The One Where My Mum Trips Over In A Car Park And A Bone In Her Finger Comes Out Of Her Hand

Because my mum's shoulder-size and outfit here is hilarious.

For my dad’s birthday last year I wrote something super nice and heart-warming about all of the things that his death taught me (approx. four things) and for my Mum’s 60th birthday* this year I thought I’d write something nice about her – when your parents are divorced, equality is the key to a happy life.

The thing is, my mum is not dead. Thank god, but it makes writing stuff about her a bit harder. I thought about doing a humorous, yet heartfelt, list of sixty things that I love about her, but, again, that’s really hard. Not because she’s not great, but it’s difficult to find sixty things that you love about anyone, even, yourself; seriously, try it.

So, instead, I’m going to tell a story about my mum that I believe will tell you just why she is so great and hilarious. If it were an episode of Friends, it would be called The One Where My Mum Trips Over In A Car Park And A Bone In Her Finger Comes Out Of Her Hand.

In my darker, awake-at-3am-listing-everything-that-I've-ever-done-wrong-moments, I tell myself that the whole thing would never have happened if, five years ago, I hadn't been terrified of the tube. I'd only ever encountered the tube on school trips or whilst I was clinging to the arm of boyfriends. I was very untrusting of it; I thought it would just decide to change direction or destinations mid journey, just because I was on it, and I would end up in some shitty area of London where the bus numbers had four digits and I would have to start a whole new life as a waitress, sharing a damp flat with eight other people and, inexplicably for someone with a mobile phone, never be able to contact my family ever again.

So, for that reason, I was always nervous to travel home, to Birmingham, from university, in Brighton, and so my mum would often drive me there and back for the major holidays. This time it was Easter and she decided that when she dropped me off she would stay for a couple of days. We shopped and drank coffees in cafes that my mum would describe as quirky whilst wiping the cutlery with a napkin; all in all, we had a nice time.

The last day of her stay rolled around and she decided that, before leaving, we should take a drive to nearby Newhaven (somewhere I now know to be a bit shit) for a change of scenery.

Approximately 47 seconds after stepping out of the car at Newhaven, my mum tripped on a loose paving slab in the carpark and flew through the air to land in a heap in front of me.

I'm quite awkward when people trip over; I don't want to fuss around them too much and embarrass them, but equally it's quite dickish to just not acknowledge them totally stacking it and ask them whether they're alright.

First thing I noticed, there was blood on her face. There was blood on my mum's face! Mums aren't supposed to bleed; they are soft but ultimately impenetrable, like overcooked calamari. I tried to help her get up, but she continued to writhe around on the floor clutching her hand and was making a bit of a scene. A nearby man came over to ask whether my mum was alright, because I was clearly doing such a shit job of dealing with the situation, and offered to call an ambulance.

It's here that I'm going to change up the tried and tested appraisal tool 'The Shit Sandwich' and service it as an open sandwich, beginning with the shit - Mum, me not thinking to call an ambulance whilst you were clearly in the most pain you've ever been in is an indication of just how few life skills I had aged 19, and I'm sorry, but that is your fault.

I think it stems from a desire in my family to, whatever a problem is, and however valuable it would be to a person's character to let them figure it out on their own, to fix each other's problems. Yes, it's usually in a misguided way; like my lovely grandparents taking me for a cream tea at the garden centre when I'd been diagnosed with depression, rather than actually talking about literally anything that could be upsetting me, or my mum pretending to have immediately forgotten the name of any man who has made me cry, choosing only to refer to him as 'what's his name', even if we'd been together for two years. One of the clearest memories I have from the night that my dad died is sitting on my Grandad's lap, aged fourteen, and him telling me that he would make everything alright. Obviously, he was setting himself up for failure there, but he's done an ok job in the sense that he hasn't died yet and remains the only constant male figure in my life who, when I need someone to, will treat me like I'm eight again and will write off literally any man as not being good enough for me. Unless they're a member of Rotary Club.

But anyway, this is about mum, not dead dad. Here comes the soft, delicious bread bit of the feedback; my mum has handled being constantly upstaged by and compared to my dad by me and my sister brilliantly. When someone dies, you tend not to trash talk them and choose only to remember why you loved them so much. When you're a teenager, this loosely translates to "DAD WOULDN'T HAVE EVEN CARED ABOUT MY PHONE BILL" when your mum dares to question why you're £80 over. My mum has had to automatically be the 'horrible' parent, because in his death my dad rocketed to the top of the highest pedestal ever. As someone who was married to and divorced from him, and is therefore aware of all of his faults and shortcomings, my mum has never once shouted them back at us in anger or frustration and I love her for that.

Back to the car park crisis. I'd like to say that now that I'm 24 I am better at dealing with crises, but I can't. I am still shit in a crisis, but I'm great at tweeting about it. Luckily, I had a brilliant friend with me who had her shit together and decided that we should call an ambulance.

Once in the ambulance, in between making adorable, rubbish 'mum jokes' about having not even had a glass of wine yet (it was 10am), and breathing into an oxygen mask, my mum asked me to reach into her bag and…

...use her phone to let my grandparents know that we were having to make an unscheduled hospital trip and she would be late to pick up the dog?

