Operation Bloom

May 20th will (quite unbelievably) mark the tenth anniversary of my beautiful mum’s death.  As is so often the case when it comes to time passing, it simultaneously feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago that I last saw Anne Wardrop, held her hand, plumped her pillows, held my breath as she took her last.

She’s missed so many major events in the lives of my brother and I; we both met and married our partners since she died, developed our careers, moved houses but the thing I find hardest is she’s never met any of her three lovely grandchildren.  She would have adored each of them, and they her. We call her ‘Granny Anne’ when we speak about her to the children, which is often, but the truth is we never got to ask her what she’d like to be called so we had to decide on something we thought she’d approve of.  No teacups have mysteriously been hurled across the room so we take that as tacit consent.

Of course I miss her for my own sake; as my life unfolds there are constantly new conversations I’d like to have with her, ones we couldn’t have had when she was here because I hadn’t reached that particular stage of my life yet.  But at least I was fortunate enough to have almost thirty three years with her. The Little Chap will only have our stories and photos to know her by, and I suspect she may be not much more than an abstract figure for him, just as was my maternal grandfather to me, as he too died before I was born.  I’ve lamented my mum and the Little Chap’s lack of physical knowing of each other, no hugs, kisses, playtime, mealtimes, her cool hand on his poorly brow but it’s felt futile dwelling too much on that as there’s nothing to be done to ease that sadness…or so I thought…

The other day my wise and intuitive friend Wendy told me an incredible fact which concurrently blew my mind and brought me unexpected comfort; namely that when I was inside my mother’s womb, I was already carrying the egg that would go on to create the Little Chap.  This means my mum carried within her a physical part of my son. There was a physical ‘holding’ of him by her, just not the one I’d pictured.  I love that thought so damn much. Of course it doesn’t replace the daydream of them actually spending time together but that piece of information has given me something in place of the nothing I previously thought I had.

Over the last forty-three-and-counting hours I’ve been with the Little Chap around the clock as he’s had an awful vomiting bug poor love.  Of course it struck the night before I was due to see a friend in London, my first overnight trip away from the small one in TWO YEARS!!  But while I was really sorry to have to cancel our plans, there is nowhere I’d rather be than by his side when he’s ill.

He’s by nature a stoic vomiter.  No fuss. Which makes us love him all the more.  But I really understand why my mum used to say she ‘wished she could be ill for us’, as you would take their sickness away in an heartbeat if you could (instead we just take it in turns to pass it between the three of us, just so we can ALL suffer.  Not quite the deal my mum was after, Mother Nature). Although my mum is long gone, it’s at these times of intense care-giving that I notice that the way I show love and care for the Little Chap has the same quality as the love and care my mum showed me. I truly feel a flow from her, through me, into him and this also keeps a feeling of connection between her and my son alive.

I know how lucky I am to have known a mother’s love like hers, it’s a great foundation from which to build a life and plenty of people aren’t so fortunate, so the least I can do is create the time and space to share that love with my own son and hope it continues to flow through to future generations.  There is a law of physics which states ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed but it can transferred and transformed’…

I like to think the same applies to love…