Mother’s Day, like Valentine’s Day, can make me feel like my life is lacking. I wake up not filled with anticipation but trepidation, that no-one will have bothered to do anything, and isn’t that a red flag that they don’t care much at all?
Only last month I bad mouthed my husband all the way to school and back. I returned home at 9.20 am to discover a huge bouquet of red roses on the kitchen table. But that’s too late. You don’t do things on the day for heavens sake. Or rather I wouldn’t do it on the day. I would be planning a scenario, making lists and running errands beforehand. It’s a bit like something I once read about sex. Foreplay for a man begins in the bedroom. Foreplay for woman begins when she’s shaving her legs in the shower the morning of the date.
One of the worst Mother’s Day I’ve ever had was when first book The New Arrival hit the bookstores. It was my publisher’s big Mother’s Day title. We sold thousands of pre-sales copies and received so many messages telling us that people were gifting it or had requested it for Mother’s Day. Come that Sunday in 2014 and I had to wipe away the tears and get on social media with my book wishing all the mums’ out there a great day. And what had I got that morning? Bloody nothing. Zilch. It felt humiliating. (This is not typical of my husband, he’s great at gift buying, but baby, you really dropped the ball that year).
It gets worse.
I had no idea, no clue that when The New Arrival was first published that by Mothering Sunday 2023 I would no longer have a mother. Last year was our book’s tenth birthday. I tried to do a read-along to celebrate my mum’s life and achievements. I failed. It coincided too closely with the first anniversary of her death. I was overwhelmed by the loss of everything.
The first week of March is my youngest daughter’s birthday and my mum’s death, not to mention Pancake Day and World Book Day thrown in for good measure. By the time I reach Mother’s Day, having also made Irish Stew and Chocolate Guinness Cake for St Patrick’s en route, I’m wrung out, it’s a marathon of a month.
Now grief is in the mix it makes these days terribly loaded. Where do I get my excellent party planning, present buying, special meal making, house decorating skills from – I get them from my Mama. I always had amazing birthdays, her funny Valentine’s cards were my favourite, and she always made Easter and Christmas joyful. I ache for all her love on these day. I get this is not everyone’s love language, but it was a big part of ours. I’m in a one-sided relationship, doing all the talking, with no reciprocation from the person I want it from the most.
This year I seriously considered crawling under the duvet and hiding again. After two years of sickness, grief and healing against a backdrop of rising food prices and soaring energy bills and depleted savings, I don’t have the luxury of going back to bed with a three-year-old anymore and shutting the world out. Partly because I now have to drop my lockdown baby to reception class of a morning.
Five years on since the first lockdown I feel Lyra and I have lived in bubble after bubble, at arm’s length from the rest of the world. A newborn in lockdown one, breastfeeding alone on freezing benches in the November of lockdown two, a birthday party with no guests for lockdown three. Having to shut ourselves in whist I cared for my mum, which in the final days was 24/7. Then my grief bubble. The pneumonia bubble. Now I’m properly back to work in my writing pod in the garden which is a sort of bubble, but I’m not hiding in here, I’m not shutting the world out. I’m letting it flow through me, onto the page, into all I put out into the universe.
This March I’ve hosted a Writing & Breathwork Workshop for International Women’s Day, a really fun Substack Meet Up in West London and, a Women’s Memoir Writing Workshop for Women’s History Month. I’ve kept on writing, collaborating, creating and it’s not been easy but it’s been transformative.
The New Arrival is a book so filled with mothers and the business of mothering. At our last Meet Up talking to
I was reminded how much I’ve missed that space. It’s where my mum lives on, in those pages.A Special Offer
I’m offering a special deal between now and the end of March.
New annual or founding subscribers will receive a FREE copy of The New Arrival.
Or
Free subscribers can get a copy in the post this week for over 50% off. It’ll be £9 which includes P&P (and if it’s for your mum let me know and I’ll pop a little card in with a note).
If you’d like one please DM me and I’ll get myself over to the post office.
“A beautifully written and moving memoir of life as a trainee nurse in a struggling NHS hospital in 1970s Hackney. Beeson’s daily life and the colourful characters she met are superbly described, and we begin to understand how her most difficult experiences were also some of the most rewarding. Her selfless dedication brought hope to her patients and made a difference to their lives. A comforting and inspiring read.”
The Lady
“I thought this was a wonderful book – written in conjunction with the author’s daughter, a one-time student of mine and terrific writer, Amy Beeson. It’s a book told lucidly, matter-of-factly, and with a great deal of compassion. The past is evoked beautifully, I think – reminding us of the rather harsher living conditions of the era, and the feeling that Britain was only just ceasing to be some kind of latterday Victorian society…”
Paul Magrs
About the book
On a hot summer’s day in 1969, fresh-faced 17 year old Nurse Sarah Hill arrives at Hackney General Hospital in London’s East End. Battered suitcase in hand, she takes eager steps in her white calf-length Mary Quant boots towards the towering sandy-grey building of the Nurses’ Home. Looking up at the rows and rows of little windows, full of nervous excitement, she couldn’t have guessed just what she was getting herself into …
It’s the end of the swinging sixties, Britain is changing and the everyday life of the nurses and patients plays out against a backdrop of a failing government, strikes, immigration and women’s lib. Nurse Sarah Hill, together with her companions; the serious minded, politicised Maddox, the quick witted Lynch, who falls in love with an upper crust young doctor, golden girl Nursery Nurse Appleton, and ex-musical hall star turned midwife Wade are thrown in straight at the deep end, working long hours with few days off under the watchful eye of the stern matron.
More than just a hospital, Hackney General was part of the community just as much as the Adam & Eve pub the staff frequent. A place where the poorly children of Hackney were nursed to health, a place where young nurses would discover just want they wanted from life, fall in love with shy photographers and grow into women. But it’s not all smooth sailing in Hackney: for every baby that goes home to its loving family another is abandoned, unloved, or never gets to go home at all.
Funny, warm and deeply moving, Beeson’s poignant memoir captures both the heartache and happiness of hospital life and 1970s London through the eyes of a gentle but determined young nurse.
Like to read more?
If you’d like to read any of my published books then please consider buying from my online bookshop. The New Arrival, Our Country Nurse and Happy Baby, Happy Family. To find out more about my life as Head of Storytelling visit Wordsby Communications. I also host Substack Meet Ups in London which are really quite magical, as well as writing workshops.
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