Mothers' Day

I dreamt that my mother died.  I woke up one morning and said to my friend, “I had really strange dreams last night.  I dreamed that Mummy died and then I dreamed the baby had died and then I dreamed that they had both died”.  I repeated my dreams to her parents, who begged me to get on quickly with my breakfast as my stepfather was on his way.  Twenty minutes later, he arrived and said that my mother was dead.

Of course, I didn’t have some unnatural telepathic link with my mother’s life so that I knew that it had ended.  I would have heard the whispering during the night after my stepfather phoned to tell the neighbours with whom I was staying.

I was 12 years old.  It was August 1980.  My thirteenth birthday was in five days’ time and the previous day my mother, Mary, had gone into labour with my stepfather’s child.  My younger brother had been driven to a relative’s home earlier in the day and, when it became apparent that Mummy was still in labour much later, I was collected from our house by a neighbouring friend to stay overnight and await news of my baby brother or sister.

Afterwards, I remember sitting in the car as we drove to collect my brother:  I couldn’t believe it, but yet I knew it was true.  And as much as I wanted to believe it was a lie and that I would see my mother later, I was also old enough to be frightened by the thought of seeing her again, as I knew I would be seeing a ghost.

I have seen her from time to time over the past 30 odd years.  Sometimes, I walk around the corner in a shopping centre and I catch glimpses of her as she walks out of an exit.  She has been further along on an airport escalator, or sitting in the passenger seat of a car I pass on the motorway.  And then, when I’m really lucky, I go to check on my children at night, and I see my mother’s quiet smile on my son’s sleeping face.

I didn’t really think about my mother’s death.  The villagers rallied round as they do in a small parish.  They bought me presents and took me shopping on my birthday, the day before the funeral.  The only real upset was at the funeral when my aunt, Mary’s sister, having been up most of the previous night dipping into the extra supplies of sherry accumulated for the funeral reception, attempted to jump into the grave on top of the coffin.  I was humiliated by my aunt, but, as to my mother, I didn’t really give a thought.

By Easter the following year, my stepfather had asked his new girlfriend to move in with us.  They were engaged and married soon afterwards.  Perversely, I still didn’t think of my mother very often.  My stepmother was so completely different from the mother I knew that there was no similarity which would awaken a memory.

Mary, tiny, shorter than me when she died, was an introvert and would choose to spend time with children rather than adults, with whom she felt unable to provide witticisms or be opinionated on current affairs.  She had arrived in England from Burma already pregnant with me, and later separated from my father.  Left to support herself, she fell upon the largesse of wealthy friends she had made, who let her borrow their second homes in which to raise her children.  She was exotic in the new modern world of the late 60s and early 70s, but it was by being sweet and full of grace that she charmed everyone.

My stepmother was big, heavy, loud, a flirt, who dressed in a low cleavage blouse and a split pencil skirt to meet me.  An alcoholic, whom my stepfather divorced 10 years later, this was her third marriage.  In each of her two previous marriages she had borne a son, and at each divorce the child had stayed with its father.  But my stepfather was still reeling from the death of my mother, and was easily seduced, not only by her burgeoning bosom, but also the promise of support to raise his stepchildren.

My stepmother didn’t care whether I did well at school or came home on time from friends’ homes.  She gave me my first cigarettes and bought me a bottle of Cinzano to take to a party when I was 13.  My aunt visited, said that this was not what my mother would have wanted for me and then left for Australia not to be seen again for many years.

But if my mother had wanted better for me she should never have risked her life for another baby.  She should have been content with the ones she already had and stayed alive for us.  Well, that is what I thought when I was 14 and both my step-parents had begun the spiral of inevitability laced with affairs and rows.

I estranged myself from the troubles at home, dropped out of my stepfather’s circle of relatives and grew my own family from friends and their families.

In my twenties, I acknowledged my mother’s death by accepting it and ignoring it.  Of course, from time to time, when others went home for weekends with their parents or told me about overbearing mothers, I would feel sorry for myself as to my lack of mothering, but I never reflected on my actual mother.

And then one day, fifteen years later, soon after I returned from honeymoon, I fell pregnant.  I was 34.  My mother had died at 33.  I was already older than my mother would ever be.

