There: the only thing mothers should be

There was no Facebook eulogy to my mother this weekend. No picture of us having a cream tea, or roast lunch. I sent no flowers and didn’t bother with a card. She isn’t here, as usual, and that’s the story of my life.

She’s not, like for some of my close friends, sadly passed away. I could get on a plane and see her if I felt the urge, but a family ticket to Florida will break the bank. In some respects it’s worse, although perhaps you’d disagree if like my best friend Kate, you’d watched your beloved mother rot from breast cancer. But my mum decided to leave me. Perhaps it was for good reason. God knows, I don’t believe in free will. But the hole it’s left in my life when she walked out, cannot be reasoned away.

I remember it well. I was having a tantrum, red and slimy of face, I’d probably not had enough sleep. In any case, I was the age for it. Perhaps it was the final straw – the details are hazy. There was an affair, a violent row, her own fractured childhood brought up by her beloved grandmother. Whatever, I remember I was shut in my room, in one of those mock tudor houses built in the 1930s where the door handles were two thirds of the way up; toddler proof doors that made escape impossible. I think of that door handle often; willing our 90s new build to have such toddler proof doors back when Jonah was in the midst of his cot-escaping Houdini phase. But fire regulations no longer allow them. In any case, I eventually screamed myself to sleep, and when I woke up: poof, she was gone.

The next time we saw her, it was our birthday; my sister Katie and me, born 12 months apart in the gloomiest month of the year. I remember her gabbling in her Canadian accent, smelling of Friday nights for years to come: Chanel Number 5 and Silk Cuts mingled with car interior, about Victoria Plum, and birthday cake. Or was it Strawberry Shortcake? Both early 80s icons from my late babyhood that seem to weigh on my soul like stones. In any case, it was jolly – after the two hour drive to get where she had gone. My memory has been sharpened by round cornered photos of the event. Katie and me gone silly on pink sugar icing, hanging off the sofa with our hair all upside down, sitting at the head of the table in a room full for kids. I don’t think we ever met those kids again. Wherever mum had rounded them up from, I don’t know, but that weekend she’d clearly performed miracles.

In and out she would flout, once every three weeks. It became a mantra. High days and holidays, it seemed like no bad things at first. And later on, it was a breath of fresh air from the stifling atmosphere at home. Don’t get me wrong, Mum’s replacement, Jane, all hippy hair, and pottery, was quickly made and tried her best. She had puppets, and stories brought home from the nursery school where she worked. The Faraway Tree, and Famous Five, Narnia and Lord of the Rings. Stories I read now to Jonah and Ava. She brought home play equipment too – swings and slides for our huge 80s garden, but then Dad made her cut her hair, and she cut ours at the same time leaving us with boyish bobs and a sour taste in our mouths, that never quite went away.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my mum but my life has been marked by her absence. It is what defines me. When all is said and done, it is what brings me to tears of self-pity, even when I’m actually sad about something else.

She was there for the good bits and always made sure we had whatever we wanted – she got me riding lessons, birthday bracelet charms, tea and cakes at Polly’s Tea Room, walks in the country with my dog. Good memories all, and other less visible things too – a broader outlook: more upper middle class than I got at home, with lawyers and stock brokers and ad men as role models rather than the diet of technicolour musicals I was fed on at home; the high flying children of my overbearing stepfather, once a charismatic ogre, although even the shadow he cast on my childhood seems smaller now. She gave me permission not to fulfil some archaic notion of what mothers “should be;” a trailblazing spirit that didn’t care what people thought, one that enabled her to run her own business and marry more often than she should have, to drink gin and tonic rather than tea and biscuits. And self-reliance, if growing up too young can be called that, although, at 33, I can acknowledge that I married young because in part, I needed a parent. Perhaps it’s because she never gave us what we needed, or made herself available for the bad bits.

That’s not entirely Mum’s fault. Dad was being awkward too, by then – a hangover from a lifetime of playing the good guy: the young dad who brought up his girls until they were ungrateful teenagers who idolised their feckless mama, when he decided he’d had enough. He eventually got rid of Jane, bought her a house and married a woman he met on a business trip in South Korea. But before that, he’d got rid of me. He couldn’t cope with us growing up, I think, and sending me to live with my “bloody mother” at 15 was his way of accepting I was no longer a little girl.

It didn’t last long, living with mum, despite the school change, mid GCSEs – a traumatic attempt at latent fitting in that cut me adrift from my friends as well as my family. My step dad – my dad’s old boss, didn’t really like having a teenager around, so soon enough I upped and left to live with my first boyfriend who was nice but overwhelmed. We muddled through it, although the chain of events it set in motion were to scar me for some time.

But we all still speak to each other now, except for my step dad, who can no longer speak at all. He had a stroke after I moved in. We were all under too much stress unhelped by shouting matches and slamming doors – he as well as I.

For a time, it was hardly surprising I  did the things I did to get by. I may have married young, but it was my way of making bloody sure I put down roots strong enough for them not to come back up; to not make the same mistakes as Mum and Dad, however much they are just a product of circumstance, era and genes, although I’ve made a fair few of my own.

Mum moved to Florida shortly after Jonah was born. There were times when I needed her, but I got through it. She comes back periodically, notably when Ava was born, spending six weeks living in, changing nappies and knitting cardies. Proper Grandma stuff, but I know it’s not really her style, and for the most part, I wouldn’t want it to be.

But the summers get shorter each year. I’m not angry. I’m just sad. I’ve spent a lifetime missing my mum, so much so that I’ve disengaged. I can’t even call her because it’s not like I can just pop round for a cuppa – or more likely half a bottle of white wine –  so what’s the point?

I spent this Mother’s Day with the kids, Katie and Jane, at a National Trust Park I went to first with my Dad. We had a splendid day.

Everything is just as it always has been, and it’s not going to change. But I’m all right, so I can’t really blame anyone for anything. It’s just the way it is, and I guess I wouldn’t want it any other way. I just know time is short, and I don’t want to be left with the sense that I never really told my mum how I feel. That I love her and really just want her to come home.