Mother's Day

Mothering Sunday, to give it its proper title, marks the halfway point of Lent. The halfway point of the slog through the days of denial, of sacrifice, of fasting. The day where the end draws into sight, the joys of Easter just over the hill. The day when you should visit your home parish, your mother church, and historically, for many young men and women away in domestic or farming service, your mother.
Of course, fewer people observe Lent each year and the original point of Mothering Sunday is lost in a sea of greetings cards, floral bumf, and internet offers. Just this week, the internet has suggested I should buy my mum flowers, clothes, wine, gig tickets, and cookies.
I would buy her a book. A book of social history, or food, or better still, a mix of both. A book she wouldn't have seen in her semi-regular trips to the shop, or advertised in Sainsbury's magazine. I would buy her a book I know she would love, the sort that she would take to bed, packet of crisps in one hand, book in the other. I would buy her something like the history of the playground I saw in Jarrolds on her birthday, that made my heart hurt with longing that I would never get to give it to her.
I would buy her a card and I would write how grateful I am, and how much I love her, and hope somehow that words would be enough. I would take it round, and all her cards from all her seven children would be lined up in a row on the windowsill, and she'd be nagging my dad to go and see his mother before it got any later, and tea would be prepared, and she would be content.
That is what I would do if I still had a mother.

But I don't. And I don't like today. Today hurts.

When your mother dies, you don't merely grieve for the person. The wonderful, hilarious, intelligent woman I grew up with, who was my guardian, my educator, sculptor of my life and my personality, my friend. How I grieve for her. Her phone number in my 'last called' contacts falls further and further down the list and will never come back up. Her things are still where she left them at home, but they don't move a few inches to the left or right, the way things do when they are in use. I still expect to see her when I go in my dad's garden. I call it my dad's now - it was always "mum's house". Although we have inherited the look of her, her voice and her image are now only in recordings. The smell of her lingers in her clothes, but it will never be replenished.

In a million tiny pinpricks and sledgehammers of pain, I grieve for Jo, a woman who happened to be my mum, who was hundreds of things to hundreds of people.

But I grieve for the loss of my mother, for the loss of a mother's love, for the loss of a mother's guidance. For the loss of the person who was there first, who recognised my presence before I had a brain, who felt my first fledgling movements, and who knew me best. For the loss of the stability and foundation you only have through good parenting, through good grounding. Many people are not lucky enough to experience this type of attachment, but I did. We did.

I feel at sea: lost and abandoned and young and frightened. The fear on a child's face when they lose their mother in a shop momentarily, only magnified. When I was little, I was plagued by nightmares, and I would pad up to my parents' room and try and wake my mum up to tell her. She would rarely manage to wake up - poor woman was shattered - so I would sit by her head, and snuggle in to her until I felt safe enough to go silently back to bed. And that is what I long to do, to go and snuggle up to her for a bit until I feel safe enough to go back into the world.

Five months tomorrow. I feel like it has been five years and five minutes. But what really bothers me is that this is for always. That she won't come back. I can't have her back. Maybe if I wait a really long time, and be a really good girl, maybe we will be back together. Maybe.

When Mum was dying, she said she didn't mind dying herself, but she minded terribly about how it would affect us. She knew what it would do to us. I didn't mind Mum dying too much in the end. It felt very natural for her to die. It felt very unnatural to try and prolong her life. There comes a point when it doesn't feel wrong anymore, much as when you are pregnant, there comes a point where you really want it to all be over. So many parallels between entering and leaving the world.

But this grief, this all consuming and powerful grief: that's something to mind. That's something to tear you apart. Particularly on Mother's Day.