Tomorrow is my mum’s birthday. It goes without saying that special occasions mark the passage of time, slice it up and help us flick back on the years in a unique way. Like holding a handful of old birthday cards in our hands, as we think back to what we were doing the year before, and the year before that, one day cut out from each year of our lives.
When you are two, like my daughter is, a birthday must be like a solar eclipse, the next one, a lifetime away, which leaves plenty of time to anticipate the blow out present you would like your father to buy, (‘A bike.’) and the particular type of chocolate cake you want, (‘Not a freezing one like last year.’). I made ‘L’ an ice cream cake for her second birthday. Probably a bit of a silly thing to do at the end of June. But her daddy ‘A’ piped the face of her most beloved toy in chocolate on the top, so at the time it was a hit.
As we get older birthdays come round a whole lot faster, and some before we are really ready for them. This will be mum’s first birthday since the death of her own mum and her first since her youngest son died. I’m sure tomorrow will throw up all kinds of memories, sweet and sorrowful, for her. But hopefully we can still have a cheerful celebration of her 59 years of life.
I am grateful for the not quite 30 years I have known my mum. I think mothers and daughters can have pretty fraught relationships so I’m glad that ours has survived the difficult times. Particularly the tantruming teenage years, and the tantruming early twenties too, (though I think my toddler years sound like they were probably the worst!). All the laundry and the cooking and the driving. I left home at 21 unable to do much more in the kitchen than open a packet of mint slices. Unable to think what to do with my dirty clothes I called my mum and she did my laundry for a year! And she still had a husband and two teenage sons to wash clothes for at home! She is a very kind lady. Now that I have learnt to cook, and to reach even heights of greatness in my own kitchen sometimes, many of my favourite recipes to cook are the ones my mum made for us at home and I have copied them out of various cookbooks of hers and pasted them into my special recipe scrapbook. Though my mother no longer does my laundry I still don’t know how to switch the iron on. I hope I never do.
Most of all, I’m glad that my mum, afraid of going to hell herself and thinking she was a lost cause, took the trouble to send all three of us along to a Christian youth group, so that we might be saved. This had the added bonus of bringing my mum back to God too through the Ladies Bible Study of the mother in the playground who told her about youth group. My mum loves Jesus a lot, and has read and then delivered in monologue form to me more Christian books than I care to recall. But what a great legacy she is having. Her three children are all Christian, one, sad as it is for us, already safely on the other side. Two are married to Christian spouses and she has a little Christian granddaughter and another to come very soon. And my dad, her husband, is a Christian too. Thank God for my mum.
This week mum pulled out a cute homemade card to show us that she had found sorting out junk. It read: “Happy Birthday Mrs 46!” and then on the inside, “Thanks for waking me up every morning!” And on the back, “47 next year!” A seven year old 'J' wrote that to his mum. And I as I wrote my own card tonight I said how sorry I was that 'J' was not here to celebrate it with her as I’m sure he would have had something funny to say. Happy Birthday Mrs 59!
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