Happy Mother’s Day!

I can’t remember my mother’s voice or even her face sometimes. On some sensory level I can still feel the softness of her skin as it encased the bone when I would trace my hand back and forth across the planes of her cheek and brow but it’s been nearly forty years now. I dream of her sometimes and all of the normal things I would have liked to have done with her and never did, like treating her to some highlights at the hair salon, imagining her squealing delight at my sons – especially as babies – or having an English tea out somewhere a bit fancy.

My mother was truly beautiful inside and out and possessed great vats of personal charm. In the hospital she received flowers from every tradesperson we had ever hired – and the milkman too, all of whom had received “a bit of cake” and a cup of tea when they were working at our house.

In now vintage photos with her hair falling in a shining rope (“I don’t know, I s’pose you just wound it round your finger, really” she answered unsatisfactorily when I pressed her as to how this was achieved) she looked exactly like Lauren Bacall, a childish pronouncement that pleased her immensely. I once asked her sister (my aunt obviously) if she thought I bore any resemblance to my mother and she looked at me and said “Weeeell, not to be rotten but your mother was a very good looking woman you know.”

Nice.

My mum loved animals of all kinds and definitely impressed upon me the importance of kindness and tolerance, perhaps to a fault because I fear she also impressed on me that everyone else’s needs and wants were more important than my own. To this end, she re-located on a few different continents to satisfy my father’s ambitions but basically, remained quietly homesick her entire life for England and specifically Manchester for which she maintained a staunch allegiance to the working class yet all the while hinted at an undiscovered, possibly gentrified element in her past.

(I blame this juxtaposition for my own troubled political heart which has made me the Gucci Socialist I am today, equally pleased with Marmite or caviar on my melba toast…)

Like many working class folk, she could also be a curious kind of snob and when witnessing some act deemed to be “common” she would smile understandingly and share almost sympathetically that the person in question “couldn’t have been used to much.”

It was, hilarious.

She left school at a very early age – certainly there was no high school involved here – but she listened with a grave and genuine interest as I showed her my human biology textbooks (which I would catch her pouring over later!) and my own best subject, English Literature. Together we had fairly decent discussions about the metaphysical poetry of John Donne and she was very supportive about my writing efforts such as they were at the time. There weren’t many compliments of any kind bandied about in our household (never “I love yous” either for that matter) but I always felt that she thought I was a writer and that it was important.

The completely brilliant show “The Royles” written by Caroline Ahern and Craig Cash captured so much of that very distinct brand of Mancunian humour that I associate with my mum, so much so that I found it almost too poignant to watch although I remain a huge fan. The dialogue and phrasing is beyond perfect and basically, Caroline Ahern is a comic genius.

A few days before she died, I had two vivid dreams in quick succession that jolted me awake and then kept me that way: in the first, I saw a tap, gushing clear water and then a hand slowly appearing and turning it off. In the second dream, I saw my mother in a canoe (something that would have horrified her in real life as she had a deep loathing of camping and the great outdoors always pointing out it was no holiday for a woman as one had to do all the same things only under much worse circumstances) and she was waving, happily waving to me as she paddled along, I could even hear the water gently lapping. Gradually she was nearly out of sight and the sky was suddenly divided by a gleaming, predominantly violet rainbow.

I still miss her every day.