You can’t treat time like it owes you more.
“There are some regrets grief keeps for special occasions. Mine arrives every birthday, carrying every time my mum asked me to come home and I thought there would be another year.”
Azalea Tailor
Every year, my sister asks what I want to do for my birthday. She never lets it go unmarked. Never lets the day pass quietly. She’s great like that, and I know it’s her way of keeping something normal alive when so much of our world has already changed shape. And because it has only been a year and a half since we lost my mum, my sister is still grieving too, I never have the heart to tell her the truth… I don’t want to celebrate my birthday anymore.
Not because I am ungrateful or I don’t know how lucky I am to have another year. I know that more painfully now than I ever did before. Losing someone teaches you very quickly that being alive is not something to treat casually. But my birthday does not feel like a celebration now. It feels like evidence. Evidence that my mum wanted me home, year after year, and I hardly ever went. That’s the sentence that sits in my chest before every birthday. Heavy. Ugly. Unkind. Mine.
Since my forties I hardly ever went home. Not because I don’t love spending time with my family, or I didn’t love her, I did. But I was busy. I had plans. Friends. Dinners. A life I was building. A version of myself that wanted to be grown, free, wanted, out in the world. And because my mum was always there, because she had always been there, I treated her wanting me home like something I could postpone.
Later. Next year. Another time. There are some words that only become cruel after you lose someone you love. ‘Later’ is one of them.
Every year my mum would ask me about my birthday plans, “was I coming home at the weekend?”
And most years I would say “no mum I already have plans”
She’d just reply “oh ok, enjoy yourself.”
I can still hear it now. That softness. That pretending. That mother thing of folding disappointment so small no one else has to see it. I hate that sentence now. I hate how kind it sounds. I hate that I will never know how much hurt she tucked inside it just so I could go out and enjoy myself without feeling bad.
And I did enjoy myself. That’s the part I find hardest to forgive. I went out. I laughed. I chose friends. I chose the version of my birthday that felt exciting, not the one that meant sitting at home with my mum, probably eating too much, being fussed over, being told what to wear, being irritated within ten minutes and loved through all of it.
I thought my birthday was mine. It sounds stupid now. Childish, even. Of course, I thought it was mine. I was the one getting older. I was the one being celebrated. I was the one making plans. But now I understand that my birthday was hers too.
It was the day she became my mum. The day I arrived into the world. The day her life changed forever. The day she first held me, fed me, worried about me, and started loving me in that fierce, unreasonable, impossible way only a mother can. To me, it was another birthday. To her, maybe it was the day she remembered me becoming hers and her becoming a mother, not just a wife.
How had I missed that so many times? I should have seen it. I didn’t know going home was a luxury until the option was gone. I didn’t know that having my mum ask me to come home was not pressure. It was love. It was her reaching for the little girl she had raised, even when that little girl had grown into a woman with plans, opinions, and a handbag full of chaos.
I’m not going to rewrite history, although I easily could. My mum and I were not all soft and saintly. We were complicated and we clashed. We loved each other, but peacefully? Absolutely not. I was the always the fearless little girl who never toed the line, and my mum was that over the top Asian parent, who dished out guilt like it was ice cream, wore more jewellery than was on display in Tiffany’s, and questionable disciplinary methods. Were we perfect? Absolutely not.
Growing up, she wore rings on nearly every finger, two on some, and whenever someone was naughty, they got a little bashing on the nose with the full force of all six of them. And when I say someone, I clearly mean me. It was always me. She wasn’t violent in the way people would understand it now. It was just how Asian parenting worked back then. Smack first, apologise later. Maybe. If you were lucky.
I used to tell her, “I’d have had a perfect nose like my sisters if it wasn’t for you and those bloody rings.” She would roll her eyes and then laugh at the ludicrousness of my statement. God, how I miss that eye roll and laugh. I miss saying ridiculous things to her. I miss teasing her. I miss her pretending I was talking nonsense while knowing full well I was funny. I miss the chaos of us. I miss the arguments I thought I was tired of. I miss her calling me every five minutes to ask me if I’d ordered the top she wanted. I miss the old jokes. I miss the version of me that could still say something foolish and wait for my mum to laugh.
What I would give to say it to her again. What I would give to sit in that house on my birthday and be annoyed by her. Properly annoyed. The kind of annoyed you only feel when someone is still there enough to irritate you. I would take the fussing. The comments. The guilt trip. The food. The lecture. The love dressed up as criticism. I would take all of it, every single bit of it, if only I could get more time.
Because now there is no going home to her. There is just my sister asking what I want to do for my birthday, and me trying not to tell her that the day makes me feel like a terrible daughter. That’s the raw truth. I know I was not. Somewhere beneath the guilt, I know that. I know daughters grow up. I know people make plans. I know love is not measured by one birthday, one visit, one missed year. I know my mum knew I loved her. But grief does not care what you know.
Grief goes straight for what you fear. And what I fear is that my mum sat there on birthdays pretending it was fine when it wasn’t. That she wanted me home and I made her feel optional. That she let me go with kindness because loving me mattered more to her than making me feel guilty. That she swallowed the hurt and I mistook her silence for permission.
That’s the thought that floors me now. Not the big grief everyone prepares you for. Not the funeral. Not Christmas. Not even the empty chair where she usually sat flicking through a magazine before instructing me to order something ridiculous from it, although God knows that has its own cruelty. It’s the thought of my mum, still here, still alive, still asking, still wanting me home, and me saying no because I thought there would be more time. I thought there would always be more time. I wish someone had told me that sentence should come with a warning. Because one day there isn’t.
One day the person who asked if you were coming home is gone, and the question keeps coming anyway. Not from them. From inside you. Every birthday. Every year. Every time someone asks what you want to do. What do I want to do? I want to go home.
I want to walk through the door and find my mum there. I want to hear her voice. I want to make the stupid joke about my nose and her rings. I want her to laugh at my foolishness. I want one more birthday, not because I need presents or cake or attention, but because I finally understand that my birthday was never only mine. It was hers too.
And losing her turned me that little girl again. The one who wants her mum. The one who wants to be forgiven for not knowing. The one who wants to go back and choose differently. The one who would give anything now to say, “yes, Mum, I’m coming home.”
But I can’t.
So this year, when my sister asks what I want to do, I will smile and say something vague. I will let her make the day lovely for me, because she is grieving too, and I will not make my sadness heavier in her hands. But underneath it all, I will be somewhere else…
Standing in every birthday I did not go home. Still wishing I had. Still looking for my mum. 😢