I would like to know this woman, Mary.  I grieve for my own loss at no longer seeing her and also for my babies at never knowing her.  I fantasize scenarios where she shares my pride at my children’s successes and comforts me when things are not well.  A young woman, now more than ten years younger than me, I sympathize with her over relationships with men and her children’s behaviour.  Sometimes, when my children answer back and shock me with their astute reasoning, I am reminded of that young parent being bullied by her wilful daughter and even though I recognize that this is the way between parents and children, I feel ashamed of myself.  I didn’t ask to be born, but I was and I didn’t ask for her to die but she did.

Two and a half years ago, I discovered a sister.  One evening, I had clicked languidly from one website to another after my husband had retired to bed and stupefied myself by discovering a note which my sister had posted seven years before attempting to trace her real family – that I should accidentally come across her request for information buried in over 2,000 messages seems so preposterous that for two or three months afterwards I was still overwhelmed and unbelieving.  For her part, this missive had been lost in the annals of time and she was now happily past caring where she had come from, so imagine her shock too when I responded to her ancient cri de coeur.

My mother had given birth to another child between me and my brother.  I will never know the full story and that is not my story to tell.  The amazing revelation that I was in contact with a fully- grown sister, was swept into recognition that my mother, a most child-centric woman, had given away one of her children.

I met with my sister and we began to build a friendship through photos and e-mails and sporadic visits as she now lives overseas.  She was married with no children, but at the intersection of our venn diagram there were so many coincidences that the whole scenario appeared farfetched.  Our married surnames are one letter apart; we had both bought homes a few miles from each other despite the fact that we had both grown up in different parts of the UK; we even had a friend in common who didn’t know us as sisters since we didn’t know we were sisters either.

After years of close girlfriends, I found myself stumbling through this new relationship.  Women I met in the queues at adventure playgrounds and at the till in Sainsbury’s seemed to have stronger ties to me than the ones I was making with my new sister.

At the beginning I felt as though it was me that had given away a child – a tremendous guilt on behalf of my mother, ashamed for her actions mixed with sadness that my wonderful mother, who had bestowed on me such a memory of perfect parenting, had walked away from one of her own babies.  How could I explain this paragon of maternal nurture and affection as someone who could part herself from her own child?

I barely knew my mother and yet her death has always made me more certain of the mother I want to be.  I don’t know why and how hard it was for her to give up my sister for adoption.  But I do know that she will have made that decision out of love and hope for my sister’s better future, just as she gave me love and enough self-belief and values to help me grow into the woman that I have become.   There will never be answers to so many of my questions but now I have a new life to think about.  A few months ago, my sister gave birth to her first child.  Now we are both mothers, our relationship is evolving more quickly and we have much more common ground to look forward to than anything in our past.  Motherhood, which once separated us, has brought us together.

Minced lamb cutlets

For years I was slightly ashamed of my mother’s cooking.  I was desperate for her to cook ordinary bland English food like my friends’ mothers.  I begged her for plain old shepherd’s pie but instead she put cumin and green chillis in the mince and wrapped them into little patties of mashed potato.  These are similar to samosas – little shepherd’s pie canapés -  you can skip the chillis if you make them for kids and don’t want to deal with rings of fire the following day, although green chillis are usually fairly mild.

Packet of minced lamb – the less fatty the better – about 500g

Groundnut oil or any flavourless light cooking oil

Finely chopped onion

Minced garlic or finely chopped

Finely sliced green chilli

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp ground turmeric

Petits pois if you fancy them

Salt

Potatoes

Knob of butter – about 25g

Milk – about 100ml

Plain flour

Egg wash

Breadcrumbs if you want

Oven on warm.

Boil the potatoes with a generous pinch of salt until soft – about 15 to 20 minutes.  Add a knob of butter and a splash of milk and mash the potatoes.  Mash should be fairly dry.

Heat a tablespoon of oil in a pan. Fry the onion for a few minutes to soften, then add the garlic.  After a minute, add the lamb and fry for about 10 minutes until cooked through.  Add the spices and the peas.  Fry for another couple of minutes then add the sliced green chilli.  Fry for another two minutes then generously season with salt to taste and leave to cool.

Make a small tennis ball of mashed potato and then flatten. Put a tablespoon or so of mince filling in the middle and then mould the potato around the mince to make back into a ball.  Slightly flatten down again.

Repeat until mash and mince used up.

Roll each patty in some flour and then into the egg wash.  If you want to add breadcrumbs, this is the bit now!

Fry them gently in batches in some butter or oil until golden brown.  Keep the cooked ones warm in the oven until all done.