Thank You Ma’am For Your Service

This week, all eyes are focused on the United Kingdom as we prepare for the Queen’s funeral. She has been a symbol of stability for millions of people around the world.

Many people would be thinking of the phrase, ‘Thank you ma’am for your service. The Queen is ‘mummy’, ‘grandmother’ and great grandmother to her family and to the nation and I feel for her family who are now without a significant person in their lives.

As I write this post, I have the Queen on my mind but I also have another ma’am on my mind. This other ma’am is one I owe my life to and she is my ma’am.

Mothers are a blessing to us and sometimes it takes losing them to help us see just how important they are to us. This past week, my mum called but I was very tired and she must have seen it all over my face. I told her how much work I had to get through and she responded by praying that I wouldn’t get tired. She then called me by both my names and I burst out laughing.

I joked and asked why she was calling or more like hailing me by my full names and she burst out laughing saying she just wanted to. A part of me thought of asking if there was a more serious reason on her mind but I soon realised it was her way of putting a smile on my face and she knew exactly what to do to make that happen.

A couple of days later, she called again to check on me and I told her I had made a lot of progress with my work. She took me on a trip down memory lane and reminded me of a particular glass cup that she used to serve my dad water back when we were young. My brother and I broke so many of these cups that my mum made a decision that the next time we broke one, we had to replace it using our pocket money.

And we did. We still broke the cups and it got to a point where we no longer bothered to tell her it was broken; we simply replaced it. As she remembered this, she commented that if she had done this with other people’s children, they might have accused her of being too tough. I joked about her letting us wash the cups and blamed the breakages on her.

We both laughed at this but afterwards, I couldn’t help but reflect on her role in my life. I am who I am today partly because of how she raised me. I have a lot of respect for people’s efforts, time and money and this is because I learnt to value those things from her.

I learnt about toughness, quiet strength, love, personal sacrifice, resilience, budgeting and hard work from her and I thought about the people I have impacted one way or another; I pictured each of them saying, ‘thank you ma’am for your service’ to her.

I ran into a gentleman who served in one of the royal regiments and we got talking for a while. At the end of our conversation, I ended it by thanking him for his service. I love the way Americans say that phrase when they come across a service person and that phrase is always on my mind whenever I come across people in uniform.

At the end of our call, I continued my work late into the night and went to bed knowing that I had to base this week’s post on her because she deserves to be thanked for her own service to my life and the lives of many others who lived with her over the years.

Today, I want to extend this phrase to all mothers out there who have raised their children and built their families. I want to say ‘thank you ma’am for your service’ to the Queen who dedicated 70 years of her life to serve her people and put their needs and their good first and above anything else. Like it or not, she did what she was born and took an oath to do.

I also want to say the same to my mum too because she deserves to be thanked for her own services and sacrifices too.

Finally I want to say, ‘Thank you ma’am for your services’ to every mum out there doing their best. Most mums would do anything for their children to not have to go through pain, they defer their own enjoyment for the comfort of their children and would willingly go hungry for their children to have all the food they need.

To all our mums, you are our ‘Queens’ and we thank you for all your services and sacrifices knowing you are never off duty and you only retire when death comes. So while there is still life in you, we want you to know just how grateful we are for each of you.

Thanks for reading and sharing my post. I hope you take a moment this week to thank all the Queens in your life.