My mum turned eighty seven this week.
Here’s a few facts about her.
She was born at home, one month early, weighing around four pound. Four pound, is about two kilos.
She had a difficult and dysfunctional relationship with her mother, eventually moving two hundred miles away, which at the time was the equivalent of emigrating. Still, back in those cold dark weeks of 1937 something must have gone right between them because there were no intensive care units then, for a tiny baby, arrived too early.
When she could sit up (around six months), she was taken to a photographic studio for her first portrait. That’s her above, buttoned up in her Sunday best, and clearly not happy. It’s one of a handful of photographs that document the first decade of her life – and when I say handful, I mean they can be counted on one hand – so that’s five.
She’s had eleven operations, and given birth to four babies.
She had her first operation, for an obstruction of the bowel, when she was less than a year old.
She was taken into hospital at eleven, under fear of having contracted Polio. She hadn’t.
Her second operation was for a cyst on her ovary. She was nineteen. It was tradition back then for the local Salvation Army brass band, to visit the wards on a Sunday evening. They would play a few tunes to cheer the patients, offer a little light relief. Whether it left the patients cheerier, I don’t know. I am sure however that they were relieved, because under cover of the trumpet, those who had recently been opened up and operated upon - and whose insides were consequently full of air – were able to let rip. My mother amongst them.
Her family ran a pub, and she used to stand on a chair and sing to the punters on a school night.
Her family ran a bed and breakfast, and she had to give up her bed every summer, and sleep in the living room.
Her perfectly healthy and much loved younger brother died at eleven, a few short weeks after falling ill with kidney failure.
She was called home from school to say goodbye to him.
Her father died a few years later.
She has always suspected it was suicide.
She has rarely spoken about these things, and never with a professional who might have helped her navigate them.
She was an active member of the Johnny Mathis Fan Club in the 70s and 80s and once went on a three-week trip to California to see him sing at the Hollywood Bowl.
She bought a three-piece glitter suit for the trip which she wore in Vegas. Here she is, wearing it - and looking a whole lot happier with this choice of outfit, which I agree, is much more her!
The jacket hung in her wardrobe for decades after. It inspired my book, A Midlife Gamble – the novel shortlisted for a big prize (I didn’t win, the sci-fi guy won), and may finally open a few doors for me in this most difficult of professions. Funny isn’t it, how life goes and comes around.
She came home with a life-size cardboard cut-out of Johnny Mathis, which lived in our house for years.
She’s been sterilized. She’s had her womb scraped out twice, and then removed completely. She’s had surgery for internal scar tissue, caused by previous surgery. Her body, has at times been a battlefield.
When she had her womb removed, she was sent to a recuperative hospital for ten days. Along with the other women, she’d wash her kickers through and dry them on a radiator. The day that Fred, who was a taxi driver, and who was in the men’s ward and with whom she’d shared a few laughs, left, she leaned out of the window and waved her drying knickers at him in farewell.
Her HRT patches tended to fall off, sticking themselves to the bottom of her slipper, or the vacuum nozzle, or once, the dog’s collar.
She’s had the varicose veins on her legs (developed through her pregnancies) lasered twice. Each leg. That’s four operations. One for each baby.
She used to grow raspberries and freeze them individually on trays so they wouldn’t stick together. We ate them all year round.
She would have liked to have been an actress.
Her first job was aged fifteen, at the national coal-board. She earned the equivalent of £2.50 a week, all of which she had to hand over to her mother. She got pocket money back, from which she had to pay her bus fare and lunches. So she got an extra job …
As a cinema usherette and saw Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, so many times she lost count. (This is not apparently where I got my name from, but I’m sure there was a seed planted.)
This is where she first met my father. He was courting another girl. The night he bought his girlfriend to the cinema, my mother made a point of sitting every latecomer in the same row as them, shining the torch full in my father’s face every time.
She says she remembers the docks at Sunderland being bombed in the second world war, and given her memory I believe her.
She’s been on the protein-shake diet.
She’s been on the grapefruit diet.
The Rosemary Conley No Fat diet, the F-plan diet.
She’s been on and off a diet almost her whole adult life.
When she reached her ‘target-weight’ through Weightwatchers, she had my Dad take a photo in the garden. It’s about the only one of herself that’s on display.
She was over eighty when she bought rubber eggs, that look exactly like real eggs. They live in fact with the real eggs, in the egg basket. Every time her grandchildren came to visit she’d throw an ‘egg’ at them, yelling Catch! She has ten grandchildren. They all fell for it.
The only time we got her to play a board-game, Cluedo, she gave the identity of the murderer away, having guessed it long before any of us.
She watches real-life murder programs an awful lot.
She thinks Judge Judy should be prime-minister.
She walks with a stick now.
See You Later Alligator is the final song she has chosen to be played at her funeral.
My father has chosen a different, simpler plan which wasn’t available at the time and which my mother now wishes she had chosen. But she won’t change. She’s already paid the deposit.
Some of these things I have known forever. Some of these things I have only recently learned.
I know I’m losing her. She’s still sharp but her focus is narrowing. I visited last week and told her a little of what’s going on in my life. But I could see. I could see the way in which her concentration wasn’t the same. The TV is always on. This is not a criticism. Her job with me is done. You can’t blame an elderly parent for not being that invested in the problems of a middle-aged child. No, you can’t.
So Happy Birthday, mum.
And if there are things you don’t know about your parents, if there are things you would like to know, ask now. A river does not flow back out of the sea, time has one only direction.
Cary
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Wow that's such a beautiful picture of your Mum in her silvery suit! I really think you described her well.
A beautiful tribute and I love this line 'A river does not flow back out of the sea, time has one only direction.' Thank you ❤️