Moments with my Mum - Georgia
Being asked to reflect on a single moment with your mum is never easy - there are so many weird and wonderful moments when my mum is around. Mother’s Day is the perfect excuse to not only say thank you for the big things but the little things; bringing you tea in bed, sorting you a cosy hot water bottle or being the perfect travel companion. My mother does all the above and more, she’s my favourite person on this planet and the best person I know. I picture her reading this with a witty remark about how I should never forget just how lucky I am to have her around. The moment I want to thank her for the most, however, happened last year and will take a lot more than a gorgeous bunch of Mother’s Day flowers to ever repay my gratitude.
My mum saved my life. That might sound overly dramatic, which, as my mum will tell you, I can be prone to being, but it’s not an exaggeration. A personal crisis exploded in my life during a year which was full of drama and pain for so many people, but my world had collapsed and I needed my mother. An overnight flight and hours of travelling had her arrive at the bedside of her daughter who couldn’t eat, sleep or function. She listened, she cuddled, she waited, and then, just as mothers do, she fixed it. She dried my tears, pieced me back together and somewhere, out of a mire of despair and depression she inspired hope and optimism and eventually, happiness.
It always amuses me when mothers, especially of younger children, fret about their little angels growing up and drifting away. “I want to keep them this small forever, I don’t want them to grow up and stop needing me” is a cry I’ve heard from pretty much every parent I’ve ever known. If it reassures anyone, let me tell you now; we never stop needing our mums. Never. You don’t leave home and suddenly have it all figured out. I seek out my mother constantly for her advice, her wisdom, her wit and that all important reassurance that everything will be ok. ‘It will get better’ was the phrase my mother repeated on a near hourly basis. I didn’t believe her at first, but low and behold, I’d started a journal and I remember about a month later writing the phrase ‘she was right’. My mum is always right - she’ll tell you herself - and this occasion was no different. You’d think after all these years I would believe it the first time, but no - I still like to think I know best.
It isn’t what I’d call my favourite moment with my mum, but it’s probably the most important in memory. Other more lighthearted vignettes include her dancing most enthusiastically to mariachi music with a margherita in hand or telling the only joke she knows repeatedly to every new person she meets (it’s the wide mouthed toad joke - remember to laugh politely!).
And now she lives with me. My mum moved across the country during one of the worst pandemics in history because in one of my worst moments I was so afraid I made her promise that she wouldn’t leave me for one minute. And she kept that promise. Not that she needed to verbalise it, she’s one of the fiercest women I know when it comes to her children so it was a given that she wasn’t going anywhere. Hopefully in the future our moments will be more centred around wine and spa weekends and less around emotional and mental upheavals, but I suppose the moral of this story is that every #momentwithmymum, whether hilarious or heinous, is to be cherished equally, because I’m just as lucky to have her around in the dark times as I am during the light.
Georgia Flanagan
