Sunday Blog 135 – 12th May 2024
Today was Mum’s first Mother’s Day since she moved into a residential aged care facility. How we had wanted to keep her in her own home, but it was not to be. So we did what we could to create a home-like morning tea. “I wish I could see it,” Mum said, so we described the egg sandwiches, the special teacups and saucers, the pink iced cakes.
Morning tea merged into lunch, then Mum and I napped in her room. I roused myself and left to get on with my Sunday Blog, found myself a beautiful spot by the river. And then I saw the empty battery on the laptop with me. It declined my power bank’s kind invitation to charge it. Handwriting is fine but I need to get an image right before I can blog, so I ended up writing random notes about passing people. I was then a bit late getting to the Mother Nurture Activate Saplings event where my daughter was playing. Ah, my beautiful daughter who made me a mum. What a sweet joy to listen and sing and dance along to her music. Mother Nurture was the name of a long-ago volunteer group I joined when she was two, and then I recycled the name for a post-natal depression group for new mums struggling to bond with their babies (now called Mother Baby Nurture). I took a picture of the sign, tucked it away into my Mother’s Day.
At the end of the gig, I raced back home to plug in the laptop and get going with the Sunday Blog already. My eye fell on the picture of us I’ve had on my desk for several months—my daughter and I, when she was just three. We’d been displaced from our home and we were making the best of it in our new home, a secure apartment block. 22 years ago on 10th May 2002, just before Mother’s Day, someone invaded our little home and changed it forever. It never truly felt like home again. But I remember that photo being taken by my sister, who had come to visit us in our new digs. I can still feel my daughter’s body against me, my hands resting on her little shins.
Fancy morning tea in an aged care facility, a photo taken in the sunshine. These disjointed moments can still be sewn back together – by the incredible luck of just having loved ones together, moving forward, always moving forward.