The feeling of motherhood is the best and the same the world over - Christa Ackroyd

Many have come with me to several homes. None are particularly expensive but all are absolutely priceless.

Precious pictures are now up on the wall. Photographs in mismatched frames adorn every surface.

Books are unpacked and crammed into a little bookshelf held tight by my precious Mousey Thompson bookends bought on a trip with mum to the workshop in North Yorkshire we visited together many years ago that has been going for a century now. I love that little mouse.

Unpacking that box unpacked a myriad of happy memories that make a home a home.

I don’t do minimalism, I don’t do modern and I definitely don’t do grey or even neutral. I love colour and I love items that many would consider less than perfect but to me they are.

I am assured it is a well-known Taurean trait to put things in groups of three. And so a pottery fruit dish given to mum by dad for her 21st birthday is filled with an assortment of fruit I am determined to eat more of.

That dish holds many memories as we had often giggled together at what she thought an unromantic but practical present for what was then her coming of age. But that was dad.

I filled a vase full of her favourite flowers always bought for her on Mother’s Day remembering her typical frugal way of life as she said each year since I was old enough to be given pocket money.

“Now don’t go spending a lot Christa, there is nothing I like better than a bunch of daffodils.” And so daffs, as she called them, it is.

But it is her mum I remembered this week as the final piece of the trio of happiness was put in its permanent place, an old and very worn painted pottery egg hen that had been her mother’s before her.

Granny’s hen holds the very memories of a happy childhood. Widowed in her fifties, she was the kind of Granny that appeared in story books, the kind of grandparent I aspire to be.

If mum said no to the ice-cream van, Granny a two-minute walk away down the hill to her little one-bedroomed bungalow would always find change for a Cornetto. And that change would come from the egg hen.

Granny would always have a bag of sweets hidden inside the hen.

If I had forgotten or rather lost the pencil to do my workings out for the maths homework, that is where I found a replacement, alongside assorted items of costume jewellery we were allowed to wear to play out in, dressed in her best hat and coat playing grown-ups in the neatly kept back garden where she grew flowers alongside potatoes dug with an ancient spade she had brought from her childhood home which I have also kept.

Granny liked mint imperials. I liked the penny tray kind of sweets, so fruit salads and shrimps and flying saucers were crammed into that little hen alongside rubber bands and pencil sharpeners and an embroidered bookmark her late husband had sent her as his sweetheart when she was just 17.

I loved that little hen as much as I do now. I am even told it is quite valuable but nowhere near as valuable as it is to me holding memories inside and out whenever it catches my eye.

When Granny died one morning when I was just a teen, found on the kitchen floor with a bucket of freshly dug potatoes ready to wash for tea, my world changed.

No more popping down to Gran’s to watch the showjumping together. No more scrawled shopping lists of items to fetch from the shops to save her carrying the groceries.

No more coppers tucked into my school blazer pocket which she could ill afford but given with a smile and a twinkle.

When she died, that little egg hen found a new home and a new pride of place on mum’s much neater sideboard. When Granny passed away that is all my mum wanted from her tiny little house.

I suspect its contents had held the same mystery and joy to her as they had done for me. When mum died seven years ago that was the first thing I knew I wanted too, unbroken continuity passed from mother to mother down the generations. Some get diamonds and pearls, we got the egg hen.

Just as it should be. And in case mine don’t know I shall tuck this very column inside so that when I die it continues.

Motherhood is not afforded to all. Indeed there are some who have no wish to embrace it and that is fine. But for me it was and always will be the greatest gift.

And I enjoy being reminded of that with that little hen. And more.

On a windowsill in the spare bedroom are three shoes. One a little burgundy patent leather T bar which was my daughter’s first proper shoe which I showed to my granddaughter this week who asked why I had put it there along her first shoe and that of her sister.

She shook her head and obviously thought me crazy. But then I like being crazy with them and spoiling them and making them laugh. Those are the memories I wish for them to take of me with them.

One day they will understand. Being a mother is a huge responsibility but the greatest joy, You spend half your life worrying about them and the other half making sure they know they are the best thing that ever happened to you.

Motherhood is not about the what you can buy on Mother’s Day, it is how they make you feel and how you feel about them.

I haven’t filled Granny’s egg hen to the brim yet but I will. I hope it will become as it always was a symbol of the joy of family and the world of motherhood that is so precious.

It may look a little out of place in my newly decorated, carefully curated, kitchen. But it is exactly where it needs to be, in pride of place whether it matches or not.

Inside will go an embroidered handkerchief bearing mum’s initial. A newspaper cutting announcing my adoption fulfilling her wish to become a mother and a cutting from this very newspaper announcing the birth of my own daughter. Oh, and a bag of mint imperials. Just for Gran.

The rest? Who knows. It is up to my grandchildren to discover whatever else is crammed inside. And to always remember that it belonged to four generations of women, all very different and yet the same.

Happy Mother’s Day. It is, amidst the turmoil of the world, worth remembering that feeling of motherhood is the best and the same the world over.