My Mum Ruined Christmas So She Could Play Super Mario World.
“I don’t want a fuss.” she said. “I mean I don’t want you to flush my dusty remains down the toilet with a Clorox tablet or anything, but I really don’t want an extravagant send off.”
“I should probably cancel the elephants and fire eaters, then.” I replied.
A month ago my mum was fine, napping a bit more than usual, but fine. Now, here we were, sitting in a London hospital room planning her funeral.
Turns out the reason she had been so tired was because her body had reached a Boss Level and was using all its health potions to fight a behemoth, cancerous tumour in her colon. A tumour that was beginning to invade the personal space of the surrounding organs, kind of like the middle-aged man in leather slip-ons at every party; he hasn’t done anything quite bad enough for you to run away screaming, but he’s standing uncomfortably close and you know if you don’t wriggle away soon, it’s not going to end well for you. It’s a sleazy tumour.
She’s in surgery now, as I write this. In an attempt to save her life, the surgeons are removing half of her colon, her duodenum, her gall bladder, half of her pancreas, and part of her stomach. It’s been eight hours since she went into theatre and I’m waiting for the doctors to call me any minute now to let me know how it went.
Those surgeons are going to sleep well tonight. Not only are they removing half her insides, they then have to reattach what’s left and they have to do it all perfectly or she’ll die. That’s the kind of pressure that makes you eat well when you finally get home to your family.
Everyone thinks their mum is different from all the other mums. Whether it’s because you feel like no one’s mother could be worse than yours, or because yours is so much better than everyone else’s, we all think that ours is somehow extraordinary. In my case, my mum is definitely cooler than yours, and here’s why:
In the winter of 1992, I was 12 years old and our family had recently relocated to Tunisia, a beautiful North African country that was rich in culture, but poor in video game consoles. The Super Nintendo had been released earlier that year, and of course all my friends back home in Scotland had one, whereas I was stuck watching ‘Sauvés par le gong’ reruns on a TV that looked like it had been rescued from a skip.
A few years earlier, the first Nintendo console had been the centre of my world. I would play for hours on a Saturday in my pyjamas while my mum sat with me, dropping sympathetic f-bombs when I would lose, and celebratory f-bombs when I would finally beat the boss (she’s from Glasgow, so swearing is at the heart of our family’s communication strategy). Mario was our guy, and probably the reason why as an adult I am instinctively drawn to round men with facial hair in pubs, so when the latest console was released and I knew I wouldn’t be able to play it, it was my first real taste of heartbreak.
About a week before Christmas, after my dad had gone to bed, my mum and I stayed up to watch some Sauvés par le gong. She seemed unusually fidgety and distracted that evening, so I asked her what was wrong. After a long silence, she finally blurted out “Okay, don’t tell your dad I told you but a guy from his work did us a favour and brought over a Super Nintendo for your Christmas. I’ve been playing the new Mario game for a week but I’m stuck on a boss. Do you want to play, maybe you can figure out how to beat him?”
Well. The sharp shock of being told something so completely unexpected combined with the thrill of it being a secret was enough to make my 12-year-old brain implode with excitement. Every night for rest of that week, my mum and I would wait until my dad went to bed before hooking everything up and playing Super Mario World for a couple of hours, giggling with our hearts in our mouths whenever we thought we heard someone stirring upstairs.
On Christmas Eve she took me to one side to remind me that she was going to erase our progress, and that I had to look surprised when I unwrapped the Nintendo the following morning. Needless to say, it was an Oscar-winning performance, and no one seemed to question how quickly I got the hang of the new controller.
Growing up, my life was sprinkled with little moments like this and I learned from my mother that following the rules doesn’t make for a bad childhood, but it certainly makes for an unremarkable one. The fact that my best memory is one that would have drawn gasps of horror from the other mothers at the weekly coffee mornings is what inspires me to raise my toddler son with empathy and mischief. I hope for his sake that this time she can beat the boss level without me so he gets to see that glint in her eye - the one that signals serious shenanigans.
Anyway, I should go. My phone’s ringing.