I wrote this for my mum last year but it seems somehow more poignant this year. I asked if she’d mind if I shared it and, since she doesn’t, here it is. If you’re a child, or a mum, or both, I hope it means something to you too.
If the opening line (and title) seem a little odd, it’s taken from something I wrote when I was 7.
I had a funny way with words back then…
My mother is middle sized.
Although perhaps slightly shorter than she was.
She’s the only mother I have had and so I cannot compare her – although of all the mothers I have met I think I prefer her.
When I was young, she was younger too. But since the difference between us in years will always be the same, she is no older compared to me than she ever was.
Time has moved around us
and life has changed our roles. We don’t really choose these changes – they arrive like seasons and we adjust. Like trees, we put out buds to touch the light, or shed our heavy leaves to show our true forms ahead of the darker seasons. No season is wrong – or better than any other – and no season is the end since every one is incomplete until it merges with the next.
We are different now to the furthest I can remember.
Now, we both have more grey hair, and I have a beard. We are more separate now than when I depended on her for school lunches and help with homework and bullies, and yet we know each other better. So although I thought she was very clever for her sewing, cooking, knitting and piano-playing, I now also know she was and is wiser than I ever realised. And although I tried hard to do well at things to make her happy, I now see that she was happy all along and always realised that I was not perfect.
There are some things (like my beard, and the X-Factor) that we will probably never agree on. But, in matters of poetry, walking in open spaces and the proper folding of socks we will forever be in accord. And some things I didn’t understand years ago, like running for the sake of it, I now get and wish I had grasped while we could have shared them.
So what we have now is different from when I was little,
and she was middle sized. Now I am middle sized too, and my mother is slightly smaller. The room between us has grown and yet the love we have is broader and more able to fill the space.
And we have Skype.
Don Lowe 