You don’t know what you got till it’s …come back. Learning to appreciate the here and now.

Sometimes, it takes losing something to really value what you have. Take Jonah’s head teacher, Melissa, who published her leaving letter just moments after I wrote her a note complaining about homework for infants. Calm, quirky in a good way, unobtrusive authority without a cult of personality marked her leadership. Now on sick leave, the ingratiating email sent by her temporary successor, Jonah’s teacher, John, got my back up. Framing her absence, while she deals with a “grave situation at home” as “a really good opportunity for me”, he opted to make clear that “a lot of things were going to change around here” at a school where people have been very happy with the way things were in the first place – except for the new homework policy. Suffice it to say, Jonah doesn’t like him very much.

This weekend, it took contemplating being without my mother that I realise how lucky I have been to have her. I’ve complained before about her not being around much. But she’s back now, moved home from Florida having had a quickie divorce from her partner of 15 years. She’s on her own, but Ma being Ma, she’s already got plans for a business – she had her own tech communications company back in the day, and, rarely short of a bob or two, she doesn’t like feeling the new found pinch of pensionerdom. She’s also got a lodger to make ends meet – an unwelcome (by me) addition to her house in Southampton that had just enough bedrooms to sleep us all. But needs must, and at least she’s got someone in the house in case, she like, falls or something. It’s not that she’s old exactly – but, ya know, she’s on her way. Her hearing is going, but the nips and tucks she’s succumbed to over the years have probably kept her looking more youthful that her body is starting to feel. When she said she was going for a mammogram today – the reason she couldn’t come back up to London with me and cover the sick child minder and go to the kids’ Harvest Festival – another guilt inducing excruciation I sat through in early years, but can’t afford the time off now the kids actually have lines to speak, dressed naturally, as vegetables – I got a spike of fear.

You see I haven’t had her living in the same country since before Jonah was born. Before that, I only ever lived with her briefly as a teen, for a tumultuous period after my dad kicked me out and I moved in with my boyfriend’s mum. I know the circumstances aren’t exactly ideal for her, but like Jonah’s power hungry teacher, excited about the prospect of gaining control while the erstwhile head is elsewhere, I’m thrilled to have her back. The thought of losing her again fills me with fear.

This weekend as I went down, alone, to visit my sister Katie, who lives down the road from Ma, I got a distinct sense that life is rushing past apace, and some of it hasn’t been all that great. But spending some time with her, I realised that, for once, things are really quite okay. For the first time in forever, Ma dropped us at the pub together, and we drank and reminisced and squabbled and I helped her home after she sprained her ankle toppling off her redunculous shoes she wears, she said to stop her legs from looking short (a hangover from the days when I called her short shins – but then I had a nose job at 20 after years of being called Squadgle) and there was this magic moment where three deer, a doe and two young uns, gambled past us on the back path to her little semi on a housing estate that backs onto parkland- and in that moment, everything felt kinda nice, and silly and sisterly and magical.

I fell asleep without brushing my teeth in her sequinned guest bed, having demolished the leftover party food from her daughters’ third birthday, and had nightmares about being made redundant while strippers in vertiginous shoes taunted me, tossing me a cupcake instead of my redundancy pay.

The next day, Katie took me shopping in her flash car, to the outlet centre in Portsmouth where I shopped in earnest, replacing worn out sheets, and mended clothes and shoes with holes in for shiny bright things, getting her a dress for her trouble. We went round to Ma’s for a roast, sunbathing our legs in the autumnal heat, ignoring the prospect of being spyed on a random bloke who now shares Ma’s house. By then, Katie and I were bickering again, but then, dynamics never really change do they?

As Ma dropped me off in the car at Southampton airport, I read about Lynda Bellingham’s decision to stop chemo, following breast cancer that had spread, knowing she had only weeks to live. As I kissed Ma goodbye, I knew that this golden weekend could be the last that we weren’t living in a new shadow. I hope to hell we get to enjoy the new found status quo for a long while to come yet.