It’s always someone’s day and today it’s Mother’s Day (in the UK).

Today is the day when you think of your mother or remember your mother or give her a call or a card or a present or all these things.

A mother gives birth to you and then brings you up, sacrificing many things for you. Loving you beyond reason. Looking after you; being there when you need someone and everyone else has let you down or worse. Someone who loved you whatever. She would be so proud of your successes. Would support you when there were failures. Would just “be there”.

I read about them. Mothers. How there is some special bond between them and their children. How people miss them when they’re gone. How much they love them when they are alive.

I always wanted a mother.

I mean, physically, I had one, obviously. And I lived with that woman for the first eighteen years of my life. I understand other people’s relationship to their mothers. To a point. But, of course, without that, one can’t fully understand and so I understand and, yet, don’t understand. I see it but I see it from outside – like a kid looking in the window of a sweet shop but who can’t get in. You understand the sweets are nice and, well, sweet but, having never tasted one, how can you really know the sensation of eating one?

Of course, I could ring V’s mum – who always treated me like her son and would tell everyone that I was – even if that was impossible. But I won’t since that seems too presumptive and intrusive. After all, she didn’t give birth to me and didn’t raise me for the first eighteen years of my life. She met me when I was 30. And, in spite of the fact that she was always sweet and lovely to me, we don’t have that special bond that can only be with a mother. I always thought she was just saying that, to make me feel better. Which it did as I realised the niceness of it.

So, I won’t be phoning the woman who would be known as my mother. She’s quite vindictive and hateful. For most of my life, she hasn’t been there. She’s a shadowy figure best forgotten.

And some of you will think that’s sad. But that’s because you have a mother that isn’t/wasn’t like that. You had someone you loved deeply and who loved you back. Therefore your feeling of sadness comes from the fact that you didn’t have the a mother like I did. And, for that you should be grateful. And there may be those of you who never knew your mother. And perhaps you feel that I should be more conciliatory. But, then, you never knew the woman who gave birth to me. We can never really walk in someone else’s shoes. Never experience their experiences for we are all unique. And all mothers are unique, even if you never knew them.

So, I say happy Mother’s Day to all mothers who are/were truly mothers. But for one, I can’t say that.