I’d like to wish my dear old mum a very happy Mothers Day. I’d like to, but unfortunately she isn’t approaching her 98th birthday through a fog of cigarette smoke, having died 23 years ago, primarily because of the fog of cigarette smoke she inhaled for most of her life. And it’s no good looking even further back to happier times because, with few exceptions, there weren’t that many.
When the former Neeltje Verburg, from Rotterdam, first language Dutch, raised me as a lone parent, there was little joy, or at least I don’t remember much joy. I remember a freezing cold house, an elderly electric oven on which only two of the four rings actually worked and a seemingly endless diet of pig’s liver, or whatever unwanted past-its-sell-by-date meat mum could pick up for pennies from Josef Packaert’s butcher shop on Nelson Street. By the time we’d finished tea – or dinner or even supper as posh people call it – it was bed time.
I’d already gone mad by then, or at least endured panic attacks and night terrors on a nightly basis, and Neeltje, or Elly as everyone called her because no one could pronounce Neeltje, what with it being “a funny foreign name’, had taken me to a psychiatrist by the time I was 12.
I was grateful for what I had, mind. My dad had bought me a lovely train set in between home visits during his merchant navy career and before departing permanently to Canada and my mum kept me fed on a hearty diet of fat and sugar. It was, perhaps, a wonder I didn’t become a 20 stone diabetic by the time I was 13.
Around 1980, mum met someone else and moved in with him in Portishead. And I visited her every single week, sometimes more, for the rest of her life, including when both of them went into residential care. The pre residential care visits were okay, at least when Elly wasn’t in absolute agony from the damage smoking did to her legs as part of her circulation problems. It never became a chore visiting her, but it could be, for a clinical depressive, a highly depressing experience.
She was always incredibly generous, from the time when I was young and she made sure I ate when she didn’t (I didn’t know this at the time) to her middle aged and older days when she slipped me money to help with stuff, but my emotions were mainly sad, looking at her life, largely unfulfilled, estranged from her remaining Dutch family and her new friends in Portishead who like her were reaching the end of life’s poor pageant.
I am not one of those who “misses my mum every day”, which isn’t to say I didn’t love her; I did. But it’s hard to feel sentimental when, for much of the time, life was just living and given that she’s dead, I don’t feel much like celebrating. Not that you, my loyal reader, should feel this way, too.
My life is better now and my partner, my lover, she’s my best friend, is the mother of any child’s dreams, hopefully like your mum, too. Mine did a great job in impossible circumstances, a stranger in a strange land, and I’m not ungrateful, honest. And I loved her. But when I look back, it’s with sadness, it’s through a fog of tears, it’s full of unanswered and unanswerable questions. It would be pointless me celebrating today because, looking back, I don’t do so wearing rose-coloured glasses.
Enjoy your mothers day, mums. You deserve to.
