don’t worry. I was only a baby.”

“I have one parent who loves me more than some people who have two.”

“I’m lucky.”

There is something slightly heartbreaking about how committed I was to that sales pitch.

Fuck, I wish I could put my arms around that little girl and tell her she didn’t need to make anybody feel better.

Lucky I was not.

What £60 an Hour Bought Me

It took until my early twenties for the whole arrangement to start showing cracks.

I had my first professional job, was living away from home and began having recurring nightmares triggered by things that reminded me of my dad’s ex. At 23, it occurred to me that I should probably look into the “bad dreams” that woke me in the grip of a fear I couldn’t shake.

So I went to therapy, hoping we could get the entire thing sorted in a few sessions because £60 an hour was not particularly compatible with my fresh-out-of-university finances.

It took longer than a few sessions.

I arrived thinking I was there to deal with the woman who had abused me. Then, somewhere in the process of unpicking my childhood and the beliefs I had built around it, I casually mentioned that my mum had died when I was two.

My therapist began joining dots I had never understood were connected. She talked to me about attachment trauma and what losing a mother so young could mean.

I kept returning to what I thought was the obvious counterargument: But I couldn’t remember her.

That, I began to understand, was beside the point. The attachment existed before I had the language to describe it. The loss existed before I could make a lasting memory of it.

For years, I had treated the absence of memory as evidence that the loss somehow counted less. Therapy was the first time somebody gave me permission to consider the opposite. What if something could shape your whole life even if you couldn’t remember it happening? It was an extraordinary relief to have somebody tell me that what had happened was, actually, enormous. I had spent most of my life carrying something while simultaneously insisting it weighed nothing.

Terms and Conditions Apply

For a long time, I was fairly certain I didn’t want children.

I had very good reasons. Children were hard work. They were expensive. They changed relationships. And why would anybody deliberately create a person they loved beyond measure when the world had already demonstrated exactly how capable it was of hurting people?

Naturally, I did not phrase it like this.

I simply had standards.

Before I could contemplate having a child, I needed to be financially secure, married, in a completely loving and stable relationship, fulfilled in my career, sufficiently travelled and generally satisfied that I had completed everything I wanted to do first.

People say there is never a perfect time to have a baby.

I disagreed.

There was a perfect time. It was simply located at the end of an obstacle course of my own design.

In hindsight, the strategy was rather clever. If I made the conditions difficult enough, perhaps

I would never have to confront the much more frightening question underneath them.

What if I actually wanted to be a mum?

Then I met my husband.

We discussed children on about our third date, at which point I produced some version of my terms and conditions. Over time, maddeningly, he and our relationship started ticking the boxes one by one.

Soon, I realised I wanted a family with him.

Once we decided to try, I assumed I would have some time to get my head around the enormity of that decision. You had to try for a baby, after all. It could take months. Years.

Instead, we came home from our honeymoon and I was pregnant almost immediately.

It was wonderful. It was also slightly quicker than the psychological runway I had planned for myself.

We told our families straight away because my husband’s mum was receiving palliative care.

Four days after we told her, she died.

So at the exact moment I was becoming a motherless mother, my husband became motherless too.

What If the Body Remembers?

During pregnancy, I read Matrescence and came across a section on microchimerism: the phenomenon of cells passing between mother and baby during pregnancy and remaining in the body afterwards.

I cried when I read about it.

For somebody whose grief had always been defined by the absence of memories, there was something deeply comforting about the idea that a relationship could leave a physical trace.

My cells had been in my mum. Some tiny part of her may still be in me.

For most of my life, I had thought memory was the evidence I was missing.

Suddenly, perhaps it wasn’t.

We chose not to find out the sex of our baby, although I was completely convinced I was having a girl.

Of course I was.

In my grief-riddled brain it made perfect sense: motherless mother has daughter. I would do the hair brushing and the school gates and all the tiny pieces of ordinary mothering I had spent my life observing from a distance. I would give her everything I had never had.

Without quite admitting it to myself, I think I had imagined that having a daughter would let me experience the relationship I had missed from the other side. I could be the mother this time. But that beautiful idea frightened me too, because every loving thing I did for her might show me something I had lost. Until then, mothers and daughters had always been something I could observe at arm’s length. Motherhood was about to remove that distance.

Then our baby arrived.

A boy.

Ziggy Atwood.

There was no gender disappointment. I had wanted a child and I adored him. But I did have to wonder why I had written such an elaborate story for a daughter who had never existed.

And very quickly I realised there was something freeing about having a son.

He wasn’t a second attempt at my childhood. I didn’t have to give another little girl everything I had once needed and call that healing. There were no do-overs to perform and no old story. I needed him to correct.

He was simply Ziggy.

And I could simply be his mum.

And Then I Became the Mum

Of course I wish my mum were here.

Pregnancy, birth and those early months contain an extraordinary number of moments when you want your mother. Not a mother figure. Not somebody kind and maternal.

