It would be fun to have you try my chocolates and see it you can guess everything that went into them. I am very sure that there would be at least one ingredient that you would roll around in your mouth, savouring its sweetness and think... mmm, that tastes familiar, but slightly different. I would smile and say... its a secret, and not just an ingredient either... its the process, and not something the food regulators would even recognise. But without it not a single box or a single chocolate would exist.
My mother is the secret ingredient. Without her there would be nothing. Ironic and perhaps fitting that something created to say thank you to mothers should have been so reliant on a mother for its very existence.
You see it wasnt just this one night together that I count as having been a part of the effort to put those boxes of chocolates in peoples hands. It was also her generosity which provided me with a new home, one with a perfect, new, chocolate making kitchen. Her generosity that enables me to live there very cheaply whilst I get my new business up and running.
Then there were all the sacrifices through the years before that have built the confidence in me to keep going, complete what I started, do better than I thought I could. Like the A levelenglish essays that they edited and typed late into the night, the same for my degree dissertaion. All late sleepless days and nights that have gone into building me.
The financial sacrifices, lending me money, giving me money, feeding me, gifting me, providing the shelter over my head, at home, in Leeds, and now in my new, two bedroomed flat near Chorley.
I know how little I would be without my mother. It is actually frightening to think of how insignificant I would be without having her and her belief in me pushing me through the years. When she wakes up, what will be the task she sets herself? Selling my boxes of chocolates, for me. Not taking anything for herself, just giving, giving, giving. She is then off down to London to help with her grandchildren and visiting her mother-in-law, she just keeps on going.
Earlier in the week it was a bit disheartening to walk in to Asda and see boxes of Thorntons chocolates going for £3 each. How could I compete with that I thought. But now I smile... compete? My chocolates contain the most delicious, nourishing, wonderful and priceless ingredient of them all... my mothers love. I think this is why they taste so good!
