She wasn’t a great one for dispensing wisdom. Instead, she fought for me whenever I most needed it
M
um was a brilliant non-giver of advice. Now Dad, he had his pearls. “If you do something, do it with a good heart.” It sounded platitudinous to me, but he had a point. And then there was his favourite: “If you think something bad about someone, say it up there [pointing to his head] but not out loud.” Dad was a good man, but that infuriated me.
Mum played a bigger part in my life. She often had to fight like crazy for me – to keep me in school when I’d told the dinner lady to fuck off at the age of five (no, I don’t know where it came from); to take on the doctors who labelled me a malingerer when I had encephalitis; to allow me back into mainstream education after I’d had three years off, and finally to persuade the University of Leeds to let me in after I’d messed up my A-levels.
She did so much for me that I assumed there would be loads of advice she’d given me. And it was only when I thought about it that I realised Mum’s great gift was not to advise me but to let me make my own mistakes, not judge or bollock me for them, but discreetly help me out of them.
