Loosing my mam this week has brought on so many mixed emotions. I feel the burden of her old age lifted from my shoulders, but miss the fact that she is there much more. My mam made her life miserable and hard, she didn't understand happiness or friendships, I don't even know if she really understood what love was.
At the age of 13 she had to leave school, back in the 1930's that is what life was like. Her mother was a cold woman but my mother was close to her father. She trained to be a nurse and worked outside of York during the end WW2. Many a time she said the reason was because on a Sunday the matron allowed them a little butter with their Sunday Teas. My grandmother gave birth to a son and my mother was sent for to look after him as she wasn't able to cope. So my mother's career was ended and she went back home to live. She ended up working as a Cashier and Usher in the local cinema and somehow met my Dad. She married at 24 and lived in with her mother in law, renting a room. My Dad was in Germany in the Army then and it was quite a while before they got there own place.
I am the youngest of three, my two older brothers being 6 and 4 years older. The eldest got the love and nothing was left for the rest of us. He was always her favourite and even as she got older and his visits were shorter, he was the one.
She was never happy, my Dad died still loving this wife, her never once showing affection to him or us for that matter. I always thought mam's coldness was down to my Dad, but once he died my mam's family started opening up about how cold mam had been through her childhood and her early years of marriage.
She did have a hard life, mam and dad hardly had a penny between them, he wanted his own business and worked full time at one company while building a business up with his brother. Mam had a temper on her and many argument's ended up with her throwing crockery and him punching the doors. Her temper would not be quenched and sometimes it would be turned on us.
For a small woman she had a good weight behind those slaps and later years dog leaders and a cane. Yet as kids we loved her, but didn't dare cross her.
We are challenged with trying to find memories for the funeral address and apart from her loving the dogs that we had and being an excellent cook at this moment and time I can't think of anything that made her laugh out loud. She was a good instructor for teaching cooking, sewing, cleaning, decorating, by the time I was nine I could cook a full Sunday dinner.
We built our own house, it took a few years but I sweated over the concrete mixer, broke toes catching bricks. Every summer mam and I would decorate from one end of the house to the other. Nearly all six weeks of the holidays I would either be painting or cleaning.
Now that she has passed away the house is empty, I can feel no love residing their, hear no laughter in the walls.
I was on chemo when Dad died, not long ago I found out that my operation although successful at the time, hasn't worked as well as I had hoped and my mesothelioma is on the move again. My mam never really understood how ill I was, even when I was so ill the second time round on chemo she was demanding of my time and couldn't understand why I wasn't there all the time. When I finally had the operation to remove my lung pleura, heart sac and diaphragm my illness never registered with her, she was lonely, had copd and couldn't breathe. She would pretend that she couldn't breathe to get your attention,but all the time calling out I can't breathe! When I can't breathe the last thing I can do is shout it out!
When I was told that I was unable to have children at 30 she turned the knife that little bit more by praising the fact that her favourite son had given her such a wonderful grandson. Then a miracle happened and at 40 I fell pregnant, she said I hope its a boy, girls are nothing but trouble. I lost the child but no sympathy came my way, Oh well she said, I have 4 grandchildren. Yet here I am constantly thinking about her, could I have done more, but what more can you do with someone who really didn't want to help themselves. She could bleed you dry, cause an argument to make you feel bad.
We grew up in a house that argued from morning till night, my last conversation with my mother ended up with an argument, yet I guess for her it was what she wanted, so I am fighting the guilt and hoping that my mam has finally found the peace that she has craved for for all of her life.
I can only hope that if there is life in the form of spirit, then her spirit finally finds the meaning of love.
