Last week my youngest brother sat bedside holding my mothers hand as she died. On Monday we buried my mother’s body. My mother was not a union steward or political activist, but she was a worker and a fighter.
When my brothers and I were youngsters my mother worked 3 part-time jobs. She cleaned a local pub, then served meals at our school and on the way home from school we would watch through the window as she waitressed at a local café. In our early childhood money was always short. We rarely missed a meal, but ate a lot of bread and jam. More often we experienced winter nights going to bed early to stay warm.
This was in a way my mother’s choice. It was this way or the brutality that marriage to my dad had been. I am grateful my mother freed us from that. We eventually emerged from that emotional shell shock.
When I was nine, we three brothers were then taken from my mum. The state deemed my mother “unfit” essentially because she had no man. For two years we paid the price of a backwards government family policy. I now know that losing your children is far worse than losing a parent.
Our economically rocky life eventually stabilized when mum got a unionized factory job at EMI. Then my brother hit 15 and left school apprenticing at a local garage, bringing in a second wage to the family. Life evened out a bit.
At the funeral on Monday I included in my tribute a word about how mothers in this world are expected to be saints. Yet, they are given neither the resources nor the respect to live up to this. Our world is hostile to women, there’s no other way to say it. Yet mothers survive and if anyone sees good in me or my brothers, they see my mother in us.
My mother was something before a mother. According to those that knew her then, she rode a motorbike all over West Wales without a helmet, apparently she was a troublemaker at school which she left at 14 and her last surviving sibling called her the best sister you could ever have.
On the day before the funeral, my younger brother and I headed up the hills behind my father’s old house. Up the winding lane to the rocks where we three each took a stone on the day we scattered my fathers ashes nine years ago. The Welsh hills right now are full of tiny white noisy lambs each coupled with their scruffy grey mothers. As urban as we are, we recognized one lamb was literally a day or two-old, judging by its spindly body and awkward gait. On that walk we saw perhaps six lambs lying listless, with mother nearby. This seemed worse than the one lamb aimlessly circling its dead mother.
My younger brother cared for my mother in recent years. Despite having his own family and children. He bathed mum, shopped for her and comforted her. He changed her in the middle of the night. In her last months she stayed at a National Health Service care home. On the way home from work every night he would pop in to see mum. He is a great son, but only the son that my mother produced.
It must have been hard for my mother to leave us and all those that loved her. Her life improved the world. She parented without judgment or criticism. She taught us not to be talked down to and she taught us solidarity and its sister, love.
I will repay the sacrifice my mother made for us by doing all I can to tear down this world that can create a billion different Ring Tones, but cannot put to work the 13.5 million unemployed.
