It's been a while since I've had the time and headspace to write. With Mother's Day coming up, I wanted to reflect on the relationship I have with my Mum, and the one my kids have with me.
We always struggled financially, and I was acutely aware of how little we had. As a teenager, whenever I asked Mum to go shopping, she would sit me down and go through the family finances with me. She would show me exactly how we were living paycheck to paycheck, sometimes dipping into savings just for everyday expenses. Looking back, it was traumatising. But it was certainly effective!
And yet, that was Mum. She worked full time, sometimes two jobs, but still managed to cook for us every night and always baked. I still remember the smell of fresh apple pie: she'd gotten up early; we'd gone apple picking over the weekend and there was an abundance of apples in the house. She never bought sweets from outside. I admire the ideals. It was just never something I could quite pull off myself.
No matter what was going on or what stress she was under, she always showed up. She sat with us, took an interest in what we were doing. We used to watch the Golden Girls together (I'm showing my age now). She was present in a way I didn't fully appreciate at the time.
As they say, your kids come back to you. Safe to say, it took me a while and living away, to actually appreciate Mum and understand her. I think I needed to be alone, away from the influence and control, to truly understand myself.
I've been living away for over 20 years, Mum in Canada, me in Australia. We have a long-standing tradition on those rare occasions when we are together: coffee at 2am. Inevitably, one of us is always jetlagged and somehow the 2am coffee date has become the place where we talk about everything: family gossip, recipes we've tried and everything in between.
No other part of the day can replicate it. Would we have this tradition if we lived closer? Probably not. I imagine our conversations would be more mundane: what are the kids up to, what did you cook today. It is rare to find any advantage in living so far apart.
Perhaps good conversations at 2am is one of them.
There are some things I've taken from Mum without really deciding to. The presence. The showing up. I didn't realise it at the time, but I carried it into my own family.
That's the thing about mothers. You spend years pushing against them, then years trying to understand them, and somewhere in the middle, if you're lucky, you realise you've already become a little bit of them.
The stories worth keeping aren't always the big ones. Sometimes they're apple pie on a Sunday morning, or the year Mum sat a teenager down and showed her exactly what was in the bank account. Those are the ones that stay. Those are the ones worth writing down, before it's too late to ask.
If there's someone whose stories you've been meaning to capture, this Mother's Day is a good reason to start.
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