In memory of my mum

This is a really long post. And a very personal one.

I share in support of any of you going through challenge and change. Keep going!

And in support of mental health awareness and the removal of the stigma that sometimes still surrounds it.

On the afternoon of June 2nd my mother Annette died. 

She was 86 and lived a life of huge challenge, hurt and damage from generational and family abuse and someone who was mentally unwell and suffered from extreme bipolar. 

We were deeply disconnected and had been for some time. In fact, had been estranged for large periods throughout my entire lifetime. We had a complex and painful relationship, often spent trying, with great difficulty, to connect with each other. We failed. 

Despite this I loved her to my bones as the person who gave me life. But I grieved and came to some sort of peace about our brokenness many years ago. 

I certainly often didn’t really like her, and I am fairly certain that she did not like me. Our relationship flipped many times between parent and child. Often I was the parent, because she couldn’t be. I accept that and recognise that played out continually since those early childhood days. I over care and over share, struggle with boundaries and that’s a failing in me. 

She was nomadic. Always seeking something. She couldn’t stay still for more than a little while and that resulted in me attending 9 different schools, including a stint in the USA, before I turned 11 years old. When I was growing up in West Cornwall  she was often  classed as “crazy” or “mental” - a testimony to the challenges of growing up in an era where mental health was so misunderstood and to the effect of living in such a beautiful but parochial backwards backwater. 

Cool Cornwall was not a thing in Penzance in 1990. 

It was in many ways a brutal and narrow minded place to be when faced with something that was so not the “norm”.  I’m not certain it’s changed much since then. 

But she was unquestionably kind. I remember her going out to feed a homeless couple sleeping rough in the shelters on Penzance promenade for multiple nights in a row because she didn’t want them to be hungry. And we often had random people show up in our home because she felt sorry for them and loved a lame duck story. She always had a bed and a meal for those kinds of people in need. 

And she could cook, the best cook ever. And so creative and hospitable to those she didn’t really know. She is my greatest teacher when creating and sharing food, being around an egalitarian table and taking care of others. Everything I’ve learnt about my passion for food and hospitality in my career and beyond has entirely come from her. 

She just couldn’t show that kindness to herself or her immediate family. Because it was too close for comfort and acutely painful for her. 

She was damaged and abused and that played out throughout her life and impacted her ability to parent. She was sectioned under the mental health act 3 times during my primary school years. My father left us. And then she left me. Because she didn’t have the role models, mental resilience or tools to know how to parent herself, when she was a child. And she spent her life looking for the person or the situation that might somehow make that better. And she continued to look for that until the end. 

I found out on that Friday morning how sick she was, by chance, because some kind soul had tracked me down. I wrestled with the emotions of estrangement and anger versus love and instinct and, instinct and love won. I was on my way to see her when I took the call to say she had died. I didn’t get to hold her hand or say I was sorry for all the hurt and the pain that had passed between us. And now she has gone. 

I’m heartbroken and relieved in equal measure and I don’t write this to seek pity or sympathy from anyone. But I want to place this heavy burden down. 

So I ask you this.

If you have some unfinished business or some words that you need to say, please do it now. 

You never know what is ahead. And doing the right thing is always going to be better, despite it being more challenging in the long run, over doing the easy thing. So don’t do the easy thing and push it all down. It will one day rise up and confront you in the most painful of ways. 

And in the meantime, I love you Mum and I’m sorry we didn’t see each other for who we really are. 

I hope you have found peace at last and I’ll see you on the other side ❤️.

With love,

Tamsyn x