I Forgot My Mother’s Birthday

 

Last month I forgot my mother’s birthday. I was writing on my computer, glanced down at the bottom right corner of the screen, and saw the date. It was my mother’s birthday, or it would have been.

My mother died twenty-three years ago.

At first, after her death, I used the date of her birthday as a time to remember her. Using the date of her death for this was too much, too morbid and too negative. Her birthday was in January, in the cold winter after Christmas, and was always celebrated quietly. When she was alive, I would arrange to post a card and present to her, in time for it. After her death, I would take time, on what would have been her birthday, to remember something about her. I would remember some story or anecdote about her, good or bad. It was my way of remembering her, of keeping her memory alive.

My mother had been ill for a long time with cancer and I had told myself I was prepared, I knew what was happening. Shortly after her diagnosis, she’d had surgery and radiotherapy for it. I wasn’t able to see her, at that time, and didn’t physically see her until two months afterwards. When I did visit my parents I was shocked at how tired and worn she looked. She was sat in the house’s conservatory, reading a magazine, when I arrived, and she looked so old and frail, sitting there in that armchair. Everyone had told me how well she had done since her surgery, how well she had recovered and how she had returned to health, but looking at her, that day, I knew she was ill, I could see it. I kept quiet though, everyone, including her, were being so positive, and how could I rob them of that? I kept it to myself, but I knew my mother was dying.

She declined slowly over the following six years, her health failing her, as my father failed to cope looking after her. I lived two hundred and fifty miles away from them, and I was the only healthcare professional in my family, so my role fell to providing advice at the end of the telephone. I told myself to prepare, to be ready for when she would die. To prepare myself for my family’s reactions, to be the strong one because I had seen this coming.

She died in a hospice, were she was comfortable and well cared for. I had seen her two days before and said goodbye to her, it was clear then to everyone she was dying. I received a call, from my brother, that Tuesday morning, that she had died. She had died in one of the few moments when no one was sitting next to her bed, in a quiet moment when she was left alone. I was prepared for this news, I wasn’t shocked, I was expecting this. I called my partner and told him.

The next day, I was due in work and I was prepared. I had accepted the fact my mother was dying, her death was just the final part of that. So I went into work. I spent the first hour or so of my shift just wandering around the ward, but I wasn’t connected to why I was there. Mid-morning, I went into the ward’s office, where my manager was. She looked up at me and in surprise asked me what was wrong.

“My mother died yesterday,” I replied.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she said.

"I don't know," I said and burst into tears.

She sent me home, telling me not to come back to work until after the funeral. She was right.

Grief is a strange and messy thing. I thought I was prepared for it but I wasn’t, how could I be because I didn’t know where it would take me. I didn’t cry at her funeral, sat there in the front pew next to my partner, but I did cry when I was set off by stupid, little things. The sight of her favourite flowers in a shop, the memory of her suddenly leaping into my mind, the sound of a piece of music that she had loved. The strange, physical things that made me remember her.

I had thought I was prepared because intellectually I knew the course of grief, I had studied it, I knew the theory and evidence behind the stages of grieving. But I didn’t know them emotionally, I hadn’t lived them.

Losing a parent is never easy, I found it especially hard because I was only in my early-thirties. I was at the age when people were beginning to expect their parents to retire as they entered “old age”. But my parents were in their early forties when I was born. When I entered my thirties, my parents were entering the end of their lives. I felt cut off from my peers, they couldn’t relate to what was happening to me, their parents were alive and well, were I was living through this too soon in my life. Fortunately, my partner knew exactly what I was facing, he’d lost his mother when he was sixteen. He knew about feeling too young for what was happening.

But as time passed, that grief faded, as all emotions do. Marking what would have been her birthday became less and less urgent, and at some point I forgot to do it.

I can’t remember when I did last mark my mother’s birthday, I stopped doing it so long ago, but I didn’t forget my mother. She had been such a large and dominating part of my life for so long. She had shown me and taught me so many different things, most of which she never meant to. She had been a woman of very strong opinions, opinions that were not to be questioned, and faced with this I had learnt how to argue. My mother, unwittingly, had taught me to argue, because if I wanted to do what I wanted, as a child and adolescent, then I had to win my arguments. The first time I won an argument against her I was fourteen, and it was a glorious moment. I had learnt how to use logic to defeat a steadfast opinion. It is a skill I have used many, many times since.

Watching my mother, as a child, learning why she held her opinions, showed me how to watch and understand other people, a skill I am so grateful to have because it aids me so much as a writer.

