Reflections on my Late Mother's Birthday
I was about halfway to town when I realized that today — January 26th — is my late mother's birthday.
She passed away 17 years ago; today would have been her 104th birthday. Yes, I'm that old...
Most of us end up living long enough that our parents die, and some part of us suddenly feel orphaned, as a result of realizing that we are suddenly no longer attached to something in our past, anymore.
Of course, my mother was thousands of miles away when she died and that distance was ironically symbolic of the other "distance" between us.
It's hard to put my finger on it exactly, but what we considered important in life pretty much lived on opposite poles of existence... and we never quite met on the topic of "how to live your life."
At first, the "distance" was uneasy, but eventually we made a sort of peace over the reality that there was no meeting place in the middle.
While we perhaps didn't exactly reconcile, we were able to steer most of our interactions towards things we both enjoyed, like cooking and good food.
And that just had to be "good enough."
I was just never going to become part of the status-conscious, social climbing country clubby lifestyle, and she was never going to give up her snobbishness, racist undertones and bigotry.
I've been told that the rose-colored lenses of passing time helps us forget the parts of others we had issues with, but there are certain things I simply will not see as acceptable, no matter how far in the past they might be.
Just to be clear, I harbor no ill will... and when I say that I remember my mother's birthday today, my choice is to remember the times we spent trying out new recipes, and the times I spent in the kitchen as a kid... learning about the many aspects of food and cooking.
I am also grateful for the lessons I was taught about keeping a garden and growing things to eat at home. To this day, when Mrs. Denmarkguy and I are working in our vegetable garden, I am often sharing tales from my childhood garden.
It was a BIG one!
My parents had originally wanted to put a tennis court at the end of the garden — but didn't — so our vegetable patch was the size of a full tennis court + surround.
My mother's birthday was midwinter, of course, so the gardens lay fallow... but my dad would bring home several fresh hyacinths that would live on the windowsill in the kitchen and offer a fragrant counterpoint to the cooking smells.
As I wind down these self-indulgent reflections on my mother's life, perhaps the posthumous lifelesson that comes through for me is that I'm not entirely sure she was happy with her choices... choices that were more likely made to impress/silence the demons of her past, rather than offer her a measure of peace and contentment.
Self-examination was not her strong suit; in fact, it was often something she dismissed as "nonsense," should it arise within her circle of friends.
The message was that we simply didn't have emotional and psychological struggles in our family... so if you actually did you'd better hide them well, lest anyone should think you might belong in a "nut house!"
As I said, my mother would have been 104 today, so she was from a very different generation... and I am just going to leave it at that.
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Created at 2026.01.26 22:46 PST
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My mum used to be a staunch conservative and was shocked when I celebrated Maggie Thatchers last days as prime minister back in the late eighties. She’s now 83 and has become far less Tory in her older years. We seem to agree a little more nowadays.
Mum is also a fanatical gardener but is more and more getting help with it all.
Our childhood garden wasn’t as big as yours but it was big. Enough space to have a kickabout or play tennis in the garden with a makeshift net in the summer months.
My grandparents had the biggest gardens.
Seems that with each generation gardens get smaller, it’s probably modern builders buy smaller plots of land, yet the cost of property doesn’t quite align with it.
Here’s to your late Mum.
We were quite fortunate to move into a place that had a lot of gardening space around. Since then — and especially as a result of the Covid lockdowns — we have considerably expanded our space for growing food, claiming the side lawn to instead have vegetable beds.
The primary challenge is keeping our local herd of deer from decimating everything!
I'm glad gardening is making somewhat a of a comeback, perhaps in response to the uncertainty in the world. Even here in the States — where we allegedly live in the Land of Plenty — most days when I go to the supermarket there are areas of shelves that are completely bare and might not get refilled for a week. It's good to have at least a minimal amount of self-reliance.
I think over the years we’ve become accustomed to good supplies of goods but various factors will impact this, global political instability, poor seasons due to flood, drought and war. There are certain food items here that became scarce for awhile due to the Ukraine war, that in the end I believe farmers in the UK might have started growing again or were being sourced from countries even further away for higher cost.
We share an allotment here which is something you may have in the US, not sure, probably do in Denmark and other parts of Europe.
I'm lucky that both of my parents are still alive! Are they perfect? Far away from it, but they did raise my sister and me fairly well... I suppose... lol... 😃
I suppose your mother is generational somewhere around my grandparents, who lived, as you said, in completely different times... Unfortunately, some had a very hard life during the war(s), which made their skin thicker, but also created some wounds that never healed... Perhaps it's just an excuse for their behavior, but I can't hold a grudge against anything they did or said as I didn't live their lives...
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There was definitely a time in my younger years where I bore a bit of a grudge against my parents, and especially against my mom but I am long past that.
As you said, they went through their own periods of hard times and those were very different times from what we experience today. I know they did the best they could with what they had and I'm grateful for the knowledge they passed along, even though there were also some years of therapy to get over the negative parts!
My parents weren't perfect, but they did a pretty dang good job of raising four responsible, well-educated children. They did the best with what they had to work with, which included their educations, their pasts, their philosophies,their priorities, and their finances. They were young people just getting started in adult life when the Great Depression hit, so they were skilled at re-using and making do with what they had. I am grateful to have learned some of those skills from them.
I'm certain my parents did the best with the knowledge they had and what they had available to them!
They mostly live through the hardship of World War II in Europe and were philosophically and politically aligned with many people of their generation. Hi on that list was that feelings we're not useful things in life so you might as well forget about having them or dwelling on them. Not how I would do things, but as I said they did the best they could.