Back when you could smell fresh cut grass from the open seat of your horse and trap, and good mornings were starched collars and doffed caps, Mothering Sunday, it turns out, had nothing at all to do with mums.
The idea was that you visited the church in which you had been christened - I suppose, to go back and to be thankful for the Christian life you had led since that day, to remind yourself of your roots and how you had grown since leaving your ‘mother’ church.
You can see what happened, and perhaps rightly so - the idea of honouring your ‘mothering’ evolved quite properly into honouring your mother. And very welcome a thing Mother’s Day is in our world, I say.
What with it being the sainted day, I revisited my own mater today, complete with a little gift and a nice card. I’m glad I did; it was so nice to see her. And once more I was reminded how much I’ve missed my parents in this woeful year of weirdness. In fact, in a very tricky way to describe, I found myself unable to be fully myself. I thought about that a lot.
I think there’s an unexpected heartbreak coming. I’ve voiced it a little before, when I realised the children were growing up too fast, but it struck me again today - we’re going to realise the time we’ve lost, and maybe more.
It’s like a delayed grief, a sort of tidal wave from an earthquake a year old. It will seep out, and then quickly seep in again. Had the pandemic been a month or two, as we assumed last Spring, we might have adapted, we might have collected ourselves and returned to how we were in early 2020 without missing a beat. Unfortunately, we’ve been on pause for so long, pressing play will feel as daunting as starting over. And I don’t know if we’re all ready for it.
Many of us are also going to have to realise the people we’ve lost too. There are over 140,000 of them now. A year ago, one of the experts who flanked the daily news briefings told us that 20,000 would be a tragedy. Here we are then, seeing that terrible toll as the waters slowly recede and we survey the damage. Coming back together will at best be bittersweet. I think it might be tougher than a lot of us are expecting.
And that’s how I felt driving back from seeing my Mum today: thrilled to tears that I’d seen her, but still a little bit crushed and confused that the distance between us had made it so difficult.
Perhaps that was what Mothering Sunday was about then - tying yourself back to the things that mattered, reconciling your journey with your start point, old friends and old faces swirling through the church like warm memories, keeping you grounded, keeping you thankful, keeping you home.
“I can’t wait to give you a hug then,” said I from the doorstep. I blew her a kiss, hoping it would convey thankfulness and warmth, respect and sweetness. I reversed down the drive as raindrops spotted on the windscreen. Then, as I strapped on the seatbelt and swung the car in the direction of home, I smiled to myself, wiping away a hot teardrop from my cheek.
The Five Dates
Back to School Day: 0 days
Back to Sixes Day: 15 days
Haircut Day: 28 days
Big Travel Day: 63 days
Liberation Day: 98 days
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