Newspaper column all about Mother's Day
Social media has been filled with Mother’s Day messages over the weekend - in the UK, at least, because Mum’s Day is celebrated at different times around the globe. Anyway, I wrote a newspaper column about my lovely mum and it inspired a great many readers to send me messages. So I thought I’d put it up here for those who may be interested but who don’t live in the areas where the Western Morning News and Western Daily Press have their circulations…
I miss my mum. How many sons and daughters will be saying that this weekend? Millions, I guess, because once mum has gone to that great maternal kingdom in the sky, there’s never going to be anyone else who’ll come close to replacing her in that special caring, loving way only mothers can provide.
Needless to say, an occasion like Mother’s Day is going to highlight the sense of loss if you are someone whose mum has passed away, no matter how old you happen to be.
I wrote in this column how my mum died during Covid and I described the pathos and the despair of having to arrange the short and wholly insufficient funeral where just a small handful of us were able to gather to mark her passing under government restrictions.
That particular column would have been the first she’d failed to read since I started writing for this newspaper. My mum always read my “loads” of “old nonsense”. Whether she liked them is another thing. She often used to say I’d gone too far or been overly rude. And sometimes her memory differed hugely from my own - like the occasion when I recalled she’d been the first woman in our village to wear a bikini on the local beach.
“I’ve never been so embarrassed,” she growled. “Why did you have to tell everyone about that? And I wasn’t the first - I’m sure her-across-the-road had one before me.”
Which wasn’t true. My mum was the first to don a bikini on the rocky, muddy, but somehow lovely, Doniford Beach. Few people go there now, but in those days on hot summer evenings when the tide happened to be in, the entire village would decamp and walk one-and-a-half miles down the lane to the Somerset shoreline where family groups would gather to have picnics, fry sausages, swim and socialise under the low red cliffs. We’d walk with the rest of them, rolling the huge inflated tractor-tyre inner-tubes we used as dinghies, while mum and her friend Pearl would lug the heavy picnic things.
And I remember that first time mum wore a bikini down there on the Bristol Channel shingle because I recall that a lot of men seemed to stop by our beach-encampment for a chat.
Four decades later she was appalled I should mention such a thing in a newspaper. But, then, she didn’t understand why I’d written about the memory. It was because I was proud of her. She was a handsome woman - different to all the other mums. She stood out in a crowd, both in terms of her good looks and also her chatty open friendliness to one and all. I remember an older boy on that beach saying: “Your mum looks like that woman coming out of the sea in the James Bond film.”
I was too young to understand anything about the possible connotations of all that male interest - instead I just felt proud. Which, years later, was not something my mum could understand. To her the feeling of being proud was a one-way street. She was allowed to feel proud of her husband and sons, but she could never understand why anyone would feel the need to be proud of her.
Me and my mum spent a lifetime misunderstanding one another. In so many ways, she didn’t understand me, and I didn’t understand her. And we never talked about it because our relationship was formed back in the old days when emotions or feelings were not supposed to come out in the open.
My bet is that there’ll be plenty of other families who’ll recognise the syndrome…
Mothers do all the hard domestic work and the caring and the doting, while sons accept all the cooking and the cleaning and the motherly love without so much as a nod of thanks. Worse still, so many surly male youths generally take their bothersome, meddlesome, mums on sufferance rather than greet that love with anything like open arms.
If I am honest, I was one of those oicks. All too often, as the oldest son, I was rude to my mother and dismissive of her kindly attentions as she battled to get younger ones fed or off to bed or whatever. I really was probably like Harry Enfield’s dreadful Kevin the Teenager on TV.
My father was a calm intellectual chap with a wonderful sense of humour, and the young Hesp looked up to him with unfettered respect. Mum, who never read a book in her life, was down-to-earth in the extreme - a no-nonsense, workaday, busy person with an indomitable get-on-with-things attitude. She was, looking back, the powerhouse who allowed four difficult sons to not only exist day-by-day, but thrive. If it had been up to our dad alone, there’d have been anarchy and we’d have looked and behaved like a bunch of brigands.
So, given that she never missed this column - and just in case they get a copy up there in Heaven - what I want to say is… I love you mum and I am so sorry I was rude and horrible as a kid and that I didn’t seem to appreciate you. Because I really, really did - and now I need to say it, even if it is too late.
