I’ve not been feeling well the last couple of days and it makes me sad because I know that never again will I feel ill and be able to go to my Mum for a cuddle to cheer me up. I think I gave myself heat stroke after a run in the hot weather followed by a fair few hours in the loft clearing it out in preparation for our (keep your fingers crossed) move. I’m the kind of person who keeps everything, so in the loft were boxes and boxes of keepsakes I’ve collected over the years. Mostly stuff belonging to my kids but there were also a couple of boxes of stuff belonging to me. In there were cards from my GCSEs, A Levels, Graduation, driving test, 30th birthday…..the list goes on. It was lovely looking at them all and finding the cards sent to me by Mum. Always with an encouraging message of “knew you could do it” or something else just as supportive. She was so good at that. At making me feel good enough just being me and of making me know that, no matter what, she had faith in me.
Last week I had a day where the kids were awful .They all have them don’t they? But on this particular day they drove me to that place where I go sometimes. That place of “I’m failing as a mother.” And what upset me the most wasn’t that feeling of failure, but knowing that never again can I ring Mum up and have her tell me that I am not a failure, all kids have days like that and that I was just like that at times myself when I was a child and I didn’t turn out so bad did I. That’s perhaps when I miss her most. When I need that hug and someone to pep me up and make me believe in myself again. I am lucky. I have many people in my life willing to do that, but somehow nobody does it quite as good as my mum did.
And what I have come to realise is that my life is now split into three parts. When we talk of years we talk of BC and AD and I have that too. Only my BC stands for “before cancer” and my AD stands for “after death” and in the middle of them both I have this no-man’s land of 3 and a half years of living with my Mum being ill.
I look at photos and I can tell you immediately where they fit into my BC/AD/no-man’s land of existence. I don’t even have to work it out, my brain does it for me before I’ve even realised what I’m doing. Photos of BC existence make me want to weep for that sense of happiness I can see on our faces. There’s no worry, there’s no wondering. Just happiness. And for a split second a part of me wishes we’d known at that moment just how happy we were. But then I realise to know how happy we were then, we’d have had to have known what was to come and I am so glad I didn’t know that was coming. I just wish we’d had more of that BC time. I feel like I have been cheated of 20 years of her life and my life and it’s just not fair. When I was clearing out my boxes of stuff I found some letters Mum had sent me when I first went to uni. Nothing of any importance, just Mum chatting to me. Reading them was like having her in the room with me and it broke my heart because I’d do anything to have that back. Just one of those conversations of no consequence, that would have bored everyone else half to death but which made such a difference to me.
Photos from that no-man’s middle time are not easy to look at either. We had happy moments, we enjoyed ourselves, made memories together but there was always that elephant in the room for me. Lurking quietly in the corner, waiting to pounce. I am glad we got that time though. Some families get nothing and if it wasn’t for that time Oscar and Poppy would not have known Mum and she would not have known them. I look at photos from my last birthday with her, her last birthday, last Christmas and I just wish I’d taken more photos or that we’d had even more time together before we’d had our ‘lasts.’ It just doesn’t feel enough.
Now I find myself living in this AD time. I’ve been here for two months now. I know it will get easier with time, but to be honest I don’t want it to get easier. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m done with it. I can’t describe how terrifying it is knowing that I can’t ever get out of this new reality, it will never be over. I am stuck in it forever. Everything I do is tinged with a layer of sadness. Every happy moment is followed with a realisation that she’s not here and she should be. Every exciting moment is spoiled with the knowledge that I can’t tell her about it and every shit moment is made worse by the fact that the one person who could make me feel better no matter what is no longer here to do that.
And that, to sum it up, sucks. xx