Mother's Day

Poppy was always disinterested in Mothering Sunday, and now it seems the children she abandoned by stepping in front of a bus eight years ago are just as disinterested in her - or at least the memory of her.

The first year Poppy qualified as a mother on Mothering Sunday was 1994. Which seems a lifetime ago now (and in Poppy's case, it is). In tandem with that BBC advert (a phrase which should, in my honest opinion, have remained an oxymoron), the rubble of the Berlin Wall was yet not five years old and the change of the public perception of Nelson Mandela from a grainy stock photo from the sixties to a living and breathing sixty-two year man occurred barely four years previously.

Poppy's qualification as a mother place me in a quandary. I couldn't ask if she wanted her association with motherhood acknowledged on the traditional motherhood-acknowledging day as I would be in the wrong no matter her opinion, i.e.:

[1] "Of course I do! Why should you even need to ask that?"

or

[2] "Of course I don't! Why should you even need to ask that?"

So, I flipped a mental coin, influenced by thought-processes that decided I would be deeper in the sin bin should I fail to acknowledge the day than option [B]. So I got a cheap and fluffy card (which I hoped - if all else failed - Poppy would assume to be deliberately ironic), stuck a felt-tipped pen in the five-month-old Andrew's chubby fingers and somehow got him to scribble something within it. I added a small volume of poetry and hid them in Andrew's Moses Basket for Poppy to discover upon Andrew's initial nappy-change, which she duly did so and gave me a perfunctory kiss and thank you. We then went through that charade of my claim of having nothing to do with the purchase, it all being down to a person whose only method of propulsion would be to hitch upon his back and continually thrust his pelvis, bouncing down the road on his back-side.

This arrangement continued for the next few years, mainly due to our boys happening along at the frequent interval of seventeen months (with the interesting addition of Gabriel just a few days before Poppy's second Mother's Day), until Andrew was four and Poppy told me that she didn't want anyone to bother with Mother's Day that year. Her reasoning was thus: That it was inappropriate to use one single day to show an almost forced amount of appreciation for a mother when what was actually done by the mother deserved far, far more than such a mediocre and insincere measure.

This lasted one year, as the following year Andrew came home excitedly from school with a green cardboard concoction upon which he'd stuck yellow and orange circles of tissue paper and other various bits. I didn't want the younger pair to feel left out so I helped them put together similar constructs of their own devising, and we burst into Poppy one unsuspecting morning with a tray of tea and buttered crumpets. She took all this with good grace but the adult in me could very easily deduce the lack of enthusiasm with which she endured the upset to her morning routine.

But that was the last time. By 1999 the Poppy we knew and found it within ourselves to love went away and was replaced by the Poppy we didn't know who took every day as one further to endure on her long and collapsing road towards death; until she took that short cut to oblivion, that is.

But today I wanted to remember that old Poppy, the pre-Huntington's Poppy. The one who swore far more than any woman is expected to swear and whom, with the surreptitious addition of alcohol, could be relied upon to find even filthier expletives. The woman who presented a concrete skin to the rest of the universe and held me under pain of death not to tell a soul she had to switch off Sophie's Choice before *that* choice because her emotions could not handle it. The woman who could skillfully turn any conversation into a discussion about her within thirty seconds of it starting no matter how oblique the opening exchange.

And it would have been sad enough, to journey to the now quite-far-away place where there exists a too-small memorial stone dedicated to her memory, but the fact I had to do it all on my own made it all the more hurtful.

My boys I think knew what was going to be expected of them, and not just because it had been discussed the previous Sunday, as they'd all made themselves conveniently scarce at a ridiculously early time. For f*ck's sake - it was a Sunday morning. It is normally a feat beyond superhuman endurance to prise any of them from their beds on a Sunday. Today they all escaped without even acknowledging me by ten in the morning.

I thought about waiting for all three to return before I ventured off, but by one in the afternoon it appeared clear they were not going to be returning any time soon, so off I drove on my lonesome with only my darkened thoughts to keep me company.

Fifteen miles later I was stood at the tiny, light-blue marble plaque that signified that Poppy once blessed the world with her unique presence. I didn't know what I was going to feel, and in truth, I felt nothing. I couldn't connect this piece of chiseled and polished stone with the only woman in the history of my world I'll probably be able to call my wife. I stood for a measured amount of time before the chill content of the air upped itself and I chose to go home.

All three of my boys were back, almost as if they'd been hiding, waiting for my departure.

So the air has been fractious within the house all day. I have been uncommunicative and withdrawn and I feel I have every right to be. I have not made dinner, leaving everyone to their own devices. I know I have tried to bring my boys up to be independent, but I seemed to have brought them up to be selfish as well.