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I didn't start grieving for my mother properly until I was maybe 16.

During my grief, I realised there was nothing I could do for my mother, but I did have a child.

I lost my mother when I was 7 and they put her in a mental hospital. My brother and I watched her being taken away in a strait jacket. That's something you never forget. And my stepmother was like in the movie 'Precious.' I couldn't handle it. So I said to myself, 'I don't have a mother. I don't need one. I'm going to let music be my mother.'

But I still always felt the absence of a mother.

I didn't grow up with my mother, and so losing her for real was like, some sort of latent childhood, some sort of unresolved issue. When she left for real, it was sort of like, I was done.

Even with my father and brother dying, I didn't quite process the grief.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

I was very close to my mother, and her death, which left a gaping hole in my life, has been very difficult for me and my father in a lot of ways.

I barely saw my mother, and the mom I saw was often angry and unhappy. The mother I grew up with is not the mother I know now. It's not the mother she became after my father died, and that's been the greatest prize of my life.

There's a part of me that never felt my mother abandoned me. I always felt that she did the right thing.