Denise

It's times like these when a gal needs her Mum!
I've contracted one of those stupid, 24 hour puke-fests that have been lurking around the school.
I pick up everything these days, due to my precarious immune system, but thankfully, because of genetic robustness, I bounce back quicker than the rules of biology might have you believe.

However, it's times like these that a gal needs her mum!
I am old enough to be a mum myself and, on the estate where I work, I am old enough to be a grandmother! LOL!
But chronological and mental age are two different animals.
On the inside, I am a frightened and confused teenager most of the time (and actually on the outside too, if the shops that sell booze would have one believe).
Most of the time I enjoy being a responsible adult with a highly responsible job.
Most of the time I enjoy being the one who gives the advice, rather than takes it.

But tonight, I just want my Mum.
I want to be able to snuggle up to her as she mops my fevered brow in between puking sessions and to feel utterly safe in her arms.
When was the last time you felt utterly safe?

Answer carefully.
For most of us, it was a loooong time ago.


I remember the early Autumn of 1994.
Many of you on here know very well that I HATE Autumn.
The main reasons that I give are the changes in temperature and the dying of Summer.
But it runs deeper than that.

I knew, by late September of 1994 that my Mum was dying. No second chances... this was it for her.
I watched as she withered with the leaves and mirrored the ever greying skies.
I watched as her beautiful and effervescent lights slowly sunk to the horizon a little earlier each day, in tune with the Autumn sun.

It was an Indian Summer that year.
Summer stretched her golden arms out and breathed some of her warmth well into October.
This meant that my mother and I could continue our little tradition of sitting on the bench in the garden, under the stars of an evening while Dad pottered around indoors.
Mum and I would just sit and talk.
And talk.
And talk.
And sometimes we would stop to smell the scent of the flowers carried on the night air and the hint of Autumn threading and entwining its own scents in between.

We had a world of our own, we two...mother and daughter, sister and sister, friend and friend.
It was the truest and most beautiful of loves I have ever known.

One day, I opened up to my Mum as I often and always did.
I knew that she was dying. I knew that she had enough on her mind, but I spoke to her any way.

There were things that I had not told her...not told anyone.
I am a keeper of secrets, me. I keep those of others' and more especially, I keep my own.
I am a creeper of the underworld sometimes...I sneak off and do remarkably precarious things that are so out of character for me that I never tell of them because nobody would believe me anyway. And actually, if I did tell of them, I would have to face up to the fact that there is a very dark and dangerous faery of a creature residing within!

So that night, barely out of my teens, I confessed all.
I had racked up a fair pile of nefarious and dangerous adventures in my short time on this earth... probably more than the average forty year old. One thing I knew how to do was to LIVE and to live in a very quiet and subtle way...but also to push every single boundary I could throw myself at...just so long as it was under cover of darkness and out of view.

She wrapped her withered arms around me and stroked my hair as I sobbed my confessions into her diseased breast.
I knew that this was probably my last chance to let the one person that I had ever loved this deeply to truly know her daughter.

After I was done, she recoiled.
She asked if I could hold her as she held me so that she may honour me with her own confessions.

So I curled around her like a velvet shawl and I held her tight and cradled her as if I might be the only thing in this world that could keep her flesh from falling.

She then spilled out 54 years worth of secrets and hidden desires and regrets and longings and mistakes and heartbreak.
They spilled out of her and onto me like a torrent of water from a broken levy.
As she sobbed and spoke, I came to realise that after barely twenty years on this Earth, I had been given the chance to open my eyes and never regret the things I had never done...or the things that I HAD done.
My mother had been my carer, my best friend, a good wife and all things to every one.

But she had spent her life hiding what was, essentially, the fact that she was a poet, a dreamer, a princess, an intellect...and someone waiting for the Knight that never came.

A month later, she died.
She died in my arms in an ambulance. I whispered that I loved her and she nodded. I was the last person she ever saw with living eyes.

My world fell apart.
I had lost the only true love I had ever had and boy, was I pissed off.
I went off the rails.
I messed up my relationship with my poor boyfriend Dave by being a total fruit loop.
I went out every night and drank everything that I came into contact with.
I did whatever it took to blot out any sense of emotion or feeling.
This happened for a very long time.

But eventually, one wakes up from such folly and gets on with life.
I woke up and got on with life.

However, sometimes, when you are alone in the dark and feeling poorly and sorry for yourself, all you want is the one thing that you can never have...true, unconditional love enveloping you with no codicil, no price: just pure, 100% proof love bottled and sold to you with no request for ID and no questions asked...