AliceFraser

Mothers Day in The UK

Added 2017-03-27 01:48:43 +0000 UTC

UK mothers day. Seeing all my friends over there giving love and gratitude to their mamas. Thinking about mine.

It's good sometimes to take a little while to be sad and think - sometimes it can feel dangerous to pull out memories and let myself feel the intensity of love that will inevitably slide towards a bottomless pit of sadness.

As time passes, I have a better sense of where the edges are of that sadness, and don't have to be so careful of its gravitational pull; so worried that it'll suck me down into crippling mindless grief. That's a good thing.

Today I'm just thinking about how proud mum was. She was a very proud woman. She had a kind of powerful open, generous dignity that made many of the worst indignities of her disease seem like accessories - sidelines. She was also very proud of us. Of Dad, Henry, and me. Not proud of our achievements. Proud of us.

I told a story in Savage about the time I did that TEDx talk, and told mum that I wouldn't be coming into the hospital that afternoon because I was going to do a TEDx talk. She said "Oh darling, I'm so proud of you! I'm so proud of you... what's a TEDx talk?" I tell that story because I think it's a good example of how she was more generally. When you have one story that is a good example, it can seem like the whole story. But for me, that story's fractal - it opens up in my mind all of the grand generosity of her character.

A thousand other moments like that.