So many things still remind me of her, and I have a partner who I can share these with, even if it’s just a short memory, and he does the same about his mother. We keep those women alive in our memories.

That day, as I looked at the date on my computer’s screen, it occurred to me that if she was still alive, it would have been so easy to buy her a birthday present. I could have gone onto Amazon, found the gift I wanted, bought it, and had them gift wrap it and deliver it straight to her. So much more easy. But my mother died before e-commerce became such an easy part of our lives. So much has changed in our world in the relatively short time since her death, would she even recognise our world? Would she even like our world?

When I realised what the date was, I texted my partner and told him.

He replied, “Blimey, how old would she have been?”

“94,” I texted back.

 

Drew

When Joan Met Tommy

My father married the girl next door. My parents met because they lived next door to each other, in post-war Barrow-in-Furness. But saying it like that makes their story sound so simplistic.

My parents did not a make big deal of how they met. It certainly wasn’t a family story, brought out at every chance and worn as a badge of pride. I only found out how they met when I was fifteen. My parents had taken me back to Barrow-in-Furness, a car drive up from Liverpool with our pet dog. That trip we had not visited either of my father’s brothers, who still lived there, he was not close to either of them. He had been close to his brother John but John had died several years before from cancer. With hindsight, losing his brother deeply affected my father, John was the first of his brothers to die and it made my father face his own mortality. My father was always stoic with his emotions, not talking about his feelings and just keeping things to himself. I wasn’t aware, at the time, of how much John’s death affected him, I was not a preceptive teenager, but I have had many years to look back on events.

I don’t remember why we visited Barrow-in-Furness that bright spring day, but my father decided to drive around the city, showing me places from his childhood and youth there. As we drove around, our dog bounced about on the car’s backseat with me, she hadn’t had a long enough walk and was full of energy.

We drove to the street where my parents had lived as neighbours.

It was a narrow street of terraced houses, the briefest strip of pavement in front of the two rows of houses and the road itself still made from cobblestones, causing the car to rhythmically shudder as it was driven over them. My father stopped the car in front of two houses. They were a matching pair of terraced houses. He told me that they were the two houses where he and my mother had lived, with their parents, before they married. The house where my father had lived now had a cream-coloured rendering covering the front of it and a pale pastel-coloured front door. The housed my mother had lived in had a frontage of dark grey bricks and a chocolate-brown front door. The car drove on and my parents made no more reference to those houses.

I was fascinated by it though. I might not have been a perceptive teenager, but my imagination had matured early and was very alive. Falling in love with the next-door neighbour was a cliché of much fiction, and even songs, and here were my parents who had done that. But it also gave me another insight into my parents’ lives, especially before I was born. My father loved to tell me stories about being a boy during the Second World War and my mother would talk about growing up and living with my grandmother, but neither of them talked at all about their adolescence and courtship. Their lack of information intrigued me; my imagination began to fill in the details.

My father was born and grew up in Barrow-in-Furness, living in the same house, but my mother was born and grow up in Kendell, Cumbria. She moved to Barrow-in-Furness as a teenager, after the war, when her parents moved there; her father had got a new and better job there. He was the first person to own a car on their street.

But how did they meet? Did their mothers become friends, chatting over the garden fence, and so they got to know each other? Did my father see the new girl next door and decide that he wanted to court her? Did my parents become friends first and then from friendship did romance bloom? I don’t know, they never told me, but my imagination has filled in that blank space over and over again. I am not a fan of romantic fiction, but I am fascinated by people’s stories. How someone met their partner can tell me so much about them, about their relationship, and it fascinates me because we are all different and we all have our stories. As a writer, how couples met can be the catalyst for so many stories and can help me shape characters.

But I just don’t know how my parents met.

Then, as an adult, I stumbled across a fascinating detail. My father wasn’t the first of the Payne brothers my mother dated. First, she dated my father’s older brother Arthur before she dated my father.

How did my father feel when his brother was dating the woman he wanted to? Or did he first notice my mother when she was his brother’s girlfriend? Did my father dating his ex-girlfriend affect Arthur’s relationship with his brother? As for my mother, why did she stop dating Arthur and start dating my father? What did my father have that Arthur didn’t?

I don’t know the answers to any of those questions and I won’t now, both my parents died nearly twenty years ago. I wish I had asked them those questions, asked them how they met, asked them about their courtship, about their life together before they married. They were middle-aged when I was born and they always seemed so old to me as a child, too old to have once had a romantic life or even a life before they became parents. Back then, I had such a narrow view of life. I have learnt differently since then.

