How well do you really know someone?

We spend our lives listening to our parent’s potted histories, groan at having to hear them over and over – once, twice, three times – sometimes late at night, often with high emotion.

We internalise these stories without question; it’s only when we go to recount them back to an unconnected party that we start to see them for what they are. Glimpses only. Snapshots. A biographical history – selective, biased, incomplete.

We may know intimately our loved one’s character traits, their struggles, passions, desires. We may learn to predict their behaviour, know how to cosset them against harm, support them in their personal struggles, marvel at their hard-fought triumphs, but do we ever really consider the person they were before we met them? They are “our mum” or “our dad”. We give only a fleeting thought to the experiences that shaped them into who they are today, take foregranted who they might have been to someone else.

My dad had a few anecdotes he told time and again. Like the time he blew his falling out money from the navy on a suite of rooms at Manchester’s most expensive hotel, while his equals slummed it in student halls throughout fresher’s week. Or the first year he spent bording in a madam’s house, looked after like a son, fed cooked breakfast every morning as debauchery went on around him. Snapshots of a life lived to the full, a man with a cheeky glint in his eye.

The thing with anecdotes is that they’re just that. Improved over time, polished, made more funny, more enchanting, more impressive. If we start to ask questions, we soon begin to realise how much more there is to know, that what we know is merely a scratch on the surface of a life lived.

It was only when my father lost his sight and hearing, became isolated, more reflective, when we used to sit for hours talking because there was little else he could do, that I really got to know him. Started to fill in the gaps, build the flesh around the anecdotal bones, get to really know him as he was in life, from beginning to end.

My mum has her own stories, funny, poignant, some tragic, many filled with enormous strength and achievement. We are incredibly close, like sisters, and yet, I’m beginning to realise that for as much as I do know, there is still so much that I don’t. Have never thought to ask, question, or clarify. Or I have listened but never really heard.

I’m looking forward to finding out even more not just about a mother, but a sister, daughter, friend.