Letters to Mum
They’re all ways of saying ‘I love you’ and ‘Thanks’ but imagine if you put pen to paper and told your mum what she really meant to you and why she will always remain one of the biggest influences in your life?
RTÉ presenter Miriam O’Callaghan, pop duo Jedward and Road Safety Authority chairman Gay Byrne all took some time out recently to consider what their mum has meant to them.
“I am eternally grateful that she insisted I stay on at school — she bribed me to do so with the promise of a bicycle. So I did and that opened all the doors to me.”
Gay Byrne, in conversation with Helen O’Callaghan about what his late mother, Annie Carroll, taught him and what he most wanted to thank her for.
“My father was a farmhand on the Earl of Meath’s estate in Kilruddery in Bray. All seven brothers in the family joined the British Army at the outbreak of World War I. He came home on leave in 1916 — my mother worked in a laundry in Belfast — and they married that year. He went back to war and, at that stage, the odds were shortening that he would ever come back.
“My mother promised that, if he came back alive, she would go to Mass and Communion every day for the rest of her life. And he did — and she did. I can remember only a few occasions when she didn’t go — times when she was extraordinarily sick and just unable and incapable. It just seems to me an extraordinary promise to have made and an extraordinary promise to keep. I remain buoyed up that she made that promise and that she lived up to it everyday for the rest of her life.
“I would like to thank her for being imbued with the total conviction that education was the secret of getting on in life. Like most people of her generation, she wasn’t an educated woman herself and she married a man who wasn’t educated in any formal way, but she viewed education as the key to advancement.
“After my Inter Cert, I wanted to leave school. I would have ended up getting a job as a newspaper boy. I am eternally grateful to her that she insisted that I stay on at school — she bribed me to do so with the promise of a bicycle. So I did and that opened all the doors to me. She had a vision and an ambition for us to do well and for that I thank her.
“She had no interest in drink and had a horror of getting into debt. She was a product of her generation in that she didn’t get anything until she had the money to get it. She lived a reasonably frugal life but she wasn’t jealous of anybody.
“What I’d thank her for especially is the way she taught us to do the right thing, in any set of circumstances.”
Dear Mommy
“You mean everything to us. You’re our best friend, our number one.
“We want to thank you for bringing us up, for teaching us right from wrong, for always being on the look-out for us and giving us advice. We want to thank you for telling us to always be ourselves.
“You always want the best for us. You go ‘John and Edward, they’re not good enough for you’ –—it’s because you always want the best person working with us and that’s why we’ve got Louis.
“You love us no matter what, but what you think means the most to us. We always want our mom to go: ‘John and Edward, oh my God! You did so well. You did a good job’.
“We always tell you everything because you care more than anybody else. You read stuff about us in the newspapers — stuff that’s not true – but we’re always talking to you on the phone and you know the truth.
“You often say we aren’t organised, but we are — if we weren’t, we couldn’t do what we do. You always think we go crazy on stage and that we’ll hurt ourselves. But we’ll look after ourselves — well, Edward hurt his knee, ok, that’s true.
“We remember stuff, like the way you’d air our clothes on the radiator before we went to school, how when we were playing with our Gameboy and we didn’t know the right level, you’d do it for us. How you’d always bring us everywhere when we were young. Remember the time you lost your engagement ring and we searched for it for days in our grandparents’ house and we found it?
“You’ve got a big birthday coming up in April. You’ll be turning 50. We got you a diamond cross for Christmas. It was really cool.
“Remember when we bought you the blue suit that you really liked?
“You’re always encouraging us to use new words, not to say ‘cool’ all the time — but Mom, you are cool.”
John and Edward.
My Dearest Mother
“You are probably wondering why I am writing this letter, as we talk to each other every day. It is just that I have been thinking as Mother’s Day approaches, how often we end up chatting about things that don’t really matter, and things that matter greatly go unsaid.
“So forgive me if I take this opportunity to put down in words why you mean so much to me.
“You are quite simply the most wonderful and extraordinary woman I have ever met. Extraordinary in the way you handle the very ordinary; wonderful in just so many ways. Kind, caring, thoughtful, loving, funny, clever, unbelievably hard working and utterly unselfish. You come from that generation of Irishwomen who lived their lives largely for the benefit of others. You are also very beautiful, but enough of that I hear you say.
“You are a whole lot more, though, than the sum of your parts. Everything you did, you did for us.
“Everything I am, I owe to you and my father Jerry. He adored you, the jewel in his crown.
“You and I have never had a row, not even a cross word — hard to believe, but true. That’s down to you — your respect for others and your passionate dislike of confrontation.
“Thank you for teaching me this life-lesson, which saves me a lot of grief on a daily basis.
“Above all else, though, it is how you dealt with tragedy that made me realise what a truly exceptional person you are.
“To lose your precious, beautiful daughter Anne to cancer at such a young age was incomprehensibly cruel, but then for your husband to die so unexpectedly and be snatched away from you just a few weeks later, was a blow of such magnitude that many people would simply have been crushed.
“But not you. Stoic and unselfish, you never allowed yourself one moment of self-pity. You picked yourself up, dusted yourself down, put on a brave face for us and the rest of the world, and carried on being the best mother and grandmother anyone could ever hope to have.
“So thank you very, very, very much for everything. I love you. Your ever grateful daughter,
Miriam
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