call the police

something i read reminded me of an occasion when everything was out of sync. when i was about 10 we lived in a small house which my stepmum rented from the hospital where she worked.

one weekend my stepmum was ironing in the living-room. the reason this sticks in my mind is that i don't remember her ironing much. she used to put things in the tumble drier and then fold them when they were hot so they didn't need ironing. my mum was due to come to collect me for an access visit. i think my dad was out. the front door went. we always used the back so we knew it was a visitor. on the doorstep was my mum and a policeman. they came into the tiny living-room. i was told to get my stuff and when i came down i went off with my mum and the policeman. i have no recollection of where we went for that particular access visit. no-one explained why the policeman was there. i wondered if my mum was in trouble.

years later my mum told me what this had all been about. after i had gone to live with my dad and stepmum my mum had gone to live in scotland. she was at a residential college called newbattle abbey where she was studying english for o level. my dad had apparently said that she could not take me for access visits in case she removed me from the jurisdiction (scotland is a separate legal jurisdiction to england and wales). i assume she had got a court order and the policeman was there to enforce it if need be.

this all seems like yet more games by my dad. my mum had never contested him having custody and indeed had not attended the custody hearing. my stepmum told me mum had written a letter to the judge saying my dad was a good man. so the likelihood of her taking me away was nil. the policeman seemed quite friendly but it must have been an unusual job for him.

death

tomorrow is the anniversary of my mum's death. she died in 2000 from an embolism. she had suffered with alzheimers for many years and by the time she died she was just a shell. this is a picture of her i took the last time i saw her alive.

this will be the first anniversary of mum's death that i have marked on the actual day. it is not that i have not thought of her since, but i did not know what date she had died on. i was the person who registered her death and organised her funeral but i had to send the death certificate somewhere and did not get it back. i have a kind of number-blindness that makes dates impossible to remember unless i write them down. both my husband and i thought mum had died at the very beginning of april so around then i get a feeling of sadness but not on any particular day. more to do with which flowers are out in the garden and which birds are singing.

it was only when i was talking to my friend about the anniversary of her own mum's death that i realised i did not know the date mum died. i could remember it was a thursday. i could remember the phone call in the middle of the night from the hospital and how my teeth chattered but i didn't cry very much. how the following day we drove up to swansea and it was not until we got there and my son remarked that no-one had overtaken us the whole way that i realised how fast i had been driving. how the hospital wanted to do an autopsy because it was a sudden death and how i told them i would get a court order if they dared to try to cut my mum's body. but not the date.

i decided i would apply for a copy of the death certificate. you can get an express service from the registrar of deaths and something told me i should do this even though it cost more. it is just as well i did as mum died on 16 march rather than in april. if i had been more careful with money i would have missed it.

i wanted to mark mum's death in a more concrete way rather than just a general feeling of sadness. my friend suggested lighting a candle. mum would have liked this idea. as luck would have it my son went on a school trip last week to a museum and made a little candle. so this year i will light his special candle. next year i will buy a candle and keep it for remembering mum.

i will get the hang of all this eventually.

preconceptions

once when i was a child i asked my dad why my mum didn't want me. "she never did," he replied, "i had to pretty much rape her to get her pregnant. she tried to get an abortion but she couldn't." i was quite young when my dad told me this but i was old enough to know what rape and abortion meant.

at the time i thought it was my dad being poisonous about my mum. in spite of him being the one who had left her for another woman on more than one occasion he somehow had re-written history to make himself the wronged party. i therefore put this piece of information in the back of my mind and tried not to dwell on it.

years later, on a visit to my mum, when we were walking in a park in swansea, on a sunny day with birds singing and all apparently being well with the world, i felt it was time to ask mum about what dad had said. i wish i hadn't. instead of denying it she said "well, i thought i had something wrong inside me that would make it all go wrong. i went to the doctor and he examined me and said everything was fine." my mum went on to tell me she had indeed tried to have a termination but that the doctor refused as she was married and settled. in the late 1950s things were different to today.

with the amazing self-protection that our minds are capable of, i turned this into a welcome piece of news. i reasoned that it was not me personally, the 8 year old me with the gap in her teeth and pretty eyes, that my mum did not want. it was any baby that she would have had. it was the whole idea of it all. somehow i managed to make myself feel better about being the product of non-consensual intercourse and an unsuccessful attempt to remove me from the world. the human mind is a truly amazing thing.

what happened later in my mum's pregnancy has an almost biblical feel to it. we had a balcony in our flat and my mum grew bright flowers in window boxes. she was planting flowers for the coming summer when she was about 7 months pregnant. she had been to the dentist to have a tooth removed a few days earlier. somehow bugs from the soil had got into her mouth. this rapidly turned into an infection that became osteomylitis - an infection in her jawbone.

she was taken into hospital and had to have major surgery to remove quite a large part of her jawbone. this left a huge scar across her jaw. she was given large doses of penicillin (i am allergic to penicillin although i am told it doesn't cross the placenta so this may just be co-incidence). by the time i remember her she had had plastic surgery on the scar so it was invisible under the jawbone (it re-appeared when she was old as her skin sagged). for someone as beautiful as my mum this must have been horrific. the fact it was her jaw seems to have significance over and above the illness and the disfigurement. it is almost as though she was being silenced.

a eulogy (part 2)

this is what i actually said at my mum's funeral:

thank you for coming to say goodbye to mum.

she was a person who it is difficult to describe

above all an individual

she could be infuriating and opinionated

but she was kind, witty

an articulate woman with a thirst for knowledge

she loved music, books, art and philosophy

she was an accomplished painter, a clever seamstress and an inventive cook

she placed great importance on honesty and integrity and held firm beliefs about social justice

the awful illness she suffered in recent years masked her vibrant character

but we must try to remember her as she once was.