Good morning. It’s early, the coffee’s still finding its way into the bloodstream, and the sky outside hasn’t quite made up its mind what kind of day it wants to be. I know how it feels.

Today is my mum’s birthday. And this is the first one she isn’t here for.

Walt Whitman said we contain multitudes. I believe him. But I’ll tell you what nobody mentions. When you lose your mother, one of those multitudes just goes quiet. It’s the part of you that was still somebody’s child. The part that could pick up the phone on a bad day and hear a voice that had known you since before you knew yourself. That part doesn’t die, exactly. It just sits by the window, waiting for a car that isn’t coming up the drive.

They warn you about the firsts. The first Christmas. The first Mother’s Day. The first time you reach for your phone to tell her something funny and remember, halfway through dialling, that there’s no one on the other end. What they don’t tell you is how many firsts there are. They don’t come in a neat line. They ambush you. A song in the supermarket. A woman on the bus with the same laugh. Her handwriting on the back of an old envelope in a drawer you had no business opening.

And now this one. Her birthday. A day that was always about her, and she isn’t in it.

I got married, Mum. You weren’t there.

I keep turning that sentence over like a stone in my pocket. I stood at the front of that garden and I looked out at all those faces, people I love, people who came, and there was a space that nobody else could see. I saw it. I’ll always see it. You would have cried before the vows even started. You would have fixed my collar when you thought no one was looking. You would have told everyone at the reception a story about me that I’d spent thirty years trying to bury. I would have given anything to be embarrassed by you one more time.

People tell me everything happens for a reason. Maybe it does. But I’ve noticed that reasons are cold comfort at three in the morning. What helps, a little, is this. I know where you are. I know you went home to the Lord Jesus, and I believe that with everything in me. I believe you’re up there somewhere, smiling down, probably telling the angels to sit up straight and eat properly.

But here’s the thing about believing. It doesn’t stop the wanting. Faith tells me you’re at peace. My heart doesn’t care. My heart wants you in the kitchen. It wants your voice. It wants to hear you say my name the way only you ever said it.

Everything I do feels a little less full now. I still get up. I still go to work. I still laugh, sometimes properly, from the gut. But there’s a note missing from every song, and I hear it every time.

Somebody once told me that grief is just love with nowhere left to go. I think that’s close, but not quite right. The love has somewhere to go. It goes up. Every day I send it up there, and every day my heart breaks a little doing it, and every day I’d choose that heartbreak over forgetting you for a single second.

So, Mum. Happy birthday.

I miss you. I miss you in the big moments and I miss you in the stupid little ones. I miss you on Tuesdays. I miss you when the rain comes in sideways and I miss you when the sun is out and there’s no good reason to be sad at all.

One day we’ll see each other again. I don’t know when, and I’m in no hurry, because you’d have my head if I were. But when that day comes, you’d better pull up a chair and put the kettle on. Because I’ve got stories to tell you. The wedding. The life I’ve built. All the things you missed and all the things you’d have loved.

Until then, I’ll keep saving them up for you.

I love you. Always