At 3:15pm yesterday, Sunday January 16^th 2011, my friend Lizzie died aged 41 after a long battle with breast cancer.  I hadn’t seen Lizzie since before the disease was diagnosed because she moved away and I was…er… otherwise engaged (all right, incarcerated) but I can’t help but feel a great sense of loss and have shed a few tears. Tears for my friend but mostly for her children Eve and Jack, who are the same age as my boys, 13 and 11.  I can’t begin to imagine what they must be going through and though they knew this was coming that won’t have made it any easier.

I met Lizzie in the school playground of Hart Plain Infant School when my eldest son started school in 2001.  I don’t know about anyone else but I find school playgrounds filled with other “mummies” utterly intimidating.  There are a number of different types of mummies in the playgrounds I’ve had experience of and each group seems to form their own distinct cliques: pushy mummies, sporty mummies, chavvy mummies, mummies who were in NCT together and toddler groups together….the list goes on and on.  The thing about each and every one of them is that if they don’t like the cut of your jib they will completely ignore you.  It’s like you don’t exist.  As far as they’re concerned you don’t.

I don’t know what it is about me but I’m fine in any social situation except one where there is a collection of parents.  If anything you’d think it would be easier, after all we actually have something in common, children of the same age.  Stick me in a group of other mothers and their kids and I’ll clam up.  Someone will make a bit of small talk, I’ll blurt something inane and that’ll be the end of that.  It really is incredibly odd.  But not just that, generally I find that people don’t approach me in the first place.  I must have “STAY AWAY” tattooed across my forehead, possibly because of my irrational sense of intimidation.

Taking Jake to school was no different.  I’d turn up every day to drop him off and pick him up with my pesky 2 year old Josh in tow, avoid eye contact and then go home again.  Other people had made friends and I couldn’t understand how they managed it so effortlessly.  Then one day Lizzie introduced herself.  Jake and her daughter Eve were in the same class and we walked the same way home.  She also had a pesky little boy in tow and had clearly got fed up with waiting for me to do more than look at the ground every day.  We got chatting on the way home one morning and she invited us round for coffee.  I was so pleased we went round straight away.

Away from the school playground I was a different person, relaxed and comfortable, and suddenly chatting to Lizzie was really easy.  I’d always thought other “mummies” were just in the business of comparing their children to yours and were only interested in extolling the virtues of their precious darlings.  Not Lizzie.  Oh, she was completely devoted to Eve and Jack, but she wasn’t that interested in whether their reading ages were better than anyone else’s.  In fact we laughed about the child at school who’d been pushed into reading early, that child really was a precocious brat.  And her mother had bad 80s hair and a really fat bum.  Hehe.  While Josh and Jack played nicely together (a bit of a surprise) we chatted and drank coffee and ate biscuits and chatted and drank more coffee and chatted.  And I went to the loo about 38 times because coffee goes right through me.

I was delighted, I’d finally made a friend and through her I made other friends, Mel and Sandra and then Gill when the boys were a bit older.  But, I hasten to add, we weren’t a clique.  Though I’m sure everyone was probably a bit jealous of us because we were SO cool.

Mel and I were talking about our memories of Lizzie today and I’m happy to say there were so many that made me smile.  Her lemon drizzle cake.  The way she would stick obvious patches in contrasting fabric on her jeans if they got a hole in them.  Her comedy cat, a perfect circle of a thing with funny little legs poking out of its funny fat body.  It really did look hilarious and no-one knew why it was so fat when it ate the same as their other normal looking cat.  The way she always called Jack a plonker.  The way she didn’t bat an eyelid when Jack took his bottom half off and wandered around fiddling with his willy (sorry Jack).  How Eve is the spitting image of her.  And how Jack wasn’t allowed chocolate because it made him go bananas but Lizzie would always let him sniff it!

We used to take the boys to a soft play centre on some days and sit there with our bottomless cups of tea and coffee and go in and play ourselves, pretending that we were looking for the kids.  We did enjoy the massive slide.  One day I accidentally spilt my fresh cup of tea (which was piping hot) all over someone else’s child who had been playing near the table.  It had toppled off the tray as I went to put it down and I was absolutely mortified, especially as the mother of the child, someone I didn’t know, looked at me as though I was a murderer.  Lizzie offered me a great deal of support on that day, the mother and her cronies…I mean friends…had noisily gone off to A&E and we stayed behind while the boys carried on playing and I felt terrible.  Eventually we received a call to say the little boy I’d damaged was OK and the mother even apologised to me.  I couldn’t have got through that without the support Lizzie gave me, even though it seems fairly trivial now.

Oh, and our girlie weekend!  A weekend of pampering in Coventry (er, not sure why it was in Coventry) organised as a coach trip by our local paper’s (filthy rag The News) “Privilege Club”.  The four of us went, me, Lizzie, Mel and Sandra and we were allowed to enjoy the hotel’s pool, Jacuzzi and sauna plus a treatment and then have a day’s shopping in Solihull the next day.  The coach driver was a nutter, careering along the roads to Coventry and talking drivel into the microphone as he was going.  That’s probably illegal now.  How we laughed, he was a bit like a cheesy DJ that talks utter nonsense.  When we got there we were greeted by a vision of aging Brummy loveliness, whose name sadly escapes me although she pronounced it funny to make it sound posher than it was.  I seem to remember lots of giggling from our naughty little group, especially because the lunatic driver was trying to flirt with her.  We had a great weekend, lots of laughs, nice massages (Mel went for the full body one which included buttocks, the rest of us played it safe) and then our shopping trip.  The shopping trip was funniest of all and is how I remember Lizzie best.  While Mel and I were trying on “bedroom shoes” and clothes we’d never normally be seen dead in, Lizzie was buying new clothes and toys for her kids.  Even on a weekend which was just for us she was putting her kids first.

I’m really sad that we lost touch when she moved away but I am hoping to make up for it in a small way by running the Race for Life 10k in Portsmouth with Mel on Sunday 24^th July 2011 in Lizzie’s memory.

You can sponsor me here: http://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/fionaflaherty2