To say that my mother is always on the brink of tears is perhaps a bit strong but there is no doubt that the gap between her and that cliff is certainly much smaller than that of many others. Therefore, many events which occur within our family history involve, or at the very least end with, my mother crying. Whether or not she actually did or not is another matter, but memory is a strangely selective thing and it has served me and my brothers well to include her ‘breakdowns’ in most instances.
One such instance was just last weekend, on the way to the wedding of my first brother, Edward. Fondly called Edgar by me for the majority of his life, primarily because of his utter disdain for that name. At this juncture it is important to mention that another Family Truth (much like mother’s tears) is that Edgar is absolutely the Golden Child, the Favoured One…etc. Frustratingly smooth and successful throughout his adolescence and now adult life, first son and ‘easiest baby’, he has always managed to dodge any kind of real parental judgement, instead enjoying a lifetime of adoration and praise. So of course, it goes without saying that the wedding of such a child would be a momentous event in the family calendar.
Before describing the aforementioned ‘Journey’, it is important that I provide some context. The wedding was in Northern Ireland, a decision which was inconvenient for many reasons but of course could not be argued with. My husband and I flew over from Newcastle on the eve of the wedding with our toddler and stayed in a holiday cottage with my parents and other brother (much less favoured and far more troublesome). Of course, my daughter decided that the night before her uncle’s wedding was the perfect time to stay awake for several hours and keep everyone else up with her. Thus, the morning of the wedding dawned and we were an already fractious household.
My father, a Bishop and perpetual clergyman, was officiating at the service and therefore needed to depart for the church much sooner than the rest of us. How much sooner might have been up for debate but The Bishop is not one for risk when it comes to timings and so he departed extremely promptly for the church, leaving us to bring my mother. Herein should have been the warning. A Note To All: Transportation of The Mother of the Groom to the wedding service should not be a job assigned to two exhausted parents of a one year old in their tiny hire car. The said hire car was the cheapest, and therefore smallest, available. A Peugeot 108 (it did boast five doors) was our vehicle for the weekend.
And so, on to: The Journey. Following a (disastrous for many reasons and almost worthy of a chapter of its own) trip to the hairdressers, my mother and I returned to the holiday cottage. Dresses were hurriedly donned as we scrambled to be ready for The Big Day. The certain knowledge that, as mother-of-the-groom, she would be photographed seemed to be playing further havoc with my mother’s anxiety and I tentatively offered compliments about her apparel in fear of provoking the infamous tear ducts! Finally ready, we folded ourselves into the tiny vehicle and hit the road to attend the wedding of The Golden Boy.
About ten minutes into the journey, along winding and tedious roads, my mother (who had been navigating until this point) announced sharply that we were ‘going the wrong way’ or at least ‘we weren’t going the right way’. When questioned about her directions, this quickly progressed to statements like, ‘I’ve only been there once’ and ‘I wasn’t driving’ in higher and higher pitched tones. At this point my husband logically suggested that we make use of the modern devices we had in our possession and enter the postcode of the church into a mobile GPS. It was only then that we realised we did not have said postcode.
This revelation reduced mother to something of a jabbering wreck. This, coupled with the lightly feathered hat that she was wearing, gave her the appearance of a distressed sparrow, twittering and flapping around in the cage created by the rear seat of the Peugeot 108. ‘I can’t be late! Not to my son’s wedding!’ came the repeated tweets from the back. Mobile phones came out again, this time with the end goal of contacting someone who might give us the elusive postcode and thus ensure our timely arrival at the church. Unfortunately, due to the guest list being comprised primarily of university friends of my brother and his fiancée, there were limited options as to whom we could call, each with their own draw backs. There was of course The Bishop – a solid and reliable source but also generally prone to panic; then there was my youngest brother – a reasonable font of information but notoriously poor at answering his phone; finally there was The Groom himself, who, for obvious reasons I was not inclined to disturb. That being said, the tension was mounting, time passing swiftly and the urgency for the post code outweighed the above concerns and we frantically dialled all three individuals on repeat!
Finally, The Bishop came through with the postcode and only a minor note of panic (perhaps tinged with exasperation) and we were able to recommence our journey. I carefully pulled the hire car onto the directed route and drove the first hundred yards to ensure that we were indeed facing the correct direction. Once certain of this, I accelerated to a rapid sixty-five miles per hour (as fast as the Peugeot would travel) and followed the blue dot of the GPS to its destination: The Church. It was about five minutes into our technology-advised route that my mother declared once again that we were ‘going the wrong way’. She began violently gesticulating toward a landmass about three miles to our left, in the converse direction of travel, and squawking, ‘The church is on that cliff, I’m sure of it. We must turn around!’ It was only then that I (having been, I felt, quite restrained) lost my patience and told her in no uncertain terms to be quiet.
Moments later, and with time to spare, we pulled into the lane upon which the church was nestled; the aforementioned cliff sat knowingly behind us. Mother fluttered out of the car, hat only slightly askance, and announced to anyone in the surrounding area that we were here in ‘plenty of time’ and that she had ‘known that was the right way’.
I felt it best to keep quiet and just celebrate the fact that Mother’s infamous tears had only briefly made her eyes sparkle and had never actually made it down her cheeks!
My Family and their anecdotes 