That dark-eyed young woman in a pale floral print dress with wiry, pinned curls trying to break free in the breeze. She faces the camera with arms spread, leaning on a fence with a Scottish loch and a watery sky in the background.
She has a shy half-smile and her shoulders curve into her neck slightly, but her body is sturdy, feet together in smart new shoes.
That’s the picture of my mother I like to carry in my head. It was taken by my father during their pre-war courtship in Scotland.
It’s now in a biscuit tin somewhere, along with a few other photos of an older woman with babies and sullen teenagers. She appears again with grey streaked hair at weddings and finally on seaside benches with other grey ladies.
They’re all the same woman. There are no photos of her in her tiny kitchen cooking or complaining of her bad back, or scrubbing the toilet floor, or boiling a kettle for my dad’s tea or hanging out the washing.
Those are the ordinary and unapplauded tasks of mothers that go largely unrecorded. They are still carried out every day by mothers in the 21st century despite decades of social change — mothers still shoulder the real weight of child raising and family support.
Some men today do make a real effort to share the role, but they are rare beings. It’s still mothers who get down on their knees and scrub the toilet floor.
I once asked my mother what made her really happy?
She said a washing line full of nappies.
That was in the days before disposables.
Her reply came with a shimmer of pride and a wistful sadness in equal measure. The years when her children were babies were the golden years of her life.
She never looked for anything outside her own achievement as a mother. Or if she did, she never spoke of it. She was lucky to live in a time when motherhood could be enjoyed without pressure to prove herself in any other sphere. In those days, one man’s salary was enough to buy a house.
She showed no interest in politics or money or books or careers or possessions unless it was a new washing machine, which made her life easier as a mother.
She worked from morning until night washing and making beds and shopping and cleaning — until Coronation Street or Blankety Blank came on the telly and she put her feet up on a stool and sipped a sugary cup of Tetley’s tea.
The feminist revolution of the 1960s and ’70s came too late for my mother, but I think she would have still chosen motherhood as her career because she was a natural.
Her own mother died in childbirth, so she had no real role model. Goodness knows where Helen Pitcairn Sym got her mothering skills from. They were intrinsic, like her soft voice and the folds of her skin when she drew you to her for comfort.
Like thousands of other mothers then and now, she did what was expected of her and she never doubted or complained about her role.
She’s long gone now, but she’s always there leaning on the fence. I like to remember her like this because I am reminded my mother had another life before marriage and children. Helen Pitcairn Sym wasn’t always a cook, a washerwoman and a floor scrubber who set her daily clock by the hour that her husband arrived home from proper work.
She was once a shy young Scottish farm girl looking out at the world not knowing what it had in store for her before the terrible war came and dragged her south to become a children’s nurse in the smoking cities full of loud men with big hats and guns. The only voice she ever had was her innate motherhood.
She was meek and tough in equal measure — whenever she needed to be. She was flawed and perfect, bold in her domain and shy to the world. She would have found it impossible to exist now in these demandingly perfect times.
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