Your mum.

There is only one person who knew you in exactly the form you are now holding in your own arms. One person who carried you, gave birth to you and knew you before you knew yourself.

I wanted that person.

I still do.

Motherless mothers often talk about the absence of a village, and I understand it. I don’t have a mum or a mother-in-law. But practical help has never been the absence that has felt most significant to me.

For years, I struggled to recognise myself in other motherless mothers’ stories because so many of them had memories. Their mothers cooked particular meals, wore particular perfume, said particular things, drove them mad in particular ways.

They knew what they missed.

I didn’t.

Then I became a mum, and something strange started happening.

I began finding out.

The cuddle after a bad nap. The instinct to pick him up when he cries. Knowing what he wants from a particular sound he makes. Bedtimes. Bath times. Kissing the top of his head for absolutely no reason other than it happens to be there.

All the microscopic acts of love that would barely merit mentioning in another life.

And suddenly I understood: this is what a childhood is made of.

Motherhood was showing me what I had missed, but it was also doing something I hadn’t anticipated at all. It was making me think about my mum not only as the person I lost, but as the mother who knew she was going to leave.

I look at Ziggy and cannot comprehend knowing I only had the best part of two years with him. I cannot imagine knowing I would never see his adult face. I wouldn’t know what made him laugh at ten or what worried him at sixteen. I wouldn’t know who he fell in love with, what work he chose, what kind of man he became.

I cannot imagine knowing I wouldn’t be there for the birthdays, the heartbreaks or all the ordinary days in between. That I wouldn’t get to pick him up when he needed me or remind him, over and over again in a thousand boring little ways, that he was loved.

For most of my life, my mum’s death was something that happened to me. She was the mother I lost.

Now I understand that I was also a child she had to leave.

The Age My Mum Never Got Past

I’m 33 now. My mum died at 36. It is hard not to put those numbers beside each other. For most of my life, 36 sounded properly grown-up. Now it is three years away, and yes, I wonder whether I will outlive her. I know her age has no bearing on the length of my own life, but grief has never been particularly interested in a rational argument.

Approaching her age has also made me realise that adulthood is not what I thought it was.

As a child, I assumed grown-ups had somehow graduated into people who knew what to say, what to do and how to cope when life went terribly wrong. Then you grow up and discover there is no graduation ceremony. You are still you, older, hopefully wiser, with more direct debits, but still working things out as you go.

That has changed the way I see my dad too.

There are things I wish he had done differently, and times I needed protecting and wasn’t protected. Becoming an adult hasn’t made those things less true, but it has made room for another truth alongside them. He had lost his wife and was left raising a very small child while grieving himself, without the life either of them had expected or planned for. The mundane requirements of adulthood did not disappear because something terrible had happened. He still had to get up, go to work, keep a roof over our heads and somehow continue.

There was no manual for his experience, or for my mum’s, and rather inconveniently there isn’t one waiting for the rest of us either. That does not make every decision excusable, or mean children should absorb the consequences of them. It simply means I understand now that everybody is living their own life for the first time. That knowledge has given me something I didn’t have as a child: empathy without needing to rewrite the past.

So, What Do I Miss?

Motherhood hasn’t fixed my grief, but it has changed it.

I had no blueprint for becoming a mum. No mother I had watched closely enough to borrow from, no familiar routines I consciously wanted to recreate, no version of motherhood I could point to and say, I’ll do it like that. If I’m honest, there was a small part of me that wondered whether not having had a mum would somehow make me less equipped to be one.

Turns out, motherhood has been one of the most instinctive things I have ever done. The way I hold him, comfort him, make him smile, know when something is wrong, build our little rituals and make our home feel safe. None of it feels borrowed. It is all me. And I realised quickly something I am almost embarrassed to say so plainly: I am a good mum. I know that deep down.

Becoming Ziggy’s mum has been the becoming of me. It has given me a love I could never have imagined, but that love has not dissolved the grief. If anything, it has made the shape of it clearer. I know now what it is to love a child, which means I understand more deeply both what I lost and what my mum had to leave behind.

Maybe I didn’t inherit a blueprint, but I don’t think I started from nothing either. I like to believe some part of my mum lives on in me, not just in cells or genetics, but in the way I love my son. I may not remember being mothered by her, but perhaps some of what she gave me survived anyway.

And I am absolutely certain she would be beaming with pride at the woman I became. Not because I emerged untouched, or because I handled everything perfectly, but because I navigated a life without her that was at times incredibly difficult and still found my way here, with grace, with dignity, and with an enormous capacity to love.

I would still give almost anything for one completely ordinary day with her. Becoming a mother has not made me need her less.

But it has made me feel closer to her.

For the first time in my life, I don’t feel as though I am trying to understand motherhood entirely from the outside.

I am living it.

And somehow, I think she is living on in it too.