An insight into a mother-daughter relationship

As I've mentioned before in this blog, I feel very privileged to have had great mothering myself.  I was going through the files on some old CD ROMs today and I came across the eulogy I wrote for my mother many years after she died.  (Yes, I know- eulogies are usually written for the funeral; that's another story, and a story which is much more about my very strange relationship with my father, who I suspect was never quite the same after World War II.  I had to wait 16 years after her death to farewell my mother in my own way.) 

As I read the eulogy through, I thought it was a pretty fine portrait of what good mothering can look like.  And so it occurred to me that other mothers might like to read it. 

Apart from the many insights into her mothering technique- what she worried about, what she laughed off, how she approached day-to-day life, how she dealt with frustration and marital blues- the story of my mother through her child's eyes is a fascinating glimpse of lower middle class children's lives in the 50's and 60's. There was never enough money, but somehow she made it work. We certainly didn't get given every new gadget on the market at whim. That seems to have been an advantage when it comes to the richness of our inner lives as children and as adults. And she was a working mother from the time I went to school, at a time when it was something of an oddity.

So I suspect there's much to be learnt from this short history of my mother's life.  Here it is, slightly edited to protect others' privacy.