After my parents died, I inherited so many of my mother’s photographs. One of my favourite ones is of my parents before they married. It was taken on a summer’s day and my parents are standing in front of a farm gate. My mother is wearing a white 1940s dress with a wide belt around her waist and the skirt flowing out under it. My father is in shirt sleeves with his left hand down by his side, carefully holding a cigarette. They both are wearing photograph expressions, their best smiles directed into the camera’s lens. They look so happy.

There is a postscript to this story. The last time I saw my Uncle Arthur was at my father’s funeral. It was during that awkward limbo time when we were waiting for his funeral to begin, waiting for the right time to leave the house for the church, waiting for all the other mourners to arrive. I was standing outside my parents’ house with my brother, just waiting.

My cousin’s car pulled into the street and he got out of it. Out of the passenger side of the car slowly stepped my Uncle Arthur. But he was the double of my father. The same build, the same profile, the same head full of hair. He was my father’s doppelganger. The shock caught in my throat.

“Oh, my God…” I hissed in shock.

“Yes,” my brother agreed with me.

 

Drew

Those Pictures Mothers Carry around with Them

 

The first time I saw it she was visiting me and took out her purse to pay for a purchase. There it was, inside her purse, a picture of me. An old and unflattering picture of me. It was a passport photograph, taken years ago. My hair was in a style I’d not had for years, short and flat. I was staring fixedly into the camera, no smile on my face, the harsh light making my skin seem pale and unhealthy. I wondered why she had chosen that one, but I said nothing. It wasn’t an easy question to ask.

I have many pictures of her. Ones from her youth, as a bright and happy young woman, her hair short and dark, dressed in pale or white summer dresses with wide belts and full skirts. Pictures of her in motherhood, her clothes changing over the years, showing her own slow change in tastes. Pictures of her taken only in the last few years, her as the rosy-cheeked, white-haired grandmother that she grew into. (I have no pictures of her at the end, a tired and ill old woman, but I don’t want to remember her like that.)

I didn't keep any pictures in my wallet. Even if I did they would become lost in the chaos of paper, cards, loose coins and my different IDs and all the other things tucked away in there. For me pictures are placed in frames and hung on walls so that everyone can see them, enjoyed at a glance. That’s what I did with my favorite pictures of her. Not hidden away in the dark and clutter of my wallet. (I have heard people say that they carry pictures of their loved ones, their partners or children, with them so they can see them whenever they want to. I carry around my memories of her with me, as bright as any photographs.)

I always wondered why she chose a picture of me to carry around. I am not her only child; I have an older brother and sister. Maybe that was the reason. I was her youngest child, the last one to leave the nest. After I had gone she was no longer a mother, the role she had had for over forty years. Maybe there is a special bond between a mother and her youngest child, I don’t know, and if there ever was I am ashamed to admit I never noticed. Why that picture, of all the ones she had of me, such a harsh and unemotional one, to carry with her? (It is too late now to ask these questions.)

At the end, as she lay there in that bed being cared for by nurses who it had only taken her a few days to grow close to, I was unable to ask any but the simplest of questions. I had thought, at the end, I would be able to ask her all those questions I had been yearning to know the answers to, ones over which I had puzzled and wondered for years, not least about that picture. When the time came, all I could ask were the basic questions, "Are you comfortable?" and "Is there anything you want?" The profound forgotten and replaced by the important.

As a child I had questioned and questioned her, why this and how that, almost challenging everything she said. As an adolescent I had distanced myself from her and her rules as I was fighting to be myself, whatever that meant. What did she know? Only as an adult, when I had become a professional in my own right, we were finally able to reach an understanding and peace with each other. I was still her son but now we could talk as equals. At the end I was the one she requested of, the one she asked to look after her husband, my father.

After it was all ended, the funeral and cremation and final spreading of her ashes, did someone find found that picture of me? As my sister-in-law and my sister were clearing out her handbag, the final act of tidying a life away, tidying away her now unneeded things, did they find her purse? As they emptied it did they find that picture of me and what did they make of it? These questions are unimportant; I will forget them and never seek an answer. Instead, I will hold on to those memories I have of her, memories that live outside of pictures.

 

For Joan Margaret Payne

12/1/30 to 2/5/01

 

(I originally wrote this in the week between my mother’s death and her funeral. It was my way of working out how I was feeling. I have rewritten it in the subsequent years, but the emotions here still remained intact.)