Roslyn and MAMA in The View from the Terrace

A little while ago I heard that an old friend of mine had died. We met when we were both new mums in the early 80s.

After Chris, our eldest, was born I had a bout of post natal depression. The health visitor was useless, a middle aged spinster with little empathy. She really upset me one day and after she had left I was so down that I rang the Samaritans. This was before I was a volunteer with them. I had a chat with a lovely lady and one of the things she said was that what I needed was a support group for new mums, but there wasn’t one in my area. Then a few days later I read an article in a magazine about the Meet a Mum Association or MAMA which was exactly that, a support group for new mums. It seemed like an omen so I decided to contact them and find out how to start a local branch.

I put some posters up in town and three people rang me; we arranged a meeting. We decided to hire a room in the town hall for a first meeting of our new group. We put up more posters and advertised in the local papers. About a dozen mums came and one of them was Roslyn.

Mum’s minister offered us his church hall and we began having regular meetings there. After a few weeks Roslyn decided to join our committee of organisers and, over the next few months, we became friends. She had a little boy a few months younger than Chris and they became friends too. Later she was Louise’s godmother. After a couple of years, when the children became school age the original organisers drifted away from the group but Roslyn and I stayed in touch, mainly through Christmas cards and letters and more recently on Facebook. We’ve been talking about arranging a meeting but I came to Cardiff and somehow we never got around to it. Too late now.

I found out about her death on Facebook where her sons had left a message. It brought back many memories of the new mums group, Chris’s birthday parties and Louise’s christening. I can’t believe it was around 40 years ago. Where does the time go.