Saturday 2 April 2011

happy mothers day

"chicken wife," original papercut by Sarah Bell
Happy Mothers Day, everybody!
Just to wish all the mums who may read this a happy day...

I'm lucky to have a child still living at home to say this to me,
and bring me coffee and a pressie in the morning, and it's always a special time.

Mother's Day this year will be rather poignant though, as it will be the first year when I shan't be picking up the phone to ask my own mum if she has received her card and package in the post,
all those hundreds of miles away in the North of England.

At teatime on the last day of last year I received a phone call to say she had been rushed into hospital. The following hours were awful: hanging on the line waiting for each text and call from my sister who was with her. Mum died suddenly, twenty minutes into the New Year of 2011, whilst all the celebratory fireworks were popping and fizzing over the night sky.

I don't want to linger on that time here, and it's still difficult to believe that she's not in her little flat in our hometown, always ready to chat and dispense good advice and home remedies. I want to say something positive rather than disheartening on Mother's Day.

Mum: I'll always love you.

I wish , wish , wish I'd made the time to see you more often. But when I did it was wonderful.
You were wonderful.

One of my great ambitions is to be as good a mum as you were for me and my sister, but I know I can never come close to the example you gave me. But I'll keep trying.

Mum was only 68 when she died. I'd expected we might still perhaps another ten years together.... Ten years of trips up north to visit her; take her out for lunch or a night away; have a little potter around Clitheroe, or St Annes or Southport. Of sitting with her as a matching pair in the chairs by the fire after tea reading the local paper, listening to the radio, (and sharing an illicit bar of chocolate before bedtime.)

Well it turned out that those extra years weren't to be, but she has left me a lifetime of memories as priceless and rich as a tapestry.

Thank goodness for mums. Let's cherish them.

Happy Mother's Day, all....















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