My View Madelene McDonald: Turning into my mum means words of wisdom echo down generations

As a teenager, that was never meant to happen. With the unthinking cruelty of youth, my brother and I used to mutter that what she needed was a job to keep her out of our hair.

She was a stay-at-home mum and, as we saw it, she was under-employed, wasting her undoubted energy in her endeavours to run (or ruin) our lives.

Dad had developed his own strategies for not doing as he was told, so her unstinting flow of advice was targeted at us.

If only I could apologise now.

I never realised how much work she did behind the scenes. I also never realised the frustration of a generation of clever women herded back to the kitchen sink after doing their bit in the war.

All my adult life, I have had to guard against the fatal tendency to tell others what to do.

One early boyfriend silenced my moans about her by telling me I was exactly like her.

I never forgave him. It’s a fact of life that no-one welcomes home truths, just as no-one relishes interference.

Even when someone asks for advice, they have no intention of following it, since the request merely provides them with an opportunity to vent their feelings.

Yet mum was also incredibly relaxed about physical risk, something I only understood when I became a parent myself. As small children my brother and I played at being parachutists, leaping from the top of the wardrobe onto his bed, tea towels billowing aloft.

We graduated to parachuting from the flat garage roof to the lawn below, aiming for the gap between the cherry tree and the rockery.

Instead of shrieks of alarm, we were rewarded with bread and jam when we ran out of puff.

Her relaxed attitude carried over to childbirth. During my pregnancy, having read the books purchased by my anxious husband, she slapped them shut and announced, in her usual peremptory fashion, “You don’t need books. Trust your instincts. Imagine you’re a bitch having puppies. She knows what to do. You’ll know what to do.” Her confidence boosted mine. After all she had spent part of her childhood on a farm and knew the ways of animals.

Sadly, she died before she got to know her grandson. Yet her grandson certainly got to know her, in the shape of her philosophy coming out of my mouth.

Without conscious intent, I became my mother. It was uncanny how I echoed her mannerisms and phrases. On the plus side, amid the commotion of family life, I discovered I had inherited her practical streak.

I even look like my mother now, my face a spider’s web of wrinkles.

Who cares? It’s high time I said “Thanks for the legacy, mum.”