I’ve been thinking about my memories of my mum quite a bit as I’ve been processing the anniversary of her death. As I’ve been doing that I’ve realised that many of my memories of her divid into different groups. Her as my mum, as grandma to Zac, as she was to everyone else and as a woman of faith. I suspect the last two can’t really be divided up but there’s thoughts I’ve decided to try and write down and it’s easiest to breakdown the thoughts. So these are my memories of her as my mum.
It’s been a year since my mum, Sue, died. It was very quickly after her death that who she was started to change as people shared their memories and thoughts about her. She became a different woman. BUT I have also tried to remember how she was to me. I’ve not wanted to have rose tinted glasses in my memory of her. I want to remember her as real. As how our relationship was to me not how it was to others.
The simple fact of the matter was that for MANY years my mum drove me mad! Bear with me on this. It’s not that I didn’t love her and I look back now and see what she was doing and can appreciate much of it more now that I am a mum BUT she drove me mad.
As a child I remember finding it hard that she wasn’t well. That wasn’t her fault and I do remember appreciating that she was around in the school holidays and when I wasn’t well. I can think of many occasions when I lay on her bed with my head on stomach when I was ill listening to her tummy gurgle and finding it funny! I also remember hating being different because it was dad that took me to school and not my mum like everyone else. It wasn’t her fault but as a child that’s not the way you see it.
Mum wanted to know my friends and would hang around with me and them – I particularly remember this from summer camps when I’d lament that she wouldn’t just spend time with her friends! I often felt that I didn’t have the space to be me when she was around. Who knows if that was because the me I wanted to be in those days wasn’t a mum appropriate me or if it was just that it wasn’t a me I wanted to share with her?! But that wasn’t her fault.
I look back now and I so appreciated all that she did for our wedding but at the time I remember feeling like I just wanted to buy a dress not have one made by mum. I just wanted a wedding cake that was order and not made by mum. I think it went back to having a lot of mum-made things when I was younger and it linking in with knowing we had no money and being bullied at school (even if it wasn’t specifically for the things she made). It’s funny how our brains link things together and it’s only when we look back that we can see things clearly and that the hours she put into our wedding were a massive sacrifice for her.
Don’t get me started on when I was pregnant, one day she put her hand on my bump, something no one but Ross had ever done, and I don’t remember what I said but i remember her response being about it being her Grandchild and me saying it’s my body. I think because years of infertility had sometimes been made harder because of her stories about other peoples babies or people becoming grandparents I shut down to her at times. That makes me sad.
I’ve often thought that things started to get better when I had Zac but actually it was about 9 months before that when she came to stay while Dad was away and helped me paint our bedroom. I don’t know why things started to change but they did. -I probably grew up a bit!!
For the 18 months between Zac being born and mum dying things vastly improved. It would often be her that reassured me after Zac hadn’t gained weight properly and who pointed out that they left me to ‘cry it out’ did I remember it?! She helped with me going back to work for my 3 months notice period, ALWAYS followed Zac’s routine knowing that I had the best understanding of Zac and just generally encouraged and helped.
So for me, my memories of her as a mum are so mixed. There are a lot of happy memories mixed in with a lot of frustrations as I was growing up. But my memories end on a positive. Mum was a mum who wanted to know her children and wanted to help. She said to me the last time I saw her that she wished she was one of those mums who could do more, particularly financial but actually in the last 18 months of her life, I can see just what a good mum she was and as I look back over the whole of my life I can see it was there just unappreciated.