It’s perhaps a bit late to write about Mother’s Day, but it’s been on my mind.

My mum wasn’t perfect, but she liked children. When she found out that I was pregnant, (much later than either of us would have wished) she was overjoyed. She spoiled my lad rotten.

Although she was not a perfect mother, I had a happy, if somewhat dull childhood.

My parents were not the sort to entertain my sister and I much. We were left mainly to the television and our own imaginations.

My mum died more than six years ago. She got food poisoning from a dodgy piece of chicken.

She was laid up in bed for nearly the whole week between my usual visits, before I even knew she was ill.

Typically, she didn’t want to worry me.

Eventually her friend who lived across the road phoned, to tell me she was concerned and thought I might be able to talk her into seeing a doctor.

When I saw my mum in bed, I thought she was dead. Just skin and bone. Within the space of a week the illness had left her almost skeletal.

I got her into hospital, but the damage was done.

She was too weak to recover from the chest infection that had been detected by the ambulance driver and pointed out by me to staff as she was admitted, but that the hospital had not bothered to investigate or treat.

It’s a funny thing, celebrating Mother’s Day when you no longer have a mother.

Instead of buying gifts and flowers and booking a restaurant, the run-up to Mothering Sunday is now spent trying not to listen to whispered conversations between lad and his dad.

Instead of giving thanks, I find myself in receipt of it.

Instead of being obliged, I am indulged.

My mum was not a perfect mother, but she imprinted a template for motherhood upon me that I reference daily.  A template that she herself had to draw up to her own design.

My mum was not perfect, but she did her best.

Which was, all things considered, pretty good.

Especially as she had no ready-made template to follow, her own mum having died when she was only eleven.

She spent the years until she married my dad, at nineteen, living miles away with an aunt and uncle.

My mum was a good enough mother that I miss her still. Enormously.

Every single day. Not just on Mother’s Day.

It’s a lot to live up to.

I am not a perfect mother.

I am just hoping – and trying – to be good enough.♥