Impossible love

Hey it's Mum's Birthday again!

Anyway seeing she's in Melbourne now and I deleted this speech last time entry by accident last time, I thought 'hey!' no better time than tonight to reintroduce it than now. Happy birthday mum. I won't explicitly mention your age anymore.

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Ladies and gentlemen, friends and family, the crowd

Hi, my name is Adrian, and I’m here to tell you a little about my mother.

50 years ago, which really isn’t that long a long time ago, Doris as we all know was the first of four Chinese children born to Grace and Eddie in Burma. From what I’ve been told, she was spoilt a spoilt little brat (not so unlike myself), and looked a little like a chubby boy. She liked shoes, and expensive things that couldn’t be found in her native jungle.

She liked to read a lot of boring books.
She always ate her vegetables.
And was a kite pirate.

She traversed the globe on great steam powered voyages with her parents.
She took to rock and roll and was given her very first vinyl by an American Sailor.

She mostly kept her hair neat and short.
She, never had as many toys as I ever did.
She learned to cook and take are of a family, long before I even had windows XP.

After moving around several other countries, she wound up in Australia, where she lived in a caravan, turned my age, drove a flimsy Volkswagen, when to nursing school, and had straight long hair that reached her bum. She went on road trips with her cousins, their guitars and sat on a lot of grass. At university she once made a boy who liked her sell his motorbike and trade it for a second hand Mercedes.

Somewhere in between then and now she became a nurse, met dad, put two buns in the oven, raised a generation of children, turned fifty and ended up here.

Today, at fifty Doris spends a lot of time in front of her computer, chatting with her children on the internet, she plods around the house, plays solitaire, goes to the gym, worries herself, deletes spam, tops up her ERP card, cooks delicious meals, and generally waits for the flock to come home. She spends a lot of time running around in her car doing errands for the missing flock. She writes a lot of email, and sleeps on a rather firm mattress… She only discovered cable television last week.

She’s a little hard on hearing, but generally says the right thing.
She’s a little sleep deprived, but that mostly my fault.
She’s started to nag a little more, but she’s also started to give in a little more.
She still likes shoes, her vegetables and boring books.

And she’s always been there,
Making each day a little less awkward and a little more familiar, each mistake a little less of a failure and a little more of a lesson; each meal a little less like plastic and a little more like home.

We had a chat on the phone not too long ago, and she asked me what kind of girl I’d like to marry, to which I replied, ‘probably a nurse, or someone in health science’; She never liked it when I patronized her, or when my hair was blonde, or when I’d come home just to pass out in her arms, or when I’d change my mind at 6, deciding not to come home for the dish she’d spent the whole day preparing. And she never stopped preparing them.

Sometimes I’d wonder if I’d still recognize her in those not too long ago years; if I’d have asked for driving lessons as she reverse parked her Volkswagen, or if I would have bullied her, or if she’d have still stuck up for me, or if I’d still like to have told her I’d want to end up with a nurse; But that’s not all too relevant tonight.

She came running into my room, 3 hours before I wrote this speech; she hates me leaving things last minute. “keep it short and don’t be an asshole” she says with a huge excited grin on her face. Tonight, is the first birthday party she’s ever thrown, and I am as honored and nervous as I’m sure the rest of you are to be here. Thank you all for coming, to celebrate her very first birthday party, and of course: happy birthday mum, thank you of everything I will never realistically ever be able to thank you for, I love you, and I wouldn’t want to be standing here without you.