When you lose your mum in mid-life, you lose your map too

The hardest thing about being a mum over 40, after losing my own mother, is the silence that follows every moment when I would have called her. Good news, bad day, random thought, she was always my first dial.

It started long before I truly understood loss. Bedtime stories stretching past bedtime, surprise holidays on birthdays, the time I smashed my two front teeth bumping into a boy in the playground, every teenage heartbreak, whatever the crisis, the solution was always mam.

When I became a mother at 40

When I had my son at 40, I needed her all over again. I thought she’d be there well into her eighties, coffee in hand, helping me through sleepless nights and toddler tantrums. Life, as it does, had other plans.

The fall that changed everything

In July 2015, returning tanned and tired from a holiday in Rhodes, Dad called. Mum had fallen down the stairs and was being taken to A&E. She was 63, a size 14/16, and I wasn’t too worried at first. Strong in spirit, if not in fitness, she’d snapped her femur in two. Hip replacement surgery followed, and with it a year-long nightmare I’m still processing.

A secret she kept from me

By the time she entered rehab, she was barely recognisable. Skin yellowed, clothes hanging loose. Her GP, a woman Mum had known for twenty years, told me she didn’t want me to know the full details of her illness. I respected that. Foolishly, I thought it was cancer. I didn’t push for more. When the call came at 4am, the day before my new job, grief had already arrived.

Picking up the pieces

While other new mums were singing lullabies, I was planning a funeral, sorting paperwork, and cleaning out her house. Every photograph, card, and poem I had ever written became proof that even as she faded, she carried me with her. Little C was just over one, too young to remember her, but old enough for me to grieve the relationship he’d never have.

“A mother’s love isn’t conditional. It’s simply there, an anchor even when you don’t realise you’re drifting.”

Still here, just not here

Now I keep her close in small ways. I read my son the same books she read to me. I wear her ring when I need strength. When I write, I feel her beside me because she loved words too.

Losing a parent at midlife is strange. Not young enough to be cocooned, not old enough to be philosophical. Suspended somewhere between gratitude and fury, robbed of the future you imagined. And yet, somehow, you carry on, because what choice do you have?

So this Mother’s Day, I’ll lift my coffee cup to her. To the woman who made me, shaped me, and in quiet ways, still guides me. Because some mothers never really leave.