...check her car keys were in her bag, as we'd had to leave the car abandoned in some unevenly tarmaced car park in an area that we didn't really know?

Because, ignoring her eyebrows, I know that she
likes this one.

To pass her lipstick.

In an un-aired ad for Maybelline's Colourstay, with a bone hanging out of her hand, three broken fingers and with dried blood on her face, my mum expertly applied liquid lipstick without a mirror and she has never looked more fabulous.

And that lipstick really does have unrivaled staying power, by the way, as after a record six hour wait in A&E, despite a fucking bone coming out of my mum's actual hand, it was still going strong. It did fade slightly after she vommed when the consultant told her that he would have to 'manually manipulate' (ooh-er) her broken fingers back into place, though.

They were going to move her bone around like when you try to plug a plug into a plug socket in the dark, and as someone whose default 'chill out' TV viewing is documentaries about trauma units in the North of England, my mum was terrified.

So, with a fantastic view of the whole sorry scene, I fought my natural urge to fuck the whole thing off and leave the room, and instead held my mum's hand and bit the inside of cheeks to maintain a, kind of, neutral expression; one that said, this is fine and totally normal, because it's then that you realise, or at least I did, that your mum has cleaned up your vomit and wiped your bum all with only her top pulled up to cover her mouth, like a spontaneous, under prepared criminal, and if you can't watch her get her bones pulled about like Meccano without anaesthetic (Yeah, consultant, don't think I didn't notice that) then you are a terrible child.

After we'd both left the cubicle, wide eyed and staring at mundane objects and signs, like we'd both been the victim of a sexual assault in Hollyoaks, we were told that my mum would be kept in overnight so that they could operate the following morning and she was moved to a ward in which she was the youngest person there by about 30 years.

It was here that I saw the old-aged vagina of the elderly woman in the bed next to my mum. She kept lifting her hospital gown up and it was right in my eye line. Like something out of an Ian McEwan novel, this was an unexpected but defining moment for me, I feel - it was where I thought “Vaginas - no big deal.”

I returned the next day with a bag full of all the items my mum felt imperative to a successful, happy hospital stay (e.g nail files and facial serum) to find her bed empty and freshly made. I'd seen enough episodes of Casualty to know what that meant.

I asked the nurse at the reception desk where she was, and after twenty long minutes of them not being able to ‘find her', she told me that my mum was now on the gynaecology ward.

"...she's broken her hand?"

"Oh. Right."

Once I had checked with every available doctor that she had not in fact been transferred because they had detected ‘WOMEN’S CANCER’, my mum and I exchanged brief goodbyes before she was ‘taken down’ for her operation.

I should have really learned my lesson from my dad’s sudden death, in that we left him to go and get a chicken bake from the Greggs at Wolverhampton Hospital and by the time we’d returned, our baked goods still molten in the middle, he had died, and therefore I should have told my mum that I loved her and was grateful for everything that she’d done for me and that it was me, not my sister, who kept using her perfume.

I didn’t though, and so I spent five long hours telling myself that I would never see my mum again.

A nurse eventually found me and told me that they were having a little trouble getting my mum's heartbeat back to a normal speed; that it was fine, just a little slow.

Anyone who knows my mum, or even knows me, will know that she is not particularly 'laid back', so I did not take her heartbeat as a sign of how 'chill' she was feeling about the whole thing and because I am prone to occasional bouts of irrationality, I convinced myself that my mum had died. I imagined making the phone call to my grandparents and to my sisters and arranging the funeral and picking the songs and going through all of her stuff and finding out stuff that I never wanted to know.

Because I think she looks beautiful here.

There is nothing like losing one parent to make you, on some level, always constantly permanently terrified of losing the other. I'm 24 and I am not, in any way, ready to be in the world without parents. Maybe, if my parents had done a better job, I would be, but they didn’t and I really feel like I'd make a right hash of everything without having one person around who is, if no longer legally, is at least emotionally obliged to help me when I fuck everything up.

When they wheeled my mum back into the ward, I was so relieved that I had to fight every urge to throw myself on top of her and mess up her hand all over again.
After that, everything was kind of fine. My mum learned to do pretty much all tasks with one hand for a few months; this includes buttering toast one handed, buttoning up shirts and snipping out the labels in every item of clothing I owned “in case it irritated” me. She engaged in a lengthy legal battle with the owners of the car park in Newhaven and won a tidy sum, which allowed her to pay off the ever-mounting debt that comes as an unwelcome bolt on when you raise two daughters singlehandedly through their teenage years and had been pulling the three of us, and all of our possessions, into a black hole for the last ten years. So, really, it all worked out for the best. Sometimes, I feel like she tripped on purpose to save us all.

To summarise: I love my mum and I don't know what I'd do without her.

Apart from know what size jeans to buy.

*I'd like to make a clarification here that I think my mum would appreciate; yes, my mum is sixty, but she is not, and never has been, an 'old mum'. Sure, she did once say "Well, maybe I've just bought one that doesn't have wifi, then!" when she couldn't connect her iPad to the internet instantly, and does say "With a nice thick pair of tights?" in answer to whatever item of clothing I hold up to her across a shop, but that doesn't make her old, ok?