Motherhood Quote by Margaret Mahy

Grief arrives here sideways, through proximity: not the melodrama of a parent dying, but the quiet shock of realizing that someone else’s catastrophe can rewire your own life. Mahy frames the event with the plain furniture of childhood memory - “across the road,” “best friend” - then drops the trapdoor: the mother’s death lands “like losing a member of my own family.” That simile does double work. It honors the intimacy children build with the adults who host them, feed them, and stabilize their small worlds; it also exposes how porous the boundaries of “family” really are when you’re young and neighbors function as an extended household.

The subtext is less about a single bereavement than about the first time reality breaks its promise. “Unexpectedly” is the key adverb: it signals the moment a child learns that safety is contingent, that routine can be punctured without warning. Mahy’s final line - “I think I am still affected” - resists tidy narrative closure. The hedge (“I think”) reads as honest rather than evasive, the way adults talk when a feeling has outlived its story and settled into temperament.

In context, coming from a writer known for children’s literature, this memory functions like a origin point: the emotional apprenticeship behind stories that take young readers seriously. She isn’t romanticizing tragedy; she’s explaining why she can’t. Childhood, in Mahy’s telling, is where loss first becomes a permanent roommate, shaping empathy, attention, and the kind of imagination that notices what’s at stake in ordinary lives.