This Sunday is the first Mother’s Day since the woman who gave birth to me died. Not much will change in terms of buying presents, because my mother was ideologically opposed to receiving gifts.

I didn’t want to write about her death, because the physical effects feel similar to running a marathon. But front-page attacks on Bill Shorten’s mother in the middle of an election campaign brought the memories flooding back of my own mum: a shy social activist who handed out how-to-vote cards peacefully at school gates.

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Mum was one of many working class humanitarians whose capabilities never received belated verification from a university.

Mum was a shy autodidact with simple tastes and a social conscience. She didn’t wear make-up, jewellery or dresses. She had a heavyweight brain that flew under the radar, a know-it-all who didn’t need anyone else to know what she knew unless they needed to.

Mum had the vocabulary of a poet with the patience of a kindergarten teacher. The bullshit radar of a barmaid with a solicitor’s ability to absorb ideas. Without a degree, she was running the finance department of a major supermarket chain by her mid-20s, but her voice entered the office like bubbles through a hoop.

Mum wrote down arguments instead of shouting them. Nothing made her feel more at peace than writing a sentence that made perfect sense. I grew up hearing her read other people’s perfect sentences to me. And slowly but certainly I was converted to a life of reading and writing the same way she had been.

This was even more of a miracle than my birth. Boys where I came from didn’t become artists. Men were allergic to vulnerability. A deep-seated sensitivity was cultivated by my mother, the highbrow dropout from the bush, crafting another far-fetched legacy.

The eldest child of a disabled war veteran, her deep love of language didn’t have a conventional middle-class genesis. She was raised in council housing during the 50s and 60s, when full employment told the lie that poverty was a personal decision, and before Whitlam made it possible for poor people to get degrees.

No one in her family finished high school, let alone went to university. Despite a high IQ, she was forced to leave school at 14 to support a family of seven, due to her father’s disabilities and her mother’s alcoholism. Then, at 16, she was kicked out of home by a mentally unwell mother, finding refuge at a caravan park.

My grandfather died. My grandmother suffered a nervous breakdown. At the age of 21, my mother took responsibility for her younger siblings and an estranged mother sent from a psych ward, while continuing to work full-time to provide for them all.

'You should be a writer!' she used to say, an outrageous idea that never would’ve occurred to me unless she whispered it

This was mum’s defining feature: not the surprisingly high IQ, but the triumph of compassion over self-pity. She was a caregiver from childhood until illness robbed her of that ability as an adult, loving other people compulsively, even under extreme pressure.

After meeting my father at a barbeque and promptly getting married, mum proceeded to suffer six miscarriages. Her barrenness was emotionally shattering given how much she craved children.

My parents became foster carers to compensate for a failure to procreate. By 1991, they’d accepted six permanent foster children under the age of 12, which sometimes blew out to a dozen depending on emergencies. I was a late-night Hail Mary produced a long time after rebreeding had been eliminated as a possibility.

My publican father named me after Lech Walesa, because he genuinely believed I was going to be the prime minister of Australia. My mother’s only ambition for me was to be humble and well read. I have her to thank for the literacy and him for the intensity of ego.

Mum was a buoy of progressive values amidst a sea of country conservatism. She raised seven kids while speed-reading half-a-dozen novels a week. She couldn’t bake to save herself, but recited Clancy of the Overflow and The Man From Snowy River verbatim. She was the most prolific letter-to-the-editor writer in town, but sent them using the pseudonym Myra Magoo, because mental stimulation was more important to her than generating attention.

For two decades, she was the main person responsible for the highest profile child safety case in Queensland, essentially a 24/7 psychologist and solicitor. Mum debated psychology with childless social workers, who had multiple degrees, but little life experience. Experts were erring on the side of creating more boundaries. Foster carers should be professionals, not unconditional mothers.

My mother had seen too many children ruined by human cruelty to withhold love from my foster siblings. She didn’t see a difference between their blood and mine. As adults, they are unfathomably successful and well adjusted, raising a new generation of kids in hyper-literate safe havens like the one we grew up in.

More than anyone else, my mother broke the intergenerational cycles of neglect that triggered their original placements.

My sister Hannah is a neuropsychologist who works with kids exposed to alcohol. Over the last decade, she has provided me with the protection that my mum couldn’t, a fluky evolutionary substitute.

On the eve of our first Mother’s Day without mum, Hannah called to announce her first pregnancy. “Congratulations!” she said. “You’ll have your ninth niece in November. The patriarchy is dead.”

My mother unwittingly knitted a patchwork tapestry of physical attachments to keep me warm after she couldn’t physically provide hugs any longer. The destinies of my carefree nieces and nephews are covered in her fingerprints, lives blessed by the legacy of love.

Mum lost the battle of my naming rights, but won the war of my vocation. “You should be a writer!” she used to say, an outrageous idea that never would’ve occurred to me unless she whispered it.

My first book will be out next year. Which is bittersweet given the main person responsible for my literacy won’t be able to read it.

Mum will be dead for a year in July. This is terrifying. Each day, I move further away from the memories when she wasn’t sick. I yearn for the perfect words to sandbag the reality of her missing existence. Loss isn’t a creative writing exercise. Unfailingly, I come up with C– efforts.

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I miss her so much. It still feels like yesterday. Just one more hug… One more kiss… One more, “I love you, baby.”

Grief is a daily exercise in trying and failing to say the perfect words, then finally feeling those unsayable emotions only when everyone else has stopped paying attention, so not having anyone to articulate them to, or completely freaking people out when you do.

But because I’m a certain person’s son, I’ll keep trying to find a language to name the strangeness of bereavement. Nothing makes me feel more kindred with my mother than writing imperfect sentences about the limits and possibilities of the human condition.

Without this accumulation of brittle beauties and calculated failures, my mother’s gift of literature will drift away into the abyss.

• Lech Blaine is a writer from country Queensland