My mother’s best advice: go in to bat for the ones you love

Mum was a brilliant non-giver of advice. Now Dad, he had his pearls: “If you do something, do it with a good heart.” It sounded platitudinous to me, but he had a point. And then there was his favourite: “If you think something bad about someone, say it up there [pointing to his head] but not out loud.” Dad was a good man, but that infuriated me.

Mum played a bigger part in my life. She often had to fight like crazy for me – to keep me in school when I’d told the dinner lady to fuck off at the age of five; to take on the doctors who labelled me a malingerer when I had encephalitis; to allow me back into mainstream education after I’d had three years off, and finally to persuade the University of Leeds to let me in after I’d messed up my A-levels.

She did so much for me that I assumed there would be loads of advice she’d given me. Only when I thought about it did I realise Mum’s great gift was not to advise me but to let me make my own mistakes, not judge or bollock me for them, but discreetly help me out of them.

mother, advice, parenting, encephalitis, leeds university, a-levels, malingerer, mainstream education, advocate, school