Recently it has been my birthday. As it was during lockdown my partner organised for each of my friends and family to record a message saying happy birthday to me and made it into a video. This was really special and is something I’ll treasure forever. Photos and videos are so important when they are all you have left of someone and I wish I’d taken more with my mum.
When I look back at photos with mum there are few. And as I look through them she is often carrying a birthday cake or has me or my brother on her hip. This made me realise how much she did for us and why we seem to have few photos, my mum was always the one behind the camera taking the photos of us. Mums are so often juggling everything in the scene to make it a special memory that they forget about themselves and we get so used to it we often forget to thank them, I know I didn’t.
If you take one thing from this anecdote please let it be that you thank your mum and take a photos of her when she’s smiling, we never know when it will be the last photo.
the absence of someone who once was there 