When I was little, I thought my mother’s words were just words.
They were the background hum of the house.
Shoes off at the door. Say thank you properly. You’ll understand when you’re older.
I didn’t know she was handing me a compass.
Back then, I thought she was simply steering the day – turning us left towards school on time, right towards clean pyjamas, straight ahead through arguments about vegetables and bedtimes. I thought she was captaining a small, ordinary boat called “family,” and I was just a passenger, swinging my legs over the side, trailing my fingers in the water.
I didn’t see the charts she was drawing.
She plotted invisible lines across our kitchen table:
This is how you apologise. This is how you keep going when you’re tired. This is how you love someone even when you’re cross.
She never called them lessons. She just lived them.
And I watched, without knowing I was watching.
I watched how she steadied her voice when she was overwhelmed. How she made room at the table for one more. How she swallowed sharp words and chose softer ones instead. How she carried worry like an anchor – heavy, necessary, unseen by us.
I thought she just knew how to do these things.
I didn’t realise she was teaching me how to read the weather.
It’s only now, standing in my own kitchen with small faces tilted up at me, that I feel the wheel in my hands. Only now, when the sea turns choppy – when there are slammed doors and tears and questions I don’t feel ready to answer – do I hear her voice rise in me like a lighthouse cutting through fog. Be calm. Try again. You’re their safe place.
And suddenly I recognise the route.
The way she would pause before reacting.
The way she would sit on the edge of my bed and smooth my hair, even when she was exhausted. The way she made hard things feel survivable simply by being there.
I find myself saying her sentences. Using her tone. Repeating her reassurances almost word for word.
I used to think strength was loud, that leadership was grand and obvious.
But she showed me it is often quiet: a steady hand on the helm, adjusting by inches, keeping the boat from drifting too far off course.
There are days I feel lost. Days when I am certain I am failing. Days when the map seems smudged and the horizon unclear.
On those days, I realise just how carefully she prepared me.
Not with lectures, but with living. Not with speeches, but with example.
She let me see her mend what was broken. She let me see her apologise when she got it wrong. She let me see that love is not a straight line but a series of gentle corrections. And now, when my children watch me – though they don’t know they are watching – I understand the weight and wonder of that.
They are learning the tides from me.
They are measuring their own voices against mine.
They are storing away my reactions, my patience, my impatience too.
One day, they will stand on their own two feet. They will feel the wheel beneath their fingers and realise that the course was set long ago, in small moments they barely noticed. And perhaps they will understand me in the way I now understand her.
Not as perfect or unshakeable.
But as someone who loved fiercely enough to learn the sea. As someone who stayed up late plotting safer routes. As someone who pretended not to be afraid so that we could be brave.
The compass was always there, pressed quietly into my palm when we crossed the road hand-in-hand. The maps were folded into everyday conversations.
The lighthouse was built from ordinary routines.
And here I am, years later, sailing waters she once sailed, whispering thank you into the wind.
Because I finally understand how much she gave me
when she was simply being my mother.
*****
One of the longest poems I’ve written, but someone recently asked me to write a poem about only truly realising how much her mum had done for her now that she was a mother. Of course, this can apply to anyone who raised us, but it seemed fitting to share this a few days before Mothers’ Day here in the UK.
Becky Hemsley 2026
Stunning artwork by Fanitsa Petrou
