Mothers in the Modern Era

I'm a young guy who reads the news and watches the world around him with fear building. Ice caps melting. Animals going extinct. The deranged becoming presidents. Companies ruling the poor. A decent look at the world and one would not be judged for thinking it's all coming to an end. But then I look at my parents. When a family friend dies, my Mum gets out her pots. She cooks massive vats of curry. Massive vats of the stew that I was raised on. The stew that to this day remains one of my favourite meals for its heartiness, simplicity, and warmth. She gets home from work. Cooks these vats and then disappears off to feed the family of the deceased. Every day for a week. My father, my sister, and I were fed before she left, because, of course. My mum is a superpower. An unstoppable force that makes sure anyone who falters or stumbles gets the exact aid they need. My mum doesn't have a care in the world for the cares of the world. She was teaching me to learn in the years she was given to learn things herself. She doesn't keep up with the Middle East, or East Asia, or the States. She reads the FarmWeek. She isn't going to solve global warming or make capitalism fair. To the healthy, she doesn't give a second glance to. To the rich, she'll clean for them if they give her money. But when the healthy grow sick, or when the rich get poor, that's when she's there. The tide of time washes over the shore. My mum doesn't try to command the ocean to stop advancing. But she'll save the crabs that get knocked on their back by a wave (this is a metaphor, my mum would never touch a crab).

And that's just my mum. Yeah, she's better than everyone else's mum (sorry, she'll read this, I have to say that), but any mum is a superpower in their own right. They've lived lives and talked to people. A mum has a unique ability to remember at least triple the amount of names as their sons, daughters, and husbands could manage to remember. A mum can tell a tale of a great uncle who has a mechanic that dated your second cousin's old friend from school and that's actually how Terry, y'know, Terry? From the Spar? That's how he got his job. As a mere mortal, I have built a circle of friends I'm very proud of. People I rely on and love. But a mum? A mum can weave a web that sprawls over a country. A mum can pluck the strands of the web and tell you what everyone connected to that strand had for breakfast and when they'll get married. A mum can be a lot of things. They can be a traditional housewife, cooking and cleaning, like my mum, or they can be a modern icon for the new woman of the 21st century. But regardless of whether your mum is a cleaner, a surgeon, a cook, a teacher, a stripper, a poet, a builder, or someone who's still figuring it out, a mum is a community. A mum is a community. I could mumble something about a sore back in the morning and before I could get out of my pyjamas (granted that takes a few hours) my mum would have three potential appointments with physios who have performed miracles on 50-year-old farmers who'd pulled their backs or been kicked by cattle. A mum is a buzzing beehive of connections.

Now, give that beehive Facebook. My mum, one woman, can do a lot. Imagine what 18,801 could do.

North Down Mums is a Facebook page that is exactly why Facebook exists. After convincing my mum that she will love Facebook, and getting her over her fear of having too much wine and saying something mean on it, my mum has found her place. The repeated friend requests featuring her horrendous rubber horse head profile picture that I have to turn down to keep up my street cred is a small price to pay for giving my mum exactly what she needed. My mum arrives home from work and she checks on her family. She asks me how work was, and what I ate for lunch. Did the dogs get a walk? Have the horses been fed? With these issues out of the way, she’ll start dinner, sit down with a glass of wine (that we are frequently reminded is “well-deserved, thank you very much”), and she will check in with her other family. She’ll put on Poundland reading glasses and open up Facebook. “Did you hear this? Weren’t you looking for that? Don’t we have a spare door in the garage, the Harrisons are looking for one? Oh no, he died! I’ll have to call over.” Every issue she can solve will be solved with a smile. She’ll look over the country she was raised in, and at her friends and family within it, and see who she can help and how. And all over the country, other mums are doing the same. We didn’t have a spare door, we gave that to the mechanic a week ago, but a woman named Melinda did, and it all got sorted.

I made that example up, but North Down Mums is a real place and the good is real. I took five minutes to scroll through North Down Mums despite technically being a North Down Son, and found several of the most inspiring posts I’ve seen on Facebook in my internet filled lifetime.