March 5, 2012

just like it was last year.

my mum is actually from a teeny town in England called Stourport-on-Severn where she lived until she was eight and my nan and granddad decided to jump across the pond and landed here in Winnipeg. last week she came by for tea and we went for a walk and she showed me the house the first lived in when she moved here, which is just up the street from where I live now which is weird to me. she told me about moving here in february and how cold it was and how she used to count the mosquito bites she and my uncles would get during the summer because they don't have mosquitoes in England, you fools.

but my mum didn't always live here, she traveled around with my grandparents through Alberta and lived in a trailer in the rockies with mountains right out her front door and eventually went back to England in her teens. but she missed all her cool Canuck friends and Canada's wide open spaces and when she was 19 she got on a plane all by herself and left her whole family to come back to Winnipeg which takes the kinds of balls I can only hope that I grow someday because, wow, that must have been hard.



one day my dad saw a gorgeous lady with big hair at a social and they danced to the rock lobster and a few years later your truly came along. next came Mike and she had prepared all these VHS tapes with all my favourite shows and made a list of which episode was which so I would have something to do while I was babysat during her delivery but I slept through the whole thing like the a-hole that I am.

after came Alex and my mum is so sweet that she didn't even get mad when, while she was pregnant, I told her that if she didn't have a baby girl I was going to hate it. she knew kids (especially ones with names that sound like Shmalyson Shmane) are stupid.

before I moved out of my parents house I used to go upstairs in the evening before bed and harass her while she was trying to watch some show about renovations or selling houses or crap like that because for some reason it was fun to watch tv with her even though I don't think she liked it.

she used to watch Star Trek: Voyager and used to get into arguments with this boyfriend I had about whether or not it was one of the shittier Star Treks, which is is (sorry mum). but she likes all the Saw movies which is both weird and awesome and makes up for her lame taste in Star Trek series.

there used to be a time when I never thought my mum and I would be close, which I guess is normal for every child especially the crazy female kinds and I think there may have been a time when she wasn't proud of me at all and wished that she'd never danced to The Rock Lobster and had this shitty kid. but she did and here I am and now that I'm trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing in this big, wide world she tells me that she's proud of me for doing it, and how I'm doing it, which means a lot. because I'm really proud of her, too.

happy birthday mum!

I love you,
Alyson xoxox

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