Finding the Form with Megan Beadle

I can’t take credit for the idea of a full moon party on a wildflower farm where ladies from the Barrie area go to let loose. In fact, I stole the inspiration from my own generous mother. This fact adds further commentary to this story about the nature of motherhood, but I’ll let you decide exactly what that commentary is.

On a weekend visit home to see my parents, I was surprised when my mom wasn’t with my dad in the passenger seat of their trusty blue van “Gurty” to pick me up from the GO train station.

When I inquired about her whereabouts (she is usually too excited to see me to wait at home), my father said that she wasn’t feeling well. “She partied just a little too hard last night,” he said, as he pulled onto the 401.

I thought he was joking.

When I strolled into their cute blue-doored bungalow, my mother was laying on the couch with the curtains of her bay window closed (very unusual indeed since she loves natural light and spying on neighbours), a book laying open on her face which wasn’t being read and was instead being worn as a sun guard, and a gigantic glass of water, a mug of tea, and half a glass of orange juice all within reach on her Bangladeshi-trunk side table (acquired from one of many world travels from postings abroad). And there was Leo, too, their black, furry French water dog laying between her body and the pillows of the floral couch. He barked happily twice but was reluctant to do his joyful greeting dance with me today, where he jumps around you on hind legs, full body bouncing and tongue lolling. Instead, concern and adoration were obvious in his unwillingness to leave my mother’s side while she was ailing, his head pivoting between his protective duties to her and his excitement about my return.

My mother groaned, the dog whined. Mom pulled the book off her face. “I’m hung over!” she announced.

It’s not that my mom doesn’t drink. She does. She is known to have a glass of wine (or two, sometimes three), to dance at parties, to host like a champ, but never in my lifetime had I witnessed her hungover until this day. She is one for everything in moderation. And she is tough. She has been known to command a classroom in the throes of Dengue fever and to horseback ride across a desert in Egypt with a freshly broken ankle.

She sat up, smoothing her orange galabia over black leggings, reaching out for me to come sit with her.

“I was at a full moon party with the ladies. On a wildflower farm. I stayed up till dawn!“

“Excuse me?” I said.

In my defense, thinking of your sweet, organized mother letting loose, gallivanting in a field of sunflowers, dancing and drinking under a blue moon, is a tad jarring at first. Not that you haven’t seen her shake her groove-thing at the Mariposa music festival, but this seems different somehow. Us children tend to think we are the ones who should be out causing mischief and partying with mayhem, until we consider that our parents are full-fledged and complicated human beings who also enjoy having fun and living to the fullest. Particularly my adventurous, world-traveling parents who grew up in the sixties.

*A NOTE ABOUT MY MOTHER*

My mother is fearless. She grew up in Pickering, Ontario, with a dream of one day going to Africa. She met my father on Valentine’s Day on a bus in 1969 at the age of nineteen, fell in love, and six months later they were married. A year later they were living in Tanzania. Together, my parents had seventeen postings all over the world, while raising four children. Fifty-two years later, you can still catch them making out (which is gross, but also kinda cute). My mother was an international school teacher, a librarian, and an avid reader. She is also an author: a memoirist. She loves adventure, her home, and her people. Also her dog, Leo, obviously.

I should never have been remotely surprised that she went to a full moon party on a wildflower farm. That one’s on me. Her vitality cannot be confined and she will keep you guessing!

My mother’s experience was the seed. Albeit, the seed and the setting only. Though there is a flower farm where dance parties happen in the Barrie region, it is not the flower farm in my story nor is it technically a full moon party. Though my mother may have partied, may have experienced her own grief, may even have lost a child, and though my mother served as inspiration for my idea of what a mother is, the mother in the story is not my mother. The daughter in the story is nothing like her daughter, my sister, or our story of loss; My sister lived into her thirties and died from cancer. Though Lake Couchiching exists, there was, as far as I know, no skinny-dipping involved, and if there was, my mother would never tell on her friends, who are not the ladies in this story. Sadly, Susan does not exist (though her spirit is very much alive in some of the women I know).

Inspired by, blooming from, “Wildflower Ladies” is what happens when you let your imagination run away with you and you happen to have a wild imagination. Once I pictured these vivacious women partying in a sea of undulating tulips and sunflowers and roses and strawflowers, spinning and crying and letting loose by the fire, drinking and hula-hooping and commiserating (no men allowed), their stretch marks and lived bodies on display under moonlight, how could I not wish them into existence?

Then, I added a sprinkle of my own thoughts about motherhood and being a woman, a dollop of my own grief from losing ones I love and ones I’ll never get to meet, a dash of my own experience as a daughter with a mother who loved me and my siblings unconditionally, and a measure of what she taught me about being strong and brave and courageous.

Then, the story took shape; Like a dandelion, tough and hardy, grounded but with reaching roots, whimsical and made for wishing upon. I wrote it in one sitting, letting it flow like a river, like tracing the curves on the body of a beautiful woman. And then there was editing, and submissions, and rejections (in all about six, with about half personal) until the acceptance from The New Quarterly landed in my inbox. I was thankful, and it felt instinctively like the right home, the perfect fit.

This story is my mother’s favourite of anything I’ve written (she reads everything I write—even the steamy stuff—and is one of my first readers and editors). She graciously gave me permission to use her experience as the fodder for fiction. I hope I did her credit because I wrote this piece for the moms, but mostly for her, the inspiring woman who raised me and my siblings. For all the labour and care, the compassion and commitment that went unacknowledged or underappreciated, for all the times I forgot to say thank you, Please forgive me? I see you, mom. And I love you.

Megan Beadle is an emerging writer and freelance editor from Toronto. Her writing highlights include being published in The Antigonish Review, having a cover story for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, getting picked as the winner by Catherine Hernandez for the Room Magazine Short Story competition in 2019, and recently getting an OAC recommender grant from Anansi Press.

Photo by Aaron Burden