Neither of Us Yielded

My Mother’s Independence

4 min read10 hours ago

When my eldest turned sixteen, my father died.

The two events remain fastened together in my memory — one life edging towards its own assertions, the other receding, almost apologetically, from the world. With my father’s passing, my mother was left alone in the old house — a house already thirty years lived in, its walls seasoned with routine and memory. She would not leave it. Independence, for her, was not merely temperament; it was identity.

As the eldest, the obligation came to me without ceremony. There was no family conference, no formal entrustment. Such duties, in our families, are not negotiated. They descend — quietly, but with weight.

And so began what I can only call a stealth existence. My days were claimed by work in Sydney; my evenings by four children whose lives were gathering pace — examinations, illnesses, ambitions, small crises magnified by youth. And threaded through it all, across oceans and time zones, was my mother in Sri Lanka. Medical appointments. Repairs to the ageing house. Bank matters. The small anxieties that gather force after dusk.

Once a year, I made the journey back. Two weeks at a time. Every year, until she died a decade later. My father had trusted me with this. He never said it outright, but there had been, between us, an understanding. He knew I would care for her. And I knew that he knew. That was sufficient.

The visits were acts of devotion complicated by logistics. Leave had to be negotiated, school holidays aligned, family events rearranged. There was always the quiet arithmetic of bank balances — the cost of airfares, repairs, medicines. Care, I discovered, is sustained not only by sentiment but by planning.

My mother, Susan Jayawardane, was sixty-eight when my father died. Age came to her gradually, then all at once. She slowed; she tired more easily; yet she resisted the idea of frailty as though it were an insult. My brother’s wife, a doctor, became her medical adviser from afar, conducting consultations by telephone from Canada. It required diplomacy. Doctors in Sri Lanka are accustomed to authority; guidance from overseas was not always welcome. She nevertheless took over much of the medical administration. My brother, with younger children and mortgages and the long geography between Canada and Sri Lanka, could not come often.

So the physical presence fell to me.

And yet, for all that, my mother did not depend on me in the way others might have. For her logistical needs — withdrawing cash, managing minor errands — she turned to my cousins. There was pride in that choice. She would accept assistance, but not surrender control.

It struck me that this was not new.

When I turned eighteen, the first declaration of my adulthood was practical: “Wash your own clothes.” There was no ceremony. No congratulation. Just instruction. I did not wash them as frequently as she would have preferred, but I learned. It was no easy task in those days — drawing water from the well, scrubbing soap into the cloth by hand, striking the garments against stone until the dust and sweat yielded. Independence, I learned then, was labour.

Yet even as she insisted on self-sufficiency, I remained dependent in ways less visible. I relied on her cooking. She fed my friends when they descended on the house unannounced, as boys do. She sustained us without commentary.

There were moments of severity. Once, in anger, she struck me across the face. I remember the metallic taste of blood from my nose. And I remember, more vividly, her expression when she saw it — the shock, the immediate remorse. She wept. Authority dissolved into tenderness in an instant.

And there were moments of unguarded intimacy. When an insect found its way into a place that caused a boy acute panic and embarrassment, it was she whom I called. She came without hesitation, practical, composed, maternal in the most elemental sense. Such incidents are rarely spoken of, yet they define the texture of dependence.

It is perhaps this history that complicated our annual disputes. I wanted to move her to a smaller, modern house — safer bathrooms, manageable spaces, no stairs. I spoke the language of practicality. She heard the language of displacement.

She chose the old house — its vast rooms, its encroaching garden, its inconveniences. It was not the structure she defended, but her sovereignty. In that house she was not a widow under supervision, nor an ageing parent repositioned for efficiency. She was herself.

And so our arguments traced familiar ground each year: my concern framed as responsibility; her resistance framed as dignity. Beneath it lay something older — the long apprenticeship of a son learning independence under her discipline, and now attempting, imperfectly, to guard hers.

Neither of us entirely yielded. But neither of us withdrew our trust.

And now, when I reflect on my own ageing, I see that it is not so dissimilar from my mother’s values. What once struck me as inconvenient — the insistence on independence, the refusal to be managed, the stubborn maintenance of a life lived in ritual — now looks different in the softer light of understanding. What once seemed impractical has become, in memory at least, compassionate and whole.

Independence, I see now, was never a convenience she craved, but a dignity she defended. In that, she taught me something that only time could reveal: that the measures of practicality are never the same as the measures of a life.