Josie Bicknelle - Mar 01 2023
Mother's Day
Mother’s Day is just around the corner for us Brit’s, and I thought it might be a good topic of conversation to cover. Not everyone’s relationship with their mum is the same. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it’s completely different for every single person on this planet.
Some people have nothing but love and admiration for their mum’s. Some have resentment, or anger, and some people don’t even have a mum - something of which I am eternally grateful I don’t relate to.
My mum is my best friend.
Don’t get me wrong - it hasn’t always been that way. Like most mother-daughter relationships, we’ve had turbulence (especially in the frightful years between 13 and 16). As it turned out, however, growing out of my terrible teens happened to coincide with my mum and I finding ourselves living alone together for around four or five years.
We grew incredibly close incredibly quickly.
As I was maturing and starting to live more independently, it began to feel as though we were actually more like roommates, and that the parental power dynamic had started to fade away. It did to me, at least - she would probably argue that roommates don’t do each other's laundry quite as often as she did mine.
I seem to notice that quite often in mother-daughter relationships, it can be embarrassing or incredibly vulnerable for both parties to discuss intimate parts of their lives. Namely, the topics of sex, or relationships, or even mental health can be seemingly off limits for a lot of people to talk about with their parents.
I don’t think that there’s anything that’s off limits for my mum and I to gossip about.
My happiest place is sitting in her living room with a cup of tea, filling each other in on everything that’s been going on in our lives since we last saw each other - whether that be a bad panic attack I’d had the week prior, or a dating disaster, or how good that last episode of Handmaid’s was.
In the fields next to our house
I have this philosophy that you can’t fully comprehend how much mum’s do for their children until you realise that they’re people, too.
As a child, you’re brought up with this misconception that your parents are some other worldly figures, put into the world to look after you and that’s it. I think as you grow up, you begin to understand the sacrifices made by these people who raised you, and that they had a full life before you were born, and have given parts of that away to look after you.
Mum’s aren’t just ‘mum’s’ - they’re people. It sounds obvious now, but as a bratty thirteen year old I definitely wasn’t thinking about how my argumentative behaviour might make my mum feel insecure about her parenting skills, or how cooking us dinner every evening must exhaust her at the end of a long work day.
Ma & I - the early years
It’s easy to take everything your parent’s do for granted, because they’ve always been there. For a lot of people, they are the one constant in your life that you’ve always been able to depend on, no matter how much you use them as a punching bag.
I know that a lot of people in their twenties, including myself, can’t possibly imagine having children any time soon. I hear a lot of people say, ‘I'm too selfish to have children’, or, ‘I like my free time too much to have kids’. The next time you’re having those thoughts, I implore you to remember - your parents did that for you. Do not take that for granted.
I cannot even begin to imagine the blood, sweat and tears that go into raising a well rounded, emotionally intelligent, kind human being. Yet somehow, my mum did. For that, there are not enough days in the calendar to show my gratitude.
So, I don’t care how busy you are, or that you buy her flowers every year so ‘why does she need more?’. If, like me, you have the best mum in the world, show her that you recognise everything she’s done for you. It’s only one day, it’s really not that hard.
Get her the flowers, get her a card, get her a hidden message candle - I don’t care. She fucking deserves it.
To mum’s everywhere, I think you’re amazing. To my mum, I love you. Happy Mother’s Day.
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