Barmy Blue's Bland Blog

My mum needs me and I'm not there.
This was always going to happen at some time but it doesn't make it any easier.
I'm no good a verbal comfort. I don't know what to say or how to say it. I can't reassure people and end up sounding as if I don't care.
My mum needed me today and I wasn’t there. I'm all she's got. She can't see her sisters, they live too far away, even my uncle is a considerable drive away. Dad's not around and he'd be hopeless even if he was and my grandparents have been dead for quite some time. I'd feel better if she had something there, like a cat, to look after when I'm not there and cuddle. Teddy bears are good but they can't give you that warmth no matter how hard they try. So far, since moving here, there's only been one time when my lovely Eddie bear couldn't make me feel better and that was when I moved in. He was a comfort but he couldn't make it go away.
Now I'm okay here and I have more to look after me now. I have Eddie and Puss and my Dalek and Cybee (my Cyberman poster, I like to lean against him when I'm sad) I have my dragon Seadra ad I have the Doctor too to look after me now .
Mum has a collection of collectible bears, but those are hard for me to come by so she usually gets cute, huggable (Yet common and cheap) bears whenever I find them. For Christmas I gave her a reasonably large teddy she named Elliot. He's loveably huggable and he likes watching TV (particularly Top Gear).
What's got mum so sad though is that one of her friends had been made redundant. I know little of him myself but I refer to him as the Flying Saucer man, because mum's obsessed with those sherbet flying saucers and she always has a bag at work practically every day, and he likes flying saucers too, they must be the only ones there that can stomach the slightly more face contorting sherbet .
I don't know if that's the only thing that made her sad. In my personal experience it tends to build up until it explodes out at a particularly sad event . If mum's anything like me then I wonder how long it's been building up?
She cried when I moved in in September and she got upset at Christmas because she got pissed off and stressed (the kind of situation when you feel it's all hopeless so why bother) but she recovered quickly (we were in a hurry to get to my uncle's so he could take us to my aunt's (because mum always gets lost) and she did what she does every year without fail, she lost the presents she bought my cousins (Second cousins technically, they're my eldest cousin's sons, about my age) she found then though and cheered up again).
What makes it worse is the fact that I didn’t realise until she told me she could’ve done with me being there to cuddle today. She’s my mother. I’ve known her for nearly 20 years, how could I not have known she was sad straight away? Why couldn’t I detect it? What kind of person am I?