OK argh so it's obviously Mother's Day (or Mothering Sunday if you want to be all traditional about it!) and so logically I thought I should write something about my Mum and I and how much she means to me blah blah blah! I was reading quotes earlier and there are so many about 'a mother knows her daughters heart, lives in her eyes, resides in her very soul' type stuff that to me, personally, just doesn't feel real. I adore my Mum, she probably doesn't feel that that is true a lot of the time, but I do, I love her in a way that is really beyond sitting here and putting into words on a blog and I love her in a way that is real and honest and takes account of who we are, how we've changed and all the ways we will never change.
My memories of my childhood and exact years and dates of what happened are fuzzy either through selective memory or through dementia but at some point, I think between the ages of 8 and 11 my Dad moved out of our home and there was just my Mum and I. My Dad still visited and was a very real presence in my life but essentially it was just us, figuring stuff out....and really, I was just a child so most of the time it was just her. Just my Mum making sure we ate and that the bills were paid and that I felt safe and happy and loved. As a kid you never appreciate it and she probably doesn't think I ever have, but I know it was tough, I know she sacrificed things for me and worked overtime and counted every penny and I know she never let me know how difficult things were, I remember her crying over a telephone bill once because I wouldn't stay off the bloody internet (yeah back when surfing the net on dial-up got charged at 5p a minute!) and realising just how tight things must be.
I feel like I should point out here that my Mum never wanted kids, I was a surprise, shall we say and that makes me appreciate more the efforts she made to be a good Mum or to try and raise me to be a good person. She taught me to read before I ever stepped foot in school, I was always the top reader in my class (although some of my teachers confiscated my reading materials, especially when I went through a True Crime phase around age 8!!) and reading has been one of the most valuable things in my life. 30 odd years later I have an English Degree and several English awards along the way....sometimes you sow a seed in a child and it impacts them forever.
So yeah, she was a good Mum to me, and we are incredibly close because for most of my teenage and young adult years there were just the two of us. I wasn't a big rebellious teenager, I wore strange clothes and dyed my hair pink and decided that I wanted my room painted black, but nothing major, we didn't have those typical big teen-parent arguments, although I'm sure I was moody for a fair while, in the same way I can be now! She gave me a lot of freedom really, when I think about it, I never had a bedtime or rules or chores to do (although I did have a paper round), she never smacked me or sent me to my room. The years blur now so I'm not sure how we got through them so smoothly, or maybe we didn't and she'll put me right, but here we are now, two people, older, a bit wiser maybe, still as close, I'd say, although no longer geographically so.
Our relationship continues to change I think, both of us now, I hope, have moved to a place where what we really want for the other is happiness. I don't know if it's maturity, I think it's possibly just letting go of things, of the belief that I'll outgrow my odd obsessions, that I'll run the world or lose 8 stone, my Mum letting go of the things that she wants for me and accepting that I live the life that I want for myself. As a parent I think you will always ask, is my child overweight because of me? Is my child single because of something I did or taught her? Firstly I think that once a child becomes an adult they are responsible for their own lives, their own weight and relationships, parents can't be blamed forever and secondly I think it's the wrong question, more important questions are 'Is my child happy?' 'Is my child confident?' 'Is my child a good person?' and if the answer is yes (at least the majority of the time!) then you did an amazing job and you succeeded where many, many fail.
So yes, here we are, we still argue, except now every argument is one we've already had before! I invariably get annoyed when she wants to get to the train station 3 hours before the train actually arrives and she is often subject to my random mood swings that occur for reasons she isn't privy to, but she ends up apologising anyway! I'm pretty much only moody with my Mum, I think you can tell when you truly trust someone loves you by your willingness to be a complete cow towards them and even know whilst you are doing whatever it is that you are doing, that you are being a complete cow and doing it anyway, because you know they'll be there and you know that their first response will be to try and help....that's love, helping someone whilst they are being a complete bitch!
So, to get back to my original point, if I had one, I don't think love between a mother and daughter is summed up in words about beautiful eyes and tender lillies! Love is holding a birthday party for your daughter when you hate every moment of it, but want her to be more social than you have been, love is accompanying your daughter to science fiction conventions you don't understand, love is accompanying your Mum to Elvis tributes that don't include any of his famous songs! Love isn't saying 'why are you travelling 1ooo's of miles to see two people off the TV?', love is saying 'I'll come with you'. Love is sitting in a library going through hundreds of slides to find random ancestors because your Mum is genealogy obsessed! Love is walking around a graveyard in the freezing wind to help her find one name. Love is acceptance of another, love is allowing another to feel that who they are is all they need to be.
My Mum always says I was supposed to do something great with my life. The doctor told her she wasn't pregnant when she was and by the time she knew she was actually having me it was too late to look at other options and on top of that she'd spent the previous months slapping her stomach against some piece of equipment at the gym to make it flatter (which might explain a lot!), so she thinks the universe wanted me to be born for a greater good. The fact that I'm not Prime Minister yet then is a source of disappointment, but I think she looks at it the wrong way, I think the universe did want me to be born for important things, I think it wanted me to be born so that the two of us temperamental, closed off souls could understand what it is to love another person, without fear or agenda, or even particular reason, I think it wanted to teach us to love and if it achieved that then I think there isn't really a greater good to be found.
Happy Mothers Day :)
That was a lovely post - I think you said what the rest of us think about our own mothers :-)
Posted by: Amanda | April 04, 2011 at 08:37 PM