Motherless Day
Mother’s Day lands on my mum’s birthday this year, which gives it extra poignancy. She’s been dead for 6 years now, and never got to see my wife become a mum, which was her dying wish, if you can have such a thing. (I imagine not dying is high on most people’s wish lists, as they turn to face the great beyond.)
And as my kids cling to my wife and wish her a happy Mother’s Day, with handmade cards from nursery craft cupboards and heavy, invisible guiding hands of key workers, it’s got me thinking about what my mum was like as a mum. Pretty special, you’ll be unsurprised to hear me say.
There’s no maternity leave when you run your own business, but there’s some salvation when that business is a corner shop with a corner to put your kids in. From there, she juggled us – three kids in quick succession; a husband and a mother-in-law, who in the great Indian tradition were cared for by her like children too. Fresh chapatis every day, homemade yoghurt resting in the airing cupboard.
We also saw, from that corner, how she treated everyone who came into the shop like family too. Engaging with them like they were the only person that mattered in the moment, when she must have had a million things on her mind. You could say, incredible customer service. I think now it was personality.
She was generous, like her mum. Mention, in passing, that you liked her shirt, and she’d genuinely offer it to you. There should be a saying for that. And if it wasn’t shirts off her back, it was blankets on our beds, hand knitted in what spare time she had, casting off with the TV on. She gave them to us, our friends, friends-of-friends. I saw recently, on Facebook, that she’d given one to my sister’s husband’s brother-in-law’s mum. Knitted memories of her, stitches in time.
Her generosity took on a sense of urgency towards the end. One of the million things on her mind was that she only had weeks to live. It was a final generosity, really: thinking of us, not having to sort through so much of her stuff when she passed.
As I sort through my memories of her today and write this online – the modern-day equivalent of a tattoo on my arm (with arguably more permanency), until the data centres in the desert are destroyed, and this post is lost forever: I love you, mum. Happy Mother’s Day.
