Andy Richardson: Mum is the word(s): love, kindness & fun

It’s an invocation to ignore inhibition, shed self-consciousness and be our truest self. It’s a phrase that details a purity of expression and compels us to be utterly, determinedly free.

The best music, the finest drama and the most honest words are conjured similarly.

Musicians are at their best when playing from the heart, actors when inhabiting a character and writers when offering unarguable, irrevocable truth. That’s the quality that allows others to identify. It’s the place where people find reason to believe.

And so, having framed this week’s man column like a carpenter enveloping a painting, it’s time to reflect on the only thing that matters this weekend: mums. There won’t be any playing to the gallery, no killer jokes or knowing one-liners. It’s time to write from the heart, to write like no one else is going to read it.

I make no apologies for the Black Country spelling of ‘mom’, for she is a woman of this place, a Black Country lady who’s spent an adult lifetime lovingly caring for a husband and three kids who are also products of the region.

She’s treated her family as Caravaggio treated oil and canvas; her family has been her greatest work of art.

Every detail, every move, every thought has been in pursuit of perfection, intended to make things better, crafted in our better interest. Lucky us. Lucky, lucky us.

Black Country kids who decide at the age of five that all they want to do is write usually tend to find themselves working in a factory, stacking shelves in a supermarket or spending time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

Not this one. He was encouraged by both parents to pursue his dreams, to follow his true course and to never say never when the game appeared to be up. It’s to them that I owe everything.

To them that I am avowedly humble. To them that I look to when all else seems lost. Our family’s working class and proud of it.

Though we have a work ethic that means 85 hours a week seems perfectly normal at times. And we’ve a creative spirit that is unyielding and will not be beat.

As a kid, I remember that my mom was very beautiful. A pretty lady with blonde curls, she was also immense fun. Oh yes, and she was indomitable. She ran a youth club with my father and on one occasion she’d taken a group of 30 kids to a park in Wednesbury to play sports.

As the evening wore on, she shepherded her group towards the bus back so that we could return home.

The driver baulked and told her she couldn’t bring so many kids on board because they’d be too much trouble.

She gave him a look that could kill: ‘Get on board, kids. Stupid man’. She always had my back, too. When others have at times lined up to stick a knife in, she’s been there to counsel and protect, to love and restore.

Perhaps it was her misfortune to bring into the world a youngest child even more independent, free-spirited and creative than her. And there were times when this writer’s sense of purpose led to a difference of opinion.

But my knowledge that I am loved has burned brighter than the sun during every second on this earth. I have been safe in her orbit, happy in her love.

She has set an unsurpassable example to love and be loved, to try to be kind, to try not to hurt others, to build bridges not walls and to be as free as a raptor riding the thermals.

She’s devoted her life to family; to looking after her own cantankerously brilliant, 101-year-old mother while she might have been off on day trips to somewhere nice; to counselling her kids who, in this case, made the sort of mistakes that she and her husband managed to avoid; to doting on grandchildren who think she’s the bees knees.

I’m not sure where I’ll be on Mother’s Day. Most likely, I’ll be putting in one of those 85-hour-weeks because she encouraged me to do something in life that I love, so I don’t ever feel like work’s a chore. Whatever I’m doing and wherever I am, she’ll be travelling with me. Her voice is the strongest I know.

She’ll read this. It’ll be like the page of a diary left open in a room. And, I hope she’ll be pleased that her youngest son feels comfortable expressing his love for her so freely. Mother’s Day isn’t just a Sunday in March.

It’s a code, a way of life, a 365-24/7 thing. She doesn’t need a public declamation.

My mom is loved very deeply by her husband and three kids. She always has been. She always will.