Every Mother’s Day with Mum became an argument.
Although a bit like the annual Christmas argument over the Royals when Mum wanted to watch the Queen’s Speech and I didn’t, the Mother’s Day one was relatively new.
About five years ago, Mum started to call it Mothering Sunday and made a big deal of my continuing to call it what it had always been throughout my childhood. We didn’t know then that this was the American version and that Mum’s new affectation was the correct one for the UK, nor will I ever know what precipitated the change; it was just another thing to add to the list of her increasing contrariness that, basically, was the opposite of whatever I thought or said.
It was always a special day growing up. The day before, we would go as a family on our usual trip into Newport town and have ice cream in the Kardomah café, where Mum chose two different types of coffee beans and had them ground and securely packed in brown paper bags. I hated the smell almost as much as I hated the smell of hops from the brewery when we ventured into Cardiff; to this day, I cannot bear to be around the smell of coffee.
Usually, this was followed by Mum parking Dad, Nigel and me in Howells’ make-up department while she went off exploring for three hours. The day before Mother’s Day, however, was always different because we got to disappear with Dad to buy the “secret” presents for the next morning. I specifically remember a grey smoked glass vase, not least because Mum dropped it and broke it a week after. She couldn’t stop crying. Nor could I. It had cost me five shillings, which must have been a year’s saved pocket money back then.
After that, we always played it safe and she had a purple potted hydrangea every year. During the past few years, if I have been out of the country, I sent her a hamper of smoked salmon goods. How she loved her fresh smoked salmon. When she was in hospital for what would turn out to be one of the last times, she nagged and nagged me about what I’d done with the salmon that was in the fridge.
Was it still there? Had the carers thrown it out? Why hadn’t I put it in the freezer? I told her I’d send her another hamper of flamin’ salmon, enough for her to have it every day; but no: she wanted that particular piece of salmon. She went on about it so much, I swear she’d probably even given the dead creature a name.
I used to take a long time choosing her card. She read the verses over and over, invariably crying at seeing how much she was loved actually written down. Little did I know that on March 31st last year, she had just 17 days to live. I had sent her the proverbial salmon hamper that she never even got to open because she was admitted to hospital for what would be the last time.
Inevitably, thoughts of Mum are uppermost in my mind as the first one without her arrives. A few weeks ago, I was in Poundland in Cardiff, excited that I’d found a pack of two Dove soaps for just £1. Pondering my cache, I turned a corner and there was a whacking great Mother’s Day display. I burst into tears, just as I had done in a store in December as I faced my first Christmas without her, Have Yourselves a Merry Little Christmas blaring out and making me sick with the sense of loss.
Mum enjoyed being a mother. She told me many times that when I was born, she just wanted to be alone with me and she was distraught when the nurses took me away when they needed to show the other mothers how to bath a baby; apparently, it was because I was so well behaved. I suspect herein lies the root of my obsessive-compulsive disorder about cleanliness.
We had a happy childhood. Trips to the seaside, ballroom dancing lessons and competitions (as a family, we all danced), cooking on a Saturday morning (all of us except Dad were pretty good cooks), late night “treats” when Mum suddenly decided to make toffee or Cornish pasties. My parents could not bear to leave us out of anything, and on the rare occasions they treated themselves to a Chinese takeaway, they would put a small amount on two saucers and deliver it to Nigel and me in bed. No food ever tasted so good as that late-night feast.
When one parent dies, the relationship with the other inevitably changes and although Mum was fiercely independent to the end (much to the physios’ consternation as she refused treatment when Emmerdale was on – which was often, and in the end, they sacked her), when Dad died in 1990 I felt the roles reverse.
I moved to Bath to be closer to Mum just six miles away and saw her several times a week. In recent years, as she became increasingly frail, she became more dependent not just on me but on other friends, and she hated growing old and being what she perceived as being a “burden”.
But she was still Mum. She didn’t know much about the minutiae of my life, but she knew me better than anyone. With a mother’s instinct, she knew when I was sad or hiding my emotions, and with that same instinct she knew not to pry; that I would tell all when the time was right.
She had a big heart, an enormous capacity for love and always said that her greatest fear was something happening to her children.
On her last day, I sat at the hospital bed, smoothing her always fine hair and talked to her as Mum. I told her I loved her and thanked her for being my mother and for everything she had done and been.
And, so comes to pass another “first” among the many others that accompany the first year of grief.
Happy Mothering Sunday, Mum.