Fourteen Years On

Fourteen years is a strange amount of time. It's long enough for life to move on, for children to grow, for whole chapters to begin and end. It’s also short enough that some memories still feel close. Seeing James, a tall, opinionated, and active fifteen year old reminds me every day that this feeling is a lie. Losing Mum sits in both spaces. It feels recent and distant at the same time, but life today often becomes an unwanted reality check.

I was almost thirty when she died. James was fifteen months old. I was undiagnosed, overwhelmed, and trying to hold myself together. My breakdown arrived three months later. I thought grief caused it. I know now it was everything at once. Disability changes, marriage ending, access issues, drinking, and the collapse of the life I thought I was building. Mum’s death was the final straw.

I look back at that version of myself with compassion. He was trying, surviving, and doing what Mum taught him to do. Fight. Push. Keep going. This from the woman who’s greatest achievement was receiving a commendation of conduct, where, in forty years, she had never taken a single sick day, using all her holidays for emergencies. She was, at that time, the only civilian to receive that honour.

She raised me with that stubborn streak. She refused to let disability define me, let fear stop me, and let anyone tell me what I couldn’t do. Adulthood and parenthood taught me that.

The years after her death were messy. I rebuilt myself, became a single dad, home educated, found community through blogging, and slowly pieced together a life. I wrote tributes, Mother’s Day posts, and reflections that circled the same stories. It was trying to keep her close. I didn’t have many photos, keepsakes, or the archive most people inherit. Adoption took the first part of my life. Her death took the second. Dad’s dementia took the rest.

I didn’t understand how much she carried until my ASD assessment this year. The assessor asked about childhood. Every answer led back to her. She cut labels out of clothes, bought soft jumpers and joggers, washed my pound puppy while I was at school so I wouldn’t notice, created systems to help me function, interpreted my overwhelm, understood my sensory needs, supported my routines, and taught me to navigate a world that confused me. She did all of this without knowing the word autism. She just knew me.

That realisation changed everything. It reframed my childhood, breakdown, and grief. I didn’t just lose a parent. I lost the person who understood me instinctively, made the world manageable, and held the map of my life long before I could read it. A role that Hannah now does so well. I think Mum would have loved Hannah.

Fourteen years on, I see the space she left. It’s not loud anymore. It’s quiet. It sits in the moments where I wish I had asked more, the stories I never heard the missing decade of photos and certificates, and the questions that will never be answered. I wish I just had more moments with her. Anything would do. Just to hear her use the name Mo, spoken by fewer people each year, would be enough.

Yet the space is not empty. It’s filled with the life she shaped. I see her in the way I parent and the way I fight for all of the kids. I see her in the way I push through disability and refuse to give up. I see her in the way I love Hannah and the children. The way we are as a family. The sentences that I say, that she said and I rolled my eyes at. I see her in the way I serve in ministry, although I’m uncertain to what she would think of my calling and ordination journey, having grown up in an anti-religion household.

Fourteen years on, I understand her better. Not just the mum who adopted me, the woman who fought for me, or the person who held me together. I understand the depth of what she carried, the choices she made, the love she gave, the quiet ways she shaped my identity, and the strength she saw in me long before I saw it myself. Being a parent, especially now with four teenagers, I can see things from her perspective. I don’t get this parenting thing right. Neither did she. I tend to upset the kids in one way or another, especially James, but I hope that despite my attitude at their age, that one day, they’ll see things from my perspective and understand me and themselves better, forgive the mistakes, and miss me, for me.

I miss her. That has never changed. What has changed is the shape of that missing. It’s no longer a wound. It is a thread that runs through my life, marriage, fatherhood, ministry, diagnosis, growth, and the man I have become.

Fourteen years on, I hope she would be proud.