Scampi, Chips and Inspiration

I took my mum out for lunch today.

Nothing special in that, you might think, but every time I drive the hundred miles to visit her and take her out for a few hours, the way she reacts and the smile it brings to her face is better than winning the lottery. Well, I think so anway.

You see my mum has Mutliple Sclerosis, and has suffered for two decades now. She is largely confined to a wheelchair, and lives in a care home where a team of wonderful people treat her like a princess and where nothing is too much trouble.

I've never once heard mum complain about her condition. Yes, she gets frustrated from time to time, and the look she gets in her fiercely intelligent eyes that are beoming ever more deeply entombed in her failing body breaks my heart every time.

When she was younger, mum was a showjumper. She won several local competitions in Nottingham, where I'm from, and I have clippings from the local papers showing a pretty, smiling young woman atop a variery of huge horses, a grin always splashed across her face.

For the last ten years in particular, though, she has lost her mobility, and the simple pleasure that a stroll on the fresh air brings, things that I know I take for granted, and that many of us who are fortunate enough to be fit and healthy don't even give a second thought.

Having watched this happen, I have on many occasions felt completely helpless, unable to do anything to stop this most peculiar of diseases that affects every single sufferer in a unique way. Mum had a friend who had suffered for years,and yet to look at him you would have never known anything was wrong, save for an almost impercetable limp. Conversely, an ex-work colleague of mine was a squash playing, active middle-aged man who went from the height of fitness to the prison of a wheelchair in six short weeks. Like mum, I never once heard either of them complain.

Sitting across the table from her today, I felt something that I've often felt, and that is that mum is hands down the most inspiring person I know. Save for my monthly visits she has systematically had everyting she loved taken away from her. She hasn't ridden for years, but can't even get out to see a horse these days. She used to love to read, and has always encouraged me to write, her response to virtually everything that happens in life being "you should write a story about that," but now can't concentrate on a book long enough to finish a single page, never mind an entire novel.

Sometimes she even has trouble remembering my name, or that of my partner Deborah, and then there will be a moment of clarity where she is acutely aware that her mind is full of holes, and the funny thing is that we can both laugh about it.

Mum is such a gentle, generous kind-hearted person, that I truly hope that I can be even a fraction as good a person as she is.

So, where is this post going? Well, nowhere really. I just wanted to share my mum with you for a few moments, and make public my admiration and love for this remarkable woman who brought me into the world, and who despite having been dealt a bad hand, never complains about it.

Instead she looks forward to, and treasures, the time that we share, whether it's tucking into a plate of scampi and chips, or feeding the squirrels at our favourite place in the grounds of Nottingham University.

In all honesty I don't know whether I could cope as well as she does if our situations were reversed, but the fact that she doesn't bitch and moan about the things she can't do, but instead treasures the things that she, and we, can do is a source of inspiration to me, and for that, mum, there are no words that this writer can put down that could ever do you justice.