I’m afraid I sound like a broken record, talking about my dead mum.

I’m sat in my 2nd year University flat bedroom. It is 8pm. I’m on my laptop and should definitely be doing some University Pre work for my seminars this week. I feel sad. Maybe it’s the time of year. December. I always feel weird about Christmas. I know I shouldn’t.

I know I have some files on my laptop that are my Mum’s journals she had to record whilst she was on a counselling course she was pursuing before she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

What I like about these is that, there is so much inner reflection from my Mum. I really got to see what was going on in her head at the time. I was 11 when she died, so I never got to know her as an adult. I never got to know what she really thought. So, these journals are my access to her actual thoughts. 

I start reading them. I cry. She suffered from depression. I never knew this. I couldn’t know as a child. She was so hard on herself, in terms of the course. She doesn’t think she is very good. This is what she said:

‘As I got older I would look to other people for some sort of appraisal, I would agree with what other people said thinking they must be much more knowledgeable then me as they had a normal upbringing.  They know how to behave and what should or shouldn’t be done.  I was never sure what was acceptable.  And I am still not sure of this.  But now I try to think  it does not matter if others think it is acceptable.  It only matters if I think it is acceptable.  Sometimes this works but I do wish I felt like this all the time but unfortunately I do not. Sometimes now I become more aggressive because I am fed up with being overlooked or thought to be unimportant.  This is not always the best way to deal with things either. I have and still do suffer from depression and  when I did my earlier course at the beginning of the year the level 2 in Counselling,  the course gave me a real feeling of self worth and a sense of achievement and I didn’t feel low at all, while I was attending this course.  My self-worth increased. I felt I was doing something important.’

This makes my heart hurt to read. She was working incredibly hard on herself, to do something that mattered. To do something to help others who had struggled like herself.

I so wish I could tell her, that she is enough. I wish she was here now. I wish I could talk to her as a 21-year-old. About mental health. And life, and everything. 

She later talks about having headaches a lot. She links them to having a lot of pressure from people in her life and how this creates stress and leads to headaches. In hindsight I believe this was the start of the warning signs of the brain tumour. This also makes my heart hurt.

But I’m 21. She died nearly 10 years ago. 

I feel like a broken record talking about my dead mum. I worry that I should definitely be over it. When people see another article I’ve written or a grief event I am part of, there is a voice in my head that tells me to shut up. Everyone must be sick of the girl who talks about her dead mum. It happened nearly 10 years ago. 

I am a part of a lot of grief charities and circles. In one that I actually help to facilitate, we were all sharing a photo of our person who had died, and an object or anything we wanted that connected us to them. It was held in a talking circle manner on Zoom. Normally, I am so used to talking about my Mum that this is genuinely an easy task for me. But before I shared, which I waited a while to do. I felt myself shaking and feeling really choked up. When I did eventually share, I felt so emotional and angry. 

I said how I felt that it was quite hard to share. I had a photo of me and her when I was about 7 or 8, and that just made me feel worse. I said that the photo made me realise how long it had been. I am so young in the picture. It creates a disconnect between me and my mum. That isn’t me now in the photo. I also said that I was kind of fed up with talking about her. 

Because I want her to just be...be in life now. 

After that session, I sort of beat myself up about it. Especially as I normally go for a more grief advocacy perspective. I know this is probably a very normal set of feelings for someone who has had the same experience as me.

I do feel like a broken record talking about her. But if I don’t, then I worry that people will forget. 

I think growing up with grief is just very strange. I sometimes feel so fine, as if it doesn’t really bother me anymore, but then something will really hit me and I could be sobbing away as if she had just died.

I am constantly grieving about new things as I am reminded, she is missing them.

It’s so hard when the one person you want to share everything with. Has already missed a huge chunk of my life. When it comes to 11 or 12 years, I will have lived longer without her than with her. This is something that scares me a lot. 

So, if I do sound like a broken record, its is because I don’t want anyone to forget her. 

Amber Banks, My Mum.