The things we carry
Last week we moved my mum into a new home. Near to me in the city.
Four women and what felt like endless boxes and decisions. A lifetime packed into carrier bags, cardboard boxes and hurried trips to the charity shop.
Mum’s lived in the same village for almost thirty years. She’s seventy-nine and has never lived in a city before. I think she is incredibly brave.
The courage I see in my mum is the kind real lives are made of - the kind that lives in decisions that have no audience and no applause. The emotional courage of leaving what is known. The psychological courage of stepping into uncertainty because it is time.
You can feel that kind of courage when you are close to it - even though courage itself is not a feeling. The courage of resisting the pull of the familiar, choosing change when staying would be easier.
Because this wasn’t just a move.
It was a garden left behind, soil she had planted and tilled for years. Roses that had been pruned and nurtured through seasons, including the David Austin rose I once bought her, now belonging to someone else’s future.
She may feel as though she is leaving that behind. But those are the very things she carries with her. The patience. The care. The instinct for making somewhere her own.
The garden stays where it is. The gardener does not.
And now those same hands will begin again, shaping a different kind of space and a different rhythm of days - the next small project of a life that has always been built that way.
This wasn’t just a relocation.
It was the dogs’ ashes, carefully wrapped. It was wedding dresses - hers, mine, my sisters’. The wedding dresses of divorced women folded on hangers, still holding stories of hope that didn’t turn out the way anyone expected.
It was letters and cards and photographs. Boxes that didn’t just contain belongings - they held matriarchy and memories. They were an ode to a lineage of women who had mostly lived alone, stood on their own feet, and found their own way forward. They were full of the lives of women.
Generations of us - loving, leaving, surviving, beginning again. A quiet matriarchy preserved in bubble wrap, envelopes and old shoe boxes.
Objects that had quietly held decades of living, suddenly laid out in front of us in piles and piles of boxes. Things I had never wanted to stop and look back at were suddenly impossible to avoid. Memories pressed into our hands whether we were ready for them or not.
And yet there was laughter. The kind that catches you by surprise when you’re tired and emotional and slightly overwhelmed.
Side-splitting laughter at the insanity of some of my old dresses. Too short, too hopeful, too certain of themselves. Laughter at forgotten photographs and half-remembered stories. Laughter at things that once felt enormous and now seemed strangely small.
Four women sitting among the boxes caught up in painful reflections one moment and laughing the next. It felt chaotic and tender and almost too much to hold at once.
What surprised me most was how much courage it took from all of us. We often talk about courage as something individual. One person making a brave decision. But this felt collective.
Three sisters and a mum making decisions together. Trying to do the right thing. Trying to respect her independence while also protecting her. Trying to be practical without being cold.
Wanting to get it right without always knowing what right looked like. There were decisions about what to keep and what to let go of. Small decisions that didn’t feel small at all. Because every object carried a story, and every story carried a life.
At one point she said, almost casually,
“You won’t have to go through it all when I’m gone at least. Most of the work has been done.”
I don’t think she meant the boxes. I think she meant the remembering.
But the truth is the work is only just beginning. Because this isn’t just a move. It is something harder to name - a kind of living grief. Not the grief of losing someone, but of watching time move forward. Of endings that happen gradually rather than all at once - chapters closing while the story is still being written.
And yet through all of it, what I see most clearly is my mum’s courage.
The strength and resilience I saw in her this week didn’t feel different from the strength I recognised when I once watched a play about the suffragettes - women who fought quietly and stubbornly for a better future.
Like so many women of her generation, she has fought and endured and survived her way through life. She has given so much - to her family, to others, to us. Quietly. Without fuss.
Finding a way through hard times one decision at a time.
When I decided to choose a new name - I did consider my mums maiden name. But even that still felt tied to a patriarchal tradition I was trying to step away from.
Pankhurst felt like the right ambitious call to arms for me - a name that spoke of courage and change and the determination to make a difference. But I will always be proud to be my mum’s daughter.
Proud of the life she built.
And proud of her for having the courage - at seventy-nine years old - to leave the place she knew and begin again. She has had more new beginnings in her life than she ever planned for - and has faced each one with determination and quiet strength
So courage can look like four women carrying boxes into a new home.
And a mother - mine - brave enough to step into the next chapter of her life.
Keep on keeping on, stay brave,
Until the next time
In a world defined by rapid technological change, inequity, and uncertainty, courage may be the most essential human capacity we have. Yet our systems of power still reward only the exceptional or the visible - the headline acts of bravery that fit the old myths of the god-like hero.
But the bravest among us are often those whose choices remain unseen. The daily persistence. The quiet refusals. The fragile but fierce steps that never make the news.
That is why I write, and why Be Braver exists: to make invisible courage visible, learnable, and shareable. To spark collective action. To give colleagues, carers, citizens, and leaders alike the confidence and capability to shape a fairer, more equitable, sustainable, and creative future.
Because heroism doesn’t belong to the powerful few. It belongs to all of us - whenever courage calls our name.