Tag: grief

Why You Might Get The Response ‘Mum Was Mum’

When you first hear that phrase, it takes you aback. What do they mean? Why aren’t they prepared with dozens of stories? In this post, I’m going to look at some of the possible reasons why someone might say those words.

A few years ago, I asked a bereaved son to tell me about his mother, who he clearly loved dearly.

He thought for a moment and replied, ”Mum was mum.”. I have to say that I at the time, I was somewhat taken aback. How could anyone possibly be so dismissive about their mother? After all,this was someone who looked after you your whole life, cooked for you, cared for you, loved you unconditionally for over 50 years and all you can say is ‘Mum was mum.’

I found over time, the answer was repeated and so, I took some time to have a look at the facts behind this alarmingly offhand comment. And there were two areas to take into account.

The Background

I realised that, on the whole, the mums in question were usually in their 80s or 90s and so they’d been bringing up their children in the late 50s and early 60s and they were very different times.

At the risk of generalising from the specific, these mums had several things in common;

  1. They hadn’t gone on to further education.
  2. They didn’t have a career.
  3. They had married at a young age.
  4. Any job they had done had been given up to care for their children.
  5. They had been stay at home housewives while the husband worked.
  6. They hadn’t travelled widely.
  7. They didn’t have exciting hobbies to speak of.
  8. They didn’t have much time for hobbies or pastimes.
  9. They had largely been ‘in the background’ being mums.
  10. They didn’t have an extensive social life.

And so, despite my surprise at the phrase, that was exactly how they’d been seen. And it wasn’t meant in an insulting or denigrating manner. I just think that for many of these people losing a mum in their 80’s and 90’s, that was exactly how so many of them were seen. Despite the hugely important role they played, they had no chance to shine as individuals because the work they were expected to do was all-consuming, and that was symptomatic of the era they found themselves in.

The second thing to take into account is;

The Brain

In spite of the fact that our brains are without question more powerful than any computer ever built, if you ask a simple open-ended question like ‘Tell me about X’ it will freeze.

Why?

Firstly, there is just too much information to process in one hit and our brains go into panic mode. We experience what is called an ‘amygdala hijack’ ( https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/amygdala-hijack#overview ) where our amygdala ( the part of the brain that developed to control fight or flight responses to threats) takes control because of the stress of the situation and disables our ability to make logical and rational decisions. Thankfully, our frontal lobes have developed and override this, realising that the threat is not life-threatening and rational decisions can be made.

Secondly, we may be experiencing ‘attention saturation’ ( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/metacognition-and-the-mind/201503/why-we-cant-remember-the-things-we-most-often-see ) a common occurrence where, if the same thing is seen on a routine basis it becomes less and less memorable. Consider growing up with a stay-at-home mum who cooked and baked every day, washed the clothes, cleaning the house, ironed, dusted and everything else and suddenly you’re being asked ‘tell me about mum’. What DO you say?

Thirdly, we may be experiencing ‘grief fog‘. Our brains are programmed to protect us and when something happens that we haven’t experienced before, especially something traumatic, like the death of a loved one, we have to begin to process the new experience. So, our brain attempts to focus and protect us simultaneously as it attempts to understand and make sense of what has happened.

Generally, with a little prompting and a little time, fond memories will come flooding back and I’m happy to say that on every occasion that I’ve heard the phrase ‘Mum was mum’, together we have always managed to produce a tribute that illustrates the wonderful qualities she